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Dialogic Pedagogy: An International Online Journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu 
DOI: 10.5195/dpj.2019.259 |  Vol. 7 (2019) A101 

  

 

 

Bullying and interpersonal conflict from a “dialogic event” 
perspective 

 
 
Mark Philip Smith 
Kean University, USA 

 

Abstract 
Through discussions in class meetings of “concrete situations” experienced by students in their lived experience in and 
out of the classroom, educators have been encouraged to guide students to understand how bullying applies to their 
lives, and to learn the degree to which bullying is present or absent in their relationships with their peers (Olweus, 
1993). In observations of and interviews about the class meetings at a private, progressive U.S. middle school, student 
and teacher discourses in response to students’ interpersonal dynamics are found to exist within separate, parallel 
universes. The teachers’ discourse universe presumes that the lived experience of students can be understood through 
and guided by abstract, Kantian-like moral universal imperatives – specifically, the imperative to “feel good” and the 
imperative not to bully. These imperatives supplant dialogue on the events of students’ experiences toward a focus on 
who the students are becoming rather than who they are now. This discourse of “half-being” maps the students’ 
experiences upon what is known, predictable, universal, unsurprising and imagined, and assumes that students are 
not fully responsible for their own or each other’s well-being. By contrast, the students’ discourse on their interpersonal 
dynamics is characterized by Bakhtin’s (1993) notion of “being-as-event” discourse, which is highly contextualized, 
unpredictable, and focuses upon everyone’s responsibility to ongoing dramatic and ontologically charged events (either 
immediate or recursive in nature). The students’ discursive universe is conducive to dialogue, whereas the teachers’ 
discursive universe supplants the students’ messy, unpredictable and dialogically responsible discourse, thus arresting 
the possibility for teachers and peers to provide meaningful and authoritative guidance to dialogic events. The reasons 
for teachers’ attraction to Kantian-like abstract moral universals as well as the consequences of the supplanting of 
students’ event-filled discourse with the discourse of bullying are discussed. 

Mark Philip Smith, Ph.D. is a full-time Lecturer in the School of English Studies at Kean University, 
currently working in the field of English as a Second Language. His interests include critical, dialogic 
authorial approaches to learning, including academic language learning and social studies education. He 
is particularly interested in addressing issues of interpersonal dynamics and bullying in K12 contexts from 
a Bakhtinian dialogic event perspective. He has also explored issues of academic integrity in university 
settings from a similar perspective. Mark is also interested in teachers’ valuation of dialogue in their 
classrooms, both as an espoused value and a value “in-action” (cf. Argyris & Schön, 1974). He has explored 
what arrests and what affords pedagogical authorial dialogue in classroom settings. He is notably interested 
in the possibilities for authorial learning agency within informal “free-choice learning environments” (Falk & 
Dierking, 2000; 2002), and has had experience working within afterschool-based practicum settings for 
undergraduate teacher education in cultural diversity. 

��� 

ISSN: 2325-3290 (online)  



 Bullying and interpersonal conflict from a “dialogic event” perspective  
Mark Philip Smith 

 
 

 
 

Dialogic Pedagogy: An International Online Journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu 
DOI: 10.5195/dpj.2019.259 |  Vol. 7 (2019) 
 

A102 

Introduction 
“We will not bully other students; we will try to help students who are bullied; we will make a point 

to include students who are easily left out.” Such are the classroom rules discussed in the context of class 
meetings in the Olweus anti-bullying program, a program which has been undertaken in schools all over 
the world (Limber, Nation, Tracy, Melton, & Flerx, 2004, p. 62; Olweus, 1993, p. 82). In this program, 
knowing about bullying and its consequences, defining what “bullying” is, and learning how to reduce the 
prevalence of bullying in the school are considered to be endpoints of these class meetings, with “concrete 
situations” experienced by students helping to uncover the presence or absence of bullying in the students’ 
lives (Olweus, 1993). 

The goal of this paper is to problematize the discourse of anti-bullying and its related techniques to 
explore what is left unaddressed by it. “Anti-bullying” is seen here as a modernist, moral universal 
educational “project” (cf. Sartre, 1963) for intervening in children’s interpersonal conflicts. In Kantian-
inspired moral education, ideas such as “one should not bully” are unquestionable principles achieved 
through following decontextualized universal moral principles which are not presumed to be readily found 
within children’s lives without “determined and consistent” adult intervention (see Olweus, 1993, p. 71). The 
goal of anti-bullying campaigns, akin to that of a Kantian vision of education, is to supplant uninformed and 
“imperfect” desires with informed, commonly-held, rational moral reasoning: “Rather than simply choosing 
to satisfy our own desires, we should cultivate our capacity to set ends and choose between them, and 
respect our capacity as rational value-conferring beings” (Klas & Suprenant, 2012, p. xxii). In turn, students 
are expected to become better people in the future than they are now or would otherwise become. 

In Kantian-inspired educational discourse, the engagement and reflection in class discussions on 
policies and rules with standards such as “one should not bully” is itself a virtuous and praiseworthy duty 
(Surprenant, 2012). As Løvlie has stated, initially quoting Kant’s Toward Perpetual Peace on the value of 
rational ideas: 

[Kant states:] ‘Human virtue is always imperfect. For this reason, we must have a standard, 
in order to see how far this imperfection falls short of the highest degree of virtue’ (Ak: 28:994) … 
Ideas are not figments of the brain, then, but inherent parts of a common moral and political 
household. In addition to ideas as standards of judgment they can be treated as ideals to be sought 
for in the future. At the very end of Toward Perpetual Peace we find the idea of peace [or anti-bullying 
– MPS] as “regulative” in the sense of a projected future to be approached in time. Kant thinks that 
the hope for universal peace [or anti-bullying – MPS] can actually serve as a motivation to bring it 
about (Ak: 8:386). In that sense ideas have force and are brought into play by our ability to imagine 
and project our dreams onto an impossible future situation (Løvlie, 2012, pp. 118-119) 

The endpoint of the anti-bullying educational project is to impose a system of decontextualized, 
self-contained, universal rationality upon students, to presume that they will thus become more rational 
beings. The rational, modernist view of education underlying bullying “derives from the conviction that if 
man [sic] is not a wholly rational animal, he ought to be; and since he ought to be motivated solely by 
rational considerations, we might as well proceed as if he were” (Bettelheim, 1960, p. 69). The emphasis 
in anti-bullying on a rational, Kantian ideal is noted in the following conclusion from a study of adolescent 
girl friendship networks: 



 Bullying and interpersonal conflict from a “dialogic event” perspective  
Mark Philip Smith 

 
 

 
 

Dialogic Pedagogy: An International Online Journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu 
DOI: 10.5195/dpj.2019.259 |  Vol. 7 (2019) 
 

A103 

Conflicts among girls need to be considered as possible acts of bullying rather than petty 
squabbles. Girls need to be aware that this may be the case and to have a repertoire of strategies 
they can use to address these issues… We need to understand why girls place such importance on 
their friendship bonds and why this can lead to the jealousy and suspicion leading to conflict (Besag, 
2006, p. 549). 

It is notable here how girls’ “friendship bonds,” “conflicts” or “petty squabbles,” “jealousy,” and 
“suspicion” – the substance of many girls’ experiences with their peers – become the means to 
operationalize “bullying.” What is notable in this discourse is an emphasis on the ought-to or the ideal rather 
than the realities of lived experience, the imperative to “imagine and project our dreams onto an impossible 
future situation” (Løvlie, 2012, p. 119). This oughtness discourse is well articulated by an unidentified anti-
bullying researcher who stated in an interview: “‘We have to think, “What is a good man or a good person? 
That’s where we start. “What should a person be?” … I think you have to make some kind of dogmatic 
statement about what a person ought to be”’ (Dixon, 2011, p. 186). Similarly, Olweus raises the work of 
addressing bullying to the level of a “fundamental democratic principle” expected to be agreed upon by 
teachers and students as important to uphold (Olweus, 1993, p. 48).  

However, some of these idealistic oughts seem impossible to achieve and may also be undesirable 
for many children. For example, in the case of the push to promote the rule “You Can’t Say You Can’t Play” 
among the kindergarten “play bosses” in the US preschool educator Vivian Paley’s (1992) classroom, the 
“play bosses” argued that the effort to include everyone (especially the excluded children) in their friendship 
networks did not “feel good” and made them “sad” (Matusov & Smith, 2009a, pp. 264-265). Despite this, 
Paley imposed an inclusion rule on the children, noting that once she discussed it with her kindergarten 
students and some older elementary students in the school, she was satisfied in the unilateral certainty of 
her resolve: 

Sarah [Paley’s teacher aide – MPS] and I can’t believe that the transition to the new rule is 
so straightforward and easy. ‘You can't say you can’t play’ has been in place for a week and there 
are only minor mishaps, quickly resolved. It is indeed a ladder out of the trap we’ve been in. Exclusion 
is still practiced, of course, but when it is someone will say ‘You forgot the rule,’ or a teacher will be 
brought over to say it. What joy to be rid of the burden of indecision” (Paley, 1992, p. 93). 

Paley’s idealistic hope that social inclusion will be practiced among her students appears to guide 
her decisions, as well as a deep-seated belief of what ought to be rather than what is. This may well be the 
only explanation for how she could claim success while at the same time reporting that her children continue 
to socially exclude each other. Note below a similar degree of idealistic oughtness, as noted in the bolded 
text below, in a bullying researcher’s arguments for ensuring the success of anti-bullying efforts: 

…reducing the frequency of all aggressive interactions would likely reduce the 
frequency of bullying interactions at the extreme of the continuum. Alternatively, pulling more 
children into the friendship networks of the classroom would increase the likelihood that 
aggressive peer interactions, when they occur, will be among friends and so easier to resolve. It 
might be possible to diminish the frequency with which aggressive interactions escalate into bullying 
by increasing the successful resolution of peer conflicts before these escalate. Finally, it might 
be possible to discourage intimidation by equalizing the distribution of power in a classroom or 
providing the classroom’s students with a protective sense of confidence. Thus, the continuum 



 Bullying and interpersonal conflict from a “dialogic event” perspective  
Mark Philip Smith 

 
 

 
 

Dialogic Pedagogy: An International Online Journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu 
DOI: 10.5195/dpj.2019.259 |  Vol. 7 (2019) 
 

A104 

suggests that there might be multiple alternative pathways towards controlling bullying within a 
classroom (Doll, Song, & Siemers, 2004, p. 164). 

What is notable here are idealistic visions of who a child should be rather than who they are now. 
It is questionable to what degree any of these goals are achievable outside of a totalitarian vision of 
education. By totalitarian, I mean the excessive presence of discourse characterized by tertium non datur 
(Bakhtin, 1999), by which I mean the idea that all particularities of existence can be understood as the 
negation or affirmation of a particular truth: the student is either “bullying” or “not bullying.” Modernist, moral 
universal discourse assumes it has a perfect answer to resolve social conflict, and it employs the technical 
concept of bullying to attempt to realize a fantastic vision of social relations among the students. But how 
realistic (or even desirable) is it for students to be free from discomfort, aggression and even exclusivity in 
friendships?   

Anti-bullying education is also concerned with lofty goals and ambitions for the betterment of 
children’s peer relations. Such goals can include “for children to feel safe and valued at school, and to 
have friends,” a goal which “does not simply equate to the absence of bullying behaviours,” but rather 
implies “a qualitatively different pattern of relating to that witnessed during bullying” (Dixon, 2011, p. 
187). Yet another ideal expressed in anti-bullying initiatives is to take advantage of the “ideal time” in 
elementary school “to instill anti-violence values and peaceful conflict strategies within all students” 
(Horne, Orpinas, Newman-Carlson, & Bartolomucci, 2004, p. 300). Such goals hold questionable 
applicability to children’s social interactions, which are frequently characterized by exclusivity. The 
achievement of such ideals may require unilateral enforcement to be achieved over objections and 
concerns from the children who are targeted by them.  

Decontextualized moral universals may thus regularly lead to projects to influence and control the 
lives of students which fail to fully consider the power and control which underlie their techniques 
(Bettelheim, 1960). Much anti-bullying research appears to unproblematically assume that “the teacher is 
the natural leader of the group” (Olweus, 1993, p. 88), who can and should continually surveil “risk areas,” 
such as certain areas of the playground (Olweus, 1993, p. 73). Some anti-bullying researchers (cf. Dixon, 
2011; Rodkin, 2004; Schott and Søndergaard, 2014b) have indeed noted that the field has been dominated 
by a behavioral orientation which has given too much emphasis to bullying as a conscious, intentional 
abuse of power rather than a sometimes unconscious by-product of group dynamics (cf. Lewin, 1943). They 
have noted that Olweus clearly calls for the need for two “units of analysis” in the study of bullying: the unit 
of analysis of the group and of the individual (Olweus, 1993). However, either an individual or group-focused 
unit of analysis can still be an effort at social engineering which can ignore the influence of unilaterally 
imposed classroom management techniques themselves in the development of aggressive peer climates 
(cf. Lewin, Lippit & White, 1939). The prevalence of monologically imposed instructional demands may also 
play a role in peer aggression. For example, “erratic and inconsistent marking of students’ work” has been 
argued to “contribute to a climate that makes [bullying] more likely to occur” (Galloway & Roland, 2004, p. 
38). Heightened degrees of horizontal peer aggression could also be a response to a “crisis” or weakness 
in vertical teacher authority to uphold arbitrary demands (Graebner, 1990; Sidorkin, 2002). There is indeed 
a provocative literature on peer aggression from the 1930s, which noted a decrease in horizontal peer 
aggression and scapegoating among boys as a result of a change in the dynamics of authoritarian-run 
informal afterschool programs toward greater democratic decision-making (Lewin et al., 1939). 

To address concerns with the imposition of unilateral power onto the students in anti-bullying 
programs, researchers and educators have attempted to turn more power over to the peer group to address 
social conflict in the classroom setting. As a result, some anti-bullying educators advocate for student-led 



 Bullying and interpersonal conflict from a “dialogic event” perspective  
Mark Philip Smith 

 
 

 
 

Dialogic Pedagogy: An International Online Journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu 
DOI: 10.5195/dpj.2019.259 |  Vol. 7 (2019) 
 

A105 

class meetings during which discussions of bullying are expected to become a “natural and important topic” 
(Olweus, 1993, p. 89) which will emerge in the meeting and become authoritative for the students. 
Researchers have also recommended utilizing peer support programs and peer mediator programs to 
reduce instances of bullying (Rigby, Smith, & Pepler, 2004) since students are argued to be more direct 
participants in the peer culture and are more intimately familiar with the peer environment than the teachers 
(Pepler, Craig, O'Connell, Atlas, & Charach, 2004, p. 137). However, concern has been raised among some 
educators that insufficient vertical adult authority is present in peer mediation programs (Rigby et al., 2004). 
Furthermore, utilizing peers has been found to result in increased victimization and some students who 
experience bullying have not preferred such approaches (Mishna, 2012). What is notable here is that the 
alternatives to addressing bullying are portrayed as a “pendulum swing” between vertical adult-led control 
(surveillance, imposition of rules) or horizontal child-led control (peer mediation) (Rogoff, Matusov, & White, 
1996). Collaborative and community of learners approaches, which would be more conducive to generating 
teacher-student and student-student dialogue, are not readily considered, most likely because they are not 
as familiar to students or teachers (Rogoff, Turkanis, & Bartlett, 2001). 

Another critique that can been levied against anti-bullying efforts, as in other modernist projects of 
moral education, is that they tend to prioritize rationality over emotionality for well-being (cf. Bettelheim, 
1960). As will be discussed further in this paper, this prioritization appears to be due to a desire to sanitize 
the lived reality of students in order to promote safety and management of risk. Bullying discourse may 
sanitize students’ lived reality by reframing the problems of children’s peer relations away from more taboo 
topics that may generate controversy, concern, or emotional discomfort among students, teachers, parents, 
and/or the public to discussions focused on the rational definition of bullying itself. Some bullying 
researchers have indeed raised concerns that sensitively addressing issues of peer relations in school may 
sometimes require exploring more thorny and taboo issues with students, such as stigmatization (Dixon, 
2011), “forms of abuse such as sexual harassment, dating aggression, workplace harassment, and marital, 
child, and elder abuse” (Mishna, 2012, p. 24), class inequalities (Due et al., 2009), teacher bullying or 
victimization of low-achieving, or low-motivated students (Delfabbro et al., 2006), the anxiety associated 
with social exclusion (Schott & Søndergaard, 2014b), or politically-charged bullying against non-
mainstream groups (Barchay, 2018). It has also been noted that bullying programs fail to directly address 
feelings of shame, given the fact that expressing this emotion in public (even with therapists) is taboo, as it 
is associated with weakness, childishness, and social exclusion (Best, 2016). In turn, children and adults 
tend to act out inappropriately rather than face their shameful feelings. This has led to some scholars 
arguing that what is called bullying could be best thought of as a form of “weaponized shame” (Best, 2016, 
p. 7).  

I argue here that anti-bullying initiatives reframe the complexity of student discourse around a single 
universal topic, bullying, instead of addressing such ontologically charged “hot topics” of concern within the 
interpersonal relations of children, teenagers, and young adults. Since the concept supposedly has 
universal application and relevance, anti-bullying discourse can engender discussions on interpersonal 
issues that do not address the specifics of lived events in children’s lives, thus prioritizing lessons that stay 
“on script” and do not delve into unexpected issues for which teachers may be unprepared (Kennedy, 2005). 
Through anti-bullying discourse, as will be noted from the results of this study, teachers can also prioritize 
safety and comfort over unpredictable (and sometimes uncomfortable) investigations of the lived 
experience of students.  

After presenting my analysis of the anti-bullying efforts at an innovative middle school, I will argue 
against the necessity for general, abstract moral universals – and universal epistemic notions of the truth 
in general (cf. Flyvbjerg, 2001) – in order for students to “learn” how to act morally in society and with each 



 Bullying and interpersonal conflict from a “dialogic event” perspective  
Mark Philip Smith 

 
 

 
 

Dialogic Pedagogy: An International Online Journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu 
DOI: 10.5195/dpj.2019.259 |  Vol. 7 (2019) 
 

A106 

other. From the Bakhtinian perspective developed in my analysis here, the notion that a child’s lived 
experience can be mapped upon a set of predictable, known universal trajectories is highly problematic in 
that it does not fully recognize the unfinalizability of the concrete other and the dialogic nature of our lived 
relations with each other. Application of epistemic thinking to social relations – which “concerns universals 
and the production of knowledge which [are] invariable in time and space, and which [are] achieved with 
the aid of analytical rationality” (Flyvbjerg, 2001, pp. 55-56) – could in fact lead to an over-procedural and 
totalitarian utopianism, concerns raised by those who have tried to apply Habermas’ ideas to social 
problems (Flyvbjerg, 2001). Authoritative moral universal discourse like anti-bullying also appears to block 
the testing of important ethical issues within internally persuasive discourse and students’ (and teachers’) 
emergent and ever-changing responsibility to others within dialogue (Morson, 2004). 

My analysis of student discourse within the class meetings of a progressive, private middle school 
in the United States below presents an alternative approach developed from Bakhtin’s notion of the dialogic 
event which does not presume the need for universal moral discourse to address interpersonal conflict. In 
the conclusion of this study, I will return to my concern with the validity of moral universal discourse for 
sensitively and meaningfully addressing human relations. 

Purpose of this study 
This research focuses upon the parallel discourse universes of teachers and students in response 

to interpersonal events in a school setting. The patterns in discourse were serendipitously discovered from 
qualitative analysis of observations of class meetings at a small, progressive, private elementary and middle 
school I call here the Creative Learning Center (CLC). CLC is located in a suburban college town in a mid-
Atlantic U.S. state. The class meetings were initially analyzed for the purpose of a broader study on 
pedagogical dialogue; since the focus was on pedagogical rather than informal dialogue, I observed the 
formal curricular spheres of the school day, rather than informal events such as recess and lunch (Smith, 
2011). 

The data collected for this study included both interviews and observations during the 2006-2007 
school year within two multiage classrooms at the school, grade 5/6 (called “Group 3” at the school) and 
Grade 7/8 (“Group 4”). I was encouraged by the teachers in an initial interview in September 2006 to 
observe the school’s “Choices” life-skills classes, among other classes, since I would be able to observe 
the role of dialogue in the school as they saw it. The Choices class was held weekly and was designed for 
students to give advice to each other about interpersonal issues as well as general life concerns, including 
issues in their lived experience relating to friendship issues, family issues, sexuality or puberty. Similar to 
what is recommended by Olweus (1993), the teachers utilized the student-led class meetings as a forum 
upon which to “intervene… in a determined and consistent way” to hold “discussions upon bullying” with 
the students (Olweus, 1993, pp. 71, 88).  

In the analysis of the class meetings, the teachers’ discourse is characterized by Kantian-like 
abstract moral universals, while the students’ parallel discourse is characterized by what I term “ontological 
dialogic event discourse.” Unlike bullying discourse, this latter discourse takes seriously the lived 
experience of students and trusts that through dialogue participants can take responsibility for their own 
and each other’s actions, making it possible for everyone to transcend troublesome (and sometimes highly 
recursive) ontological circumstances they have experienced with one another. The notion of ontology I refer 
to here emerged within existentialism in the 19th century (Heidegger & Stambaugh, 1996) and differs from 
a metaphysical approach to ontology primarily concerned with the origins of being and of the universe  
(“Ontology,” 1989). By ontological dialogue, I mean that our responsible deeds and the relations in the world 
emerging from our participation in never-ending dialogue define our existence and the world we create with 



 Bullying and interpersonal conflict from a “dialogic event” perspective  
Mark Philip Smith 

 
 

 
 

Dialogic Pedagogy: An International Online Journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu 
DOI: 10.5195/dpj.2019.259 |  Vol. 7 (2019) 
 

A107 

others (Matusov, 2009); through such dialogue, participants can transform what is given in the world 
through their efforts or deeds in concrete, situated action (Sartre, 1963). Through my analysis of the 
Choices class meetings, I note how the teachers’ modernist, Kantian-like discourse existed within a “parallel 
discursive universe” from the students’ dialogic event-focused discourse on their interpersonal conflicts, 
and supplanted and sanitized the students’ messy, unpredictable and dialogically responsible discourse 
focused upon “events of being” (Bakhtin, 1999). A major purpose of this comparison is to explore the value 
and the authoritativeness of concepts emerging within the students’ ontological event discourse and the 
teachers’ abstract moral universal discourse for both the students and the teachers. 

Setting for the data 
The CLC is a small, private elementary and middle school with 90 students located in a 

predominantly middle class, suburban area located in a mid-Atlantic U.S. state. The name of the school, its 
location, and the names of all participants in the study are pseudonyms. There are approximately 20-25 
students in each class in the school, which the school calls “Groups.” Each Group is multi-aged, comprised 
of two grades; there are 2 teachers in each Group, one of whom usually teaches math and science, the 
other writing and reading. Within each group, some lessons are broken into individual grade groups – 
notably in math, science, writing and reading. However, class meetings and social science are regularly 
whole Group lessons (involving two grades and two teachers). In this study, I focus on the “Group 3” (Grade 
5/6) and “Group 4” (grade 7/8) classes. In the 2006-2007 school year, there were 23 students in Group 3 
(15 boys and 8 girls) and 21 students in Group 4 (11 girls and 10 boys). One female student in Group 3 
had to be omitted from the data because her parents refused permission for the study. 

Demographics of the school 
The ethnic composition of the school reflects the predominantly Caucasian population in the 

immediate area; the suburban city in which the school is located is 87.3% Caucasian, according to 2000 
U.S. Census data (http://quickfacts.census.gov, accessed 23 October 2010). The tuition of the school in 
the 2006-2007 school year was about $7,500 per year. This places the school’s tuition at about the 
nationwide average at the time for elementary-level private school tuition (National Center for Education 
Statistics, 2010). Compared to its nonsectarian school peers (with an average tuition of $15,945 in 2007-
2008), CLC’s tuition is considerably lower than average. The school keeps down tuition by having students 
do “jobs” for the last 15 minutes of the day such as putting away books or sweeping the entryway. Parents 
also perform jobs for the school or can opt out of these jobs by paying an additional fee. 

The history of the school 
The school was founded in 1971 as a parent co-operative, and like many schools at the time, the 

curriculum was heavily influenced by ideas to have students to explore their own interests rather than be 
controlled solely by the teacher (Dennison, 1970; Holt, 1964, 1970, 1972). While it quickly established itself 
as a more conventional school, it holds many practices in common with progressive schools. Indeed, the 
desire of the school to be categorized as “a progressive school” was confirmed by a more recent visit to the 
school by Eugene Matusov with Russian educator Alexander Lobok (Matusov, personal communication, 
October, 2018). At CLC, there is no grading of students’ work, but rather quarterly narrative-based written 
evaluations made of the students’ performance from the teachers’ point of view. Any homework that is 
assigned is designed to be, in the words of one teacher who was interviewed for prior research, “specifically 
targeted and meaningful,” or as a former student of the school described it, “minimal” but “constructive and 
helpful.” The school environment is also more informal than most conventional schools. For example, 
students refer to their teachers by their first names. Graduates of the school, when going to more 
conventional high schools in the area, find themselves to be different from peers in that they have developed 



 Bullying and interpersonal conflict from a “dialogic event” perspective  
Mark Philip Smith 

 
 

 
 

Dialogic Pedagogy: An International Online Journal | https://dpj.pitt.edu 
DOI: 10.5195/dpj.2019.259 |  Vol. 7 (2019) 
 

A108 

a love for learning (Matusov, DePalma, & Smith, 2010). The school has also specialized in educating 
students with mild autistic spectrum disorders, notably Asperger’s syndrome (see Smith, 2011 for more 
information). 

The teachers 
The four teachers observed and interviewed for the bigger study on pedagogical dialogue upon 

which this study is based were the Group 3 teachers Melinda and Steve, and the Group 4 teachers Karen 
and Ralph. Melinda regularly teaches math, science, reading and spelling. During the summers, she works 
as an instructor for a teacher development organization which provides mathematics education training 
workshops for in-service teachers. Ralph, Melinda’s husband, never had formal training in teacher 
education, and graduated from a local university with degrees in aerospace engineering and anthropology. 
He joined CLC’s teaching ranks in its first year, and is particularly passionate about science. He also 
regularly leads Group 3 and Group 4 students in combined history lessons. Steve and Karen are siblings, 
and both specialize in teaching writing. Karen was trained as a social worker, and went back to college to 
obtain a degree in elementary education. She taught at CLC from 1991-1997 and returned in 2006. Besides 
teaching writing, Karen also regularly teaches reading classes. Steve started teaching at the school in 1998. 
He learned of the school from his sister, and started working at the school in its child care program. Steve 
is a camp counselor during the summers, an avid off-road bicyclist, and a writer. In his writing classes, he 
shares many stories with his students about the outdoor adventures of himself and his campers. Steve also 
teaches social science and politics lessons. 

Data collection 
Throughout the 2006-2007 school year, approximately 20-30 interviews were conducted with 

teachers, 15 interviews with students, 30 observations of Group 3 lessons, and 20 observations of Group 
4 lessons. Most interviews were conducted with teachers during the school day, and were not formally 
arranged. In seven instances with students, I pulled groups of students out of the classroom to conduct 
interviews about my observations. Most other interviews with the students were very short, and were 
conducted in between lessons, just before lunch, or at the end of the school day. 

Lessons were videotaped with one video camera. I also carried a pocket-sized digital audio 
recorder to record teachers’ and students’ comments during the lessons and to conduct pre-arranged and 
impromptu interviews with students and teachers. When observations attracted my attention, I conducted 
post-observational interviews with students and teachers. I showed the transcripts of the lessons to the 
students and teachers and asked for their comments. I was particularly interested in events of “internally 
persuasive discourse” within the lessons at the school (Bakhtin, 1999). I operationalized IPD as a search 
for and testing of “the boundaries of personally-vested truths” within pedagogical dialogue, in which 
everything becomes “dialogically tested and forever testable” (Morson, 2004, p. 319), including everyone’s 
responsibility to their own and one another’s ideas and values (Bakhtin, 1999). 

Students and teachers were interviewed separately because I came to suspect that the students 
would not frankly discuss the events in the transcripts with the teachers present, and vice-versa. Students 
more frankly and openly discussed the events of their lives when they were aware that no teachers could 
hear them, and when they were discussing issues of ontological significance with their peers. Teachers 
frequently discussed concerns with specific students in a low voice, as they were apparently concerned 
about the students hearing their evaluations. In interviews with the teachers, I asked them to describe what 
they liked and did not like in the particular lesson, the typical nature of what was observed, what they would 
like to improve in the lesson, and why they made certain decisions in the lessons. Students were asked to 



 Bullying and interpersonal conflict from a “dialogic event” perspective  
Mark Philip Smith 

 
 

 
 

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DOI: 10.5195/dpj.2019.259 |  Vol. 7 (2019) 
 

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describe what they learned in the particular lesson, what they thought of the lesson in general (whether 
they liked or disliked it), what they thought of the school in general, and what suggestions they would make 
for the teachers. Because the bigger study focused on pedagogical dialogue and authority, I also asked 
specific questions to the teachers and the students about the presence or absence of dialogue in lessons. 
I was also interested particularly in comments that the students made about the teachers’ demands, what 
they thought of these demands, and why they followed them.  

When formally interviewing participants, I presented transcripts of class observations related to a 
topic of interest that emerged within the data. When conducting more formalized student interviews, in three 
instances, I invited specific students for an interview during the school day because there was an event of 
interest that I wished to discuss with them. The students were selected because, from the transcript, I 
sensed that these particular students were the most involved in the issue or the lesson. However, friends 
of these students would also regularly request to come along, which I encouraged. Except in one instance, 
this practice led to an unexpected intimacy in the interviews, which also revealed differences in perspective 
across different peer groups in the school. These relational dynamics between the students became 
especially important for analysis of the Choices life skills class. The students ended up talking about the 
lessons, the teachers, and their peers in more or less the same way that they would discuss the issues 
among themselves, with one notable exception: the students were, at times, cautious to reveal the names 
and identities of students with whom they were having difficulties. This appeared to be a consequence of 
the practice during school lessons to be anonymous when referring to interpersonal issues. 

Context: The Choices life skills class (class meetings) at CLC 
In the Choices class at CLC, students are encouraged to give advice to each other about 

interpersonal issues raised mostly by their peers (the problems occur both in and out of school), as well as 
general life concerns, including issues relating to sexuality or puberty. As with many lessons in the school, 
particularly social studies and reading lessons, the students sit on the carpet, or on chairs or couches in 
the classroom. Unlike most lessons in the school, however, the Choices class is officially student-led. In 
the Choices class, students and teachers usually sit in a semicircle; the student moderator of the class sits 
at the apex of the semicircle. This student moderator leads the Choices lesson; his or her tasks include 
taking out and reading pre-written questions or comments out of the “Choices box,” and then calling on 
students who raise their hands to respond to the question or comment.  

Figure 1: Group 3 Choices class (November 10, 2006): Overview of setting and participants 
 



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Figure 1 shows a picture of a Group 3 (Grade 5/6) Choices lesson. The student moderator is sitting 
in a chair in front of the whiteboard (see the central arrow). Some students can be seen raising their hands 
to be called on by the moderator. One of the teachers, Melinda, is visible in front of the window on the left 
side (arrow on the left of the page). The other teacher, Steve, is sitting on the couch, out of the circle and 
out of the frame of the picture (see the arrow on the right side by the window). 

During the November 10, 2006 Choices class, the majority of the questions in the Choices box 
were from the students themselves. Students could have placed these questions in the box at any time, 
although the Group 3 students had been asked by the teachers to write two questions at the beginning of 
the year so that there would always be questions for students to discuss in the Choices class. As the 
teachers noted in interviews, pre-written questions allow for the identities of the people who wrote the 
questions as well as the identity of anyone who is being referred to by the question to be hidden from public 
scrutiny. The teachers guide the students to write questions related to their peers in an ambiguous way; 
many questions asked in the box were written to anonymize the participants of the referred events with 
“someone,” “everyone,” and “people” as the subjects of the utterances. The Group 3 teachers also reported 
that they began in the 2006-2007 school year to regularly pre-screen the questions in the Choices box prior 
to the class in order to ensure, as Melinda stated, that “inappropriate stuff” which included situations “where 
the thing [incident] was described… [in which] the person's having problems with someone else in the class” 
were not revealed. Melinda was particularly concerned about a message related to a girl in Group 3 class 
which “was described so that it would be obvious who that person was” [Interview, Melinda, 2007-05-02]. 
These issues were sensitive enough that the student’s participation in this study was not granted by her 
parents. 

The discussion of the questions is mostly student-to-student, with minimal teacher involvement. 
The teachers participate mostly by raising their hands and being called on by the moderator, just like a 
student would be called upon to speak. The teachers also physically position themselves in the classroom 
to minimize their influence over the dialogue. As noted above, reading/writing teacher Steve is participating 
in the discussion from a corner of the room (which actually made it difficult for the student moderator to 
even see when his hand was raised). In interviews about the Choices class, the teachers discussed the 
value of giving students the floor to speak to each other: 

Teacher Steve: We want them to be hearing from each other, it’s more important that they 
hear from each other, than it is from us, but it’s also important that they’re hearing from 
another adult besides their parents, [which is] giving some perspective on some very 
complex social issues. [Interview, Steve, 2006-11-27]. 

The teachers also stated that they sometimes write questions of their own for discussion and 
sometimes pose questions during the Choices discussion for student reflection. The teacher’s questions 
seem to function to help guide students to discuss certain moral universals such as bullying and gossip. 
For example, on November 10, 2006, the question “What’s gossip?” had been written by the teachers and 
the question “What’s bullying?” was asked by the teachers in response to the ongoing student discussion. 

Findings: The students’ dialogic/ontological event universe: The dialogic event 
between Andrew and Ben 

During the November 10, 2006 Choices class, after a discussion of two questions that were pulled 
from the Choices box, Andrew spontaneously raised his hand and stated that he had to tell the class 
something that was bothering him. The discussion which followed was unusual in that everyone listening 
knew undoubtedly that Andrew was having a problem: 



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Andrew: I have something to say.  
[Danny, the student moderator of the Choices class, points to Andrew] 
Andrew: Well, sometimes in [American] football, when I make a mistake, people start 

yelling at me, and it kind of makes me feel bad…  
[Group 3, Choices class, 2006-11-10] 

As is evident in the voicing of his concerns, Andrew followed the anonymizing norm of the Choices 
class not to reveal the identity of the person or people with whom he was concerned (stating that “people” 
are “yelling” at him). Later on in this class, he noted that these “people” had been telling him, “What were 
you thinking!?  Don’t catch a pass if you don’t think you’re able to catch it!”  

In my judgement, Andrew’s utterance to the Choices class is an ontologically relevant problem – 
i.e., a problem which deeply affects/bothers Andrew and his local relations – for which Andrew demands 
other students to take responsibility. The tone of his utterance “I have something to say” sounds as if 
Andrew needs urgently to say something to significant others here-and-now. Andrew’s relations with others 
in the class appear, based on my unsystematic observations, to be strained, and the teacher Melinda stated 
that one student even complained to his mother about Andrew annoying him at school. Furthermore, the 
teacher Steve stressed the amount of effort that the teachers had been making to address Andrew’s 
emotional and relational needs. 

Just under five minutes after Andrew’s initial utterance, Ben, who is a new student in the school 
and who appears to be still unfamiliar with the anonymizing norms of the Choices class, responds to Andrew 
in a conversational, honest and forthcoming way. His approach violates the anonymizing norm of Choices 
class set by the teachers not to directly address anyone to whom he refers. Ben directly and sympathetically 
demands Andrew to take responsibility for his own problem, situating the problem within a familiar chain of 
ontologically charged and meaningful events in Ben, Andrew and other students’ daily lives within the 
school to which he, Andrew and others are responsible and interested participants. Furthermore, Ben 
addresses Andrew’s problem in such a way that he admits that he himself personally has experienced it: 

Ben: Andrew, I mean this like in like no offense, but sometimes you yell at other people, 
and then they start yelling at you, and I know how it feels. Like, when you get upset, 
and it wasn’t and [unclear - MPS] … and then if you yell at somebody ’cause they did 
something wrong, and they start yelling back, and it gets kind of like, it doesn’t feel 
good. ’Cause like even though you’re the one that started yelling, sometimes, like they 
want to yell back. And then, when it happens, when I do it, it makes me upset, and I 
end up always losing. Like, it… [Ben starts speaking softly as Andrew starts audibly 
crying] [Group 3, Choices class, 2006-11-10] 

Notice in the text above Ben’s multiple uses of “you” rather than “people” or “someone,” as expected 
by the anonymizing norm of the class. In the first two instances of the use of “you,” Ben directly addresses 
Andrew. His later use of the term “you” – after uttering “Like, when you get upset” – could be taken as either 
as directly addressed to Andrew, or to a more general “we.” It could be interpreted that Ben’s direct 
addressing of “you” blames Andrew for the problem. In such a situation, there would be no dialogue 
possible, since the responsibility for the problem would rest solely on the individual’s transgressions. 
However, what is notable here is that Ben makes an effort to address Andrew as one who has equal rights 
in being with others (Bakhtin, 1999).1 There is a sense here that Ben desires and wants Andrew to respond 
to the utterance. He addresses Andrew from the beginning of the utterance in a friendly, respectful and 

 
1 This does not imply, however, that the relations are symmetrical (Bakhtin, 1999). 



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conversational way, “Andrew, I mean this in like no offense…” When Ben notices that Andrew begins to cry 
during his utterance (this starts happening about midway through the utterance), he begins to shift his 
utterance from addressing Andrew to addressing himself, ostensibly to empathize with what Andrew is 
experiencing (“And then, when it happens, when I do it, it makes me upset, and I end up always losing”). 
Thus, rather than blaming Andrew in an “objectivizing” and “finalizing” way as a yeller or as a wimp (Matusov 
& Smith, 2007), it seems best to say that Ben respects Andrew while exploring Andrew’s, and eventually 
others (including his own) responsibility for the problem. The teacher Steve expressed in an interview a few 
days after this event that he valued Ben’s empathetic response: 

Teacher Steve: Part of what I think Ben was doing here was really focusing on his feelings, 
and you know, kind of, helping to reinforce this idea of empathy among the kids. It’s 
important to be thinking about how Andrew was feeling right now [Interview, Group 3 
teacher Steve, 2006-11-27]. 

Ben also analyzes Andrew’s responsibility for the problem, analyzing who caused the pain that 
Andrew experienced (this is indicated by my underlining of the presence of ’cause – i.e., because –in the 
transcript above). First, Andrew yells at people. However, this is because someone did something “wrong” 
to Andrew, to which Andrew yells at them again. The problem, however, is furthered by the yelling that 
others make in response to Andrew. Yelling follows yelling, and Andrew, and potentially others, are hurt 
and frustrated. By the end of the utterance, Andrew has his head down, looking down at the floor, sobbing. 
Andrew’s crying appears to be essentially a cathartic emotional response to Ben’s sympathetic accusation 
that it was Andrew himself who must take at least partial responsibility for instigating the problems he 
received; this cathartic response appears to be a consequence of Ben having led Andrew out of an 
ontological trap (see the next section). 

Figure 2: Group 3 Choices class, November, 10 2006:  Andrew’s cathartic crying in response to Ben’s utterance. Andrew 
(underneath the arrow) has his head down, and is sobbing. Everyone appears to be directing their gaze at him, apparently 

expressing concern. While this scene is occurring, another student, George, has the floor, and is providing advice to Andrew. 
 

The incident between Andrew and Ben is nicely illustrated by Bakhtin’s (1993) notion of the “being-
as-event” reality of human dialogic life. Events such as those discussed here between Andrew and Ben are 
highly contextualized and unpredictable and demand that everyone – the students themselves, their peers 
and friends, their teachers, their parents and siblings, school administrators, the media, bullying experts, 
and so on – focus upon their responsibility to them. Dialogue leads to engagement with others in a discourse 
“of ultimate questions and ultimate life decisions” (Bakhtin, 1999, p. 74), through which all participants can 



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assume responsibility for their own and one another’s ideas and deeds, transforming their messy, situated 
and particular “unique places” in the world in response to others (Bakhtin, 1993, p. 53). 

Ben draws attention to the fact that there is a conflict over responsibility to lived events. While 
Andrew claims that he is being teased on the field, Ben reevaluates and revoices this problem as Andrew 
being frustrated and angry when playing football. Ben is insisting that Andrew cannot have an “alibi in being” 
(Bakhtin, 1993, p. 42), demanding that Andrew himself take responsibility for the problem; it is as if Ben is 
saying, “Andrew, I mean this like in like no offense, but sometimes you yell at other people, and you can’t 
hide behind this idea that you are simply being teased. You must accept some responsibility for the 
problem.” Since Ben has “surplus of vision” over Andrew (Bakhtin, Holquist, & Liapunov, 1990, p. 12), Ben’s 
utterance could be seen as a “dialogic gift” to Andrew (see prior work analyzing Vivian Paley’s classroom 
in Matusov & Smith, 2009a, 2009b). In the spirit of problematizing, Ben appears to have never intended his 
utterances to be the last word, but instead hopes that the Choices class will help Andrew to take 
responsibility for his deeds.  

Later on, during the discussion of Andrew’s problem in the Choices class, the teacher Steve asks 
questions which further expand the relational network of responsibility for Andrew’s problem: 

Teacher Steve: I just have a couple of clarifying questions for Andrew. One, is it a particular 
individual, or it is several people? 

Andrew: It’s like two or three. 
Teacher Steve: Two or three. Is it the same people every time? 
Andrew: Not always. But… well, usually it’s like one or two… and then [?] 
Teacher Steve: And is this something that happens on a regular basis, or when I’m not out 

there? 
Andrew: It’s usually when you’re not out there, yeah. 
[Group 3, Choices class, 2006-11-10] 

While the specific persons responsible are not revealed, what is most interesting here is that the 
teacher Steve’s responsibility for the problem is revealed, in that the problem is worse when he, a teacher, 
is not outside playing football with the students. This discussion shortly thereafter provokes Ben to yet again 
respond to the problem, further expanding the zone of responsibility for the problem: 

Ben: I have two things, one, Andrew, what I said before, I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings 
or anything. So, I’m sorry… Sometimes, sometimes, and I noticed, it’s not just 
happening when Steve’s [the teacher] not out there. ’Cause like, yeah, when Steve’s 
not out there. ’Cause yesterday when Steve was out with us, when I fumbled that kick, 
D- [begins to state a students’ name, but stops himself from doing so], or somebody, 
came up to me and said, hey Ben, that’s OK, just next time don’t go after the ball, don’t 
go after the ball if you’re not going to be able to catch it! [Group 3, Choices class, 2006-
11-10] 

Ben refers specifically to Steve’s presence or absence on the field, the unnamed student’s remarks 
to him yesterday, and so on. This utterance addresses specific, ongoing dramatic events in the lives of Ben 
himself and the others in the class, gaining its internal persuasiveness through referring to these events. 
The addressivity in Ben’s utterances can be characterized as being-with others, addressing one’s own and 
one another’s responsibility for ongoing events. It is notable that Ben’s discourse appears to be difficult to 
articulate without mentioning specific names (notice Ben needed to stop himself from revealing the name 



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of the student beginning with the letter “D,” apparently to comply with the anonymizing classroom rule). 
Responsibility within ontological dialogic event discourse seems difficult to assert anonymously and may 
be truncated by the norms of anonymity within the Choices class. 

Transcendence of ontological circumstances 
One of the characteristic aspects of ontological event discourse is that it creates the opportunity for 

transcendence of one’s ontological circumstances (Bakhtin, 1993, 1999). Ben has laid bare to Andrew and 
to others that Andrew’s anger seems to cause his peers to be frustrated and strike back at him. The 
recursive nature of such a pattern – “yelling” when making a “mistake” on the field – can confine Andrew 
(and others) in an ontological trap, and Ben reveals to Andrew a way to get out of this trap. This is the “gift” 
of an outside perspective which “reveals… ontological conditions of one’s being that provides an opportunity 
for the addressed person… to deal with his or her ontological confinement… and eventually transcend it” 
(Matusov, 2009, p. 238).  

This possibility of transcendence of circumstances is evident five months after this Choices class 
in interview with Andrew, Ben, and other students, where the transcript of the Choices class discussion 
from earlier in the year was presented. Andrew responded solely to a general question to talk about “the 
Choices class when you brought up what happened on the football field”: 

Andrew: …it prevented me from yelling at people, and made me understand why people 
yell at me.... It was what Ben said made me realize actually. Now everyone thinks I’m 
a wuss! [Interview, Group 3 students, 2007-04-06] 

Ben’s “dialogic finalization” thus seems to have touched Andrew in much the same way that 
Socrates is noted to have affected the recipient of his ideas like a torpedo fish paralyzes its prey (Matusov, 
2009; Plato & Bluck, 1961).2 Andrew’s crying during the Choices class can be seen as a cathartic response 
to this provocative “torpedo touch” introduced by Ben (Matusov, 2009, p. 25). Because of Ben’s utterance, 
Andrew can no longer innocently express that he is being teased on the football field, without recognizing 
his own responsibility for the problem. Ben’s utterances seem to open up and problematize enquiry for 
Andrew, rather than to close it, as is evidenced by Andrew’s reply that Ben’s utterance appears to have 
helped him to “understand why people yell at me.”  

While Andrew seems to continue to struggle relationally with his peers at the end of the school year 
– notice particularly his concerns of being called a “wuss” – he appears to have been led by Ben out of an 
ontological trap with others. These “imprisoning ontological circumstances”  (Matusov, 2009, p. 261) were 
characterized by Andrew starting to yell, making others yell back at him and become upset with him, thus 
furthering the relational tension between Andrew and the other students (which, in turn, gave Andrew a 
reason to become angry at and yell at his peers). If Ben had been accusatory of Andrew, without respecting 
him as having equal rights, Ben’s utterance could have continued to mire Andrew (and others) into this 
ontological trap. Through the dialogic event with Ben, however, Andrew recognizes that these conditions 
are modifiable through his deeds.  

A transformation of Andrew’s deeds would have repercussions not only for Andrew but also for 
others. Such a change, over time, appears to have occurred between Andrew and another Group 3 student, 

 
2 In the Meno dialogue, Plato writes, “if the torpedo fish is itself numb and so makes others numb, then I resemble it, but not otherwise, 
for I myself do not have the answer when I perplex others, but I am more perplexed than anyone when I cause perplexity in others. 
So now I do not know what virtue is; perhaps you knew before you contacted me, but now you are certainly like one who does not 
know. Nevertheless, I want to examine and seek together with you what it may be” (Plato & Bluck, 1961, p. 279). 



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Donald. While there is no direct evidence linking the transformation of Donald and Andrew’s relationship to 
Ben’s utterance, the connection is not out of the question. At the beginning of the school year, Melinda 
mentioned that Donald was significantly frustrated and angry with Andrew: 

Teacher Melinda: …Andrew, who’s kind of on the outskirts, it’s easy for the kids, Donald's 
made him a scapegoat a lot this year, and we’ve had to watch that. Donald’s just very 
irritated with Andrew all the time; he goes home and complains to his mother... 
[Interview, Group 3 teacher Melinda, 2007-05-02] 

Melinda commented later that Donald had become less and less annoyed with Andrew over the 
course of the year, and that these complaints stopped. It could be because of Ben’s dialogic “gift.” 

What has transpired between Andrew and Ben has emerged from their messy, situated and 
particular “unique place” in the world, built and transformed through their deeds with each other (Bakhtin, 
1993, p. 53). In this sense, the dramatic events described between Ben and Andrew are unique and 
unrepeatable. Furthermore, any proposed solution offered by Ben to the problem takes into account the 
imperfect world of discursive responsibility; in essence, there is no response in the ontological discursive 
universe which can sanitize or put an end to the problem. Most of the teachers’ discourse on Andrew’s 
problem, however, exists in a parallel discursive universe from that of the students, as will be revealed in 
the next section. 

The teachers’ parallel discursive universe 
In this section, I present through observation and interviews the practice of the teachers’ translation 

of students’ lived realities into abstract moral universals and the rationale for their practice. At this end of 
this section, I present the authoritativeness and persuasiveness of moral universal discourse and the 
consequences that this discourse has in resolving the interpersonal issues at the school. There are two 
categorical imperatives in the teachers’ discourse: the “feel good community” imperative – which promotes 
comfort, safety, and civility above all other discourse – and the imperative of bullying. The teachers’ focus 
on the “feel good community” imperative appears to prepare the grounds for the imperative of bullying, 
which was a pre-set curricular endpoint for the teachers. Underlying both of these discourses is an 
assumption that the children are “half-beings,” not yet fully responsible for their own or one another’s well-
being (Sidorkin, 2002). 

The moral imperative to “feel good” 
Seconds after Andrew raises his hand to describe the issues he is having on the football field, and 

before Ben first responds to the discourse (resulting in Andrew crying in response), the teachers focus 
students upon imperatives of “feel good” comfort and safety, a discussion which appears to prepare the 
groundwork for having the students later reflect upon the definition of bullying later in the class: 

Teacher Steve: I just have a couple of clarifying questions for Andrew. One, is it a particular 
individual, or it is several people? 

Andrew: It’s like two or three. 
Teacher Steve: Two or three. Is it the same people every time? 
Andrew: Not always. But… well, usually it’s like one or two… and then [?] 
Teacher Steve: And is this something that happens on a regular basis, or when I’m not out 

there? 
Andrew: It’s usually when you’re not out there, yeah. 



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Teacher Steve: OK. So that’s, that’s an issue then... Um… ’cause we’ve talked about it, I 
have a real concern that, I mean, the play out there needs to be healthy. It needs to 
be comfortable for people. Just as we wouldn’t want somebody in our 
classroom… Like, imagine, imagine if we were teaching if somebody in class would 
say to another student after they asked a question, “that’s was a really stupid thing to 
say!”  Imagine how that would feel for the student. And, how would that feel?  …  

[Kids raising hands] 
Teacher Steve: It’s pretty obvious, right?   
Danny [raises hand]: Well, they’d feel mad or something [?] 
Teacher Steve: They would feel completely shut down, you know, like a turd.  
[Laughter from students]  
Teacher Steve: So, I mean, you know, when we say when things really need to be 

comfortable here in school, we’re not just talking about in the classroom, things 
need to be comfortable in other situations and in other places, and the football 
field during the football game is one of those times and places. And I’m sort of 
concerned… you know because I, uh, Melinda and I can, um, be, be sure that that kind 
of thing wouldn’t happen um, when we’re there. But also, I don’t think people are talking 
to each other necessarily that way when we’re not there… I’m not hearing people talk 
in a way that’s a put down to make them feel bad. So, I’m kind of curious to know why 
that seems to be happening on the football field, and why people feel like that’s OK. 

Ben: Andrew, I mean this in like no offense… 
[Group 3, Choices class, 2006-11-10] 

What is notable here is the teacher Steve’s prioritization on comfort and safety which deflects 
students’ attention from the (sometimes uncomfortable and divisive) realities of their lived experience to a 
hypothetical, posited reality and a fantasy future (note the use of “imagine” and “would” in the above 
utterances from Steve). The focus on how “it needs to be comfortable” in school intends to posit an 
alternative reality sanitized from conflict. It seems that Steve’s discussion of comfort and safety was 
intended to be the “last word” in response to Andrew’s problem (that is, until the new student Ben decided 
to reply). To indicate the fantastic and unreal nature of this universe of “comfortable” football playing, when 
I presented a transcript of this discussion at a conference (Smith, 2008), two colleagues from the U.S. 
laughed at this part of the transcript, arguing that the students were being overly protected from the realities 
of playing football and from life itself. We can see how the teacher Steve attempts to search for a consensus 
for his ideas among the students by focusing on how “obvious” it is that someone would feel bad as a result 
of what transpired on the football field. Steve is thus recruiting students to act with rational intentions 
focused upon “feel good” comfort.  

The teacher Steve confirmed in an interview that making Andrew feel better about himself and 
ensuring others felt better about Andrew was a priority for the Choices discussion. According to Steve, this 
prioritization was also ultimately behind the discussion of bullying as well: 

Teacher Steve: So, it sounded like we had been on the football topic, and it was really the 
issue that was being brought up was getting on somebody's case when they made 
a mistake on the field, and how that feels. So [Teacher] Melinda tied bullying into 
that. In other words, if you’re [a student is] getting on somebody’s case and 
making them feel bad because of their performance, then you know that kind of 
fits into that idea of bullying, and yes, I think [Melinda, the other teacher] did want to 



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bring it up because it's something we've been concerned about [Interview, Steve, 2006-
11-27]. 

“Bullying” is equated here with making someone “feel bad.” The discussion of bullying which will 
later take place in the Choices class is, in essence, triggered by Andrew’s crying, and is set in motion by it.  

While the new student Ben saw an opportunity to investigate the responsibility of everyone for the 
“events” associated with Andrew’s problem, other students in the class were arguably more familiar with 
the norms of the Choices class, and responded directly to the teacher Steve’s appeal to the “feel good” 
imperative rather than to Ben’s utterance, as is seen in George’s response (Figure 2 above visually shows 
what is happening in the classroom exactly when George is speaking): 

George: If you have tried telling the person to stop doing that because it’s just a game or 
something, whatever you want to say, then they don’t listen to you and they keep doing 
it, then you can just tell them to stop, and if they don’t, then you have every right 
to go tell a teacher, and that would certainly make you feel better [Group 3, Choices 
class, 2006-11-10] 

George interestingly connects the need to “feel better” with the “right to go tell a teacher,” implying 
the teachers’ tendency to enforce the “feel good” imperative discourse. The other students in the class 
(except apparently Ben) seem to be well aware of the imperative discourse and are well socialized in the 
way the teachers prefer them to respond to students’ relational issues. 

A deeper concern of the teachers Steve and Melinda behind the “feel good community” imperative 
may be for the students to come to a mutual agreement on a more civil way in which to interact toward their 
peers. In relations characterized by civility, students engage in actions which can be interpreted as 
“reasonably… respectful, tolerant, or considerate” toward others (Cormier & Brighouse, 2019, p. 70). Civility 
is thus concerned with the promotion of positive “we” feelings, care for and empathy toward others, placidity 
in social relations, and mutual understanding and with the diminution of hostility, defensiveness, lack of 
trust, or psychological distress (Cormier & Brighouse, 2019; Mayo, 2002). However, unlike “being-as-event” 
discourse, as Mayo (2002) argues, the discourse of civility may effectively stifle the voice of students – 
“mov[ing] to the private sphere anything that impedes smooth social action” (p. 174) – in order to promote 
a “fragile ‘we’” feeling which is built upon the substance of ontologically meaningful dialogic events. While 
the power of civility lies in enabling possibilities for relations between students who may ignore/exclude, not 
trust, or be hostile to each other, it is important to note that it ultimately 

maintains the distance it initially appears to bridge. Civility, in other words, is not the way 
people build close relations. Instead it is a way people can maintain civil and personal distance in 
order to appear to abrogate the very social and political distance that poses the problem for their 
relations (Mayo, 2002, p. 171). 

In essence, then, the “feel good” community imperative may serve to promote civility but at the risk 
of sanitizing the events of being in the students’ lives and distancing students from the events within their 
peer relations, a topic which I address further in another paper in regard to addressing social exclusion 
among teenagers (Smith, 2019, in preparation). 



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The discourse of “half-being” 
To reinforce the “feel good” imperative of comfort, the teachers inserted their voices again in the 

student-led class just after Andrew started crying after Ben’s first utterance. In doing this, another important 
feature of the teachers’ moral universal discourse is revealed, the discourse of “half-being” (Sidorkin, 2002): 

Ben: …’Cause like even though you’re the one that started yelling, sometimes, like they 
want to yell back. And then, when it happens, when I do it, it makes me upset, and I 
end up always losing. Like, it…  

[Andrew is crying at this point] 
[Two students make comments at this point; the teacher Melinda interrupts a student who 

states she wishes to make an “off-topic” remark].  
Teacher Melinda: OK, hold on to it a minute. Try to get it some place in your mind so you 

can remember it. I have a question. Andrew, how are you feeling right now? 
Andrew: Lousy. 
Teacher Steve: What are you feeling lousy about? 
Andrew: [inaudible on recording] 
Teacher Melinda: I think [the teacher] Steve wants to elaborate on that is, why are we, why 

is this happening, is that what you asked? Is it the football field where it’s happening 
and why would that be? 

Andrew: And also, why it’s always happening when [the teacher] Steve’s not around? 
Boy: I have a question, is it people in here? 
Andrew: No. 
Jamal: The reason why it’s happening is because people know they can get away with it.  
Teacher Steve: And see, here’s the thing. I mean, what I would want to say to that person, 

is not whether you can get away with it. But what are you getting away with? You’re 
making somebody else feel rotten, and what is that doing to you, and your life and 
the kind of choices you’re making, where you decide that it’s an OK thing to make 
somebody feel rotten and I can get away with that. It’s not going to matter in the 
end, it’s going to affect the person saying those things as much as it is the person 
who is getting them said to. Because it’s going to end up hurting their relationships 
with people if that’s the way they talk to people and deal with people.  

[Group 3, Choices class, 2006-11-10] 

With this dialogic turn, the teacher Steve attempts to deflect the discourse of the class away from 
Ben’s utterance focused on here-and-now responsibility to ongoing events of being and toward the 
imagined future “choices” the students could make. For the teachers, who the students are becoming (what 
they may or will experience) matters more than who they are (and what they experience) now. In this sense, 
the students are “half-beings,” not yet considered to be fully responsible to themselves, one another or 
others in the world/society by virtue of the fact that they have not yet fully developed as adults (Sidorkin, 
2002, p. 43). The students thus cannot truly be expected to “take care of each other’s feelings,” as is noted 
in Melinda’s interview response to the event with Andrew below: 

Teacher Melinda: Part of our job is not just to let kids go off, a lot of our job is to help 
kids take care of each other’s feelings, and they don’t often know how to do that 
with their peers, especially for someone like Andrew, who’s kind of on the outskirts… 
when you have a peer that’s crying, sometimes people don’t know what to do. They 
want to avoid it and move on, but our job is to say, “No, you can’t! We’ve got to stay 
with this person now, we’ve got to stay and see if we can help him sort this out!” What 



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are we going to do if it’s [inaudible – one word] that the community make sure one of 
members is feeling lousy, what can we possibly do?!... [Interview, Melinda, 2007-05-
02] 

In reviewing the transcripts of the Choices class, the teacher Melinda values how the teachers 
seized the opportunity to provide a model for students to become more sensitive to each other’s feelings 
than what they are able to do now. 

Sanitization of risk in students’ peer relations 
It appears that a major reason for the concerns with “feel good” imperatives in response to problems 

like Andrew’s is that the teachers are avoiding the risks associated with directly discussing the students’ 
ontologically-loaded events. There is a risk that Andrew may be being publicly scrutinized: 

Teacher Steve: … this thing with Ben and Andrew, I don’t remember where things shifted, 
but if it was getting sort of like, they were talking to each other about the problem in 
front of the whole group, like Ben might have felt comfortable saying something, Andrew 
may or may not feel comfortable, you know, getting um... he might’ve felt frustrated with 
Ben because of his portrayal of the situation. And then that’s uncomfortable with 
everybody watching you, having this disagreement with somebody in class, so, it’s not 
bad to have things out in the open sometimes, but both people should be comfortable 
with it, um... but usually the practice is to deal with that separately. 

Researcher Mark: Why is it important for them to be comfortable with that? 
Teacher Steve: Well, imagine if you’re in a group, and you’re having an issue with 

somebody, and you didn't want to deal with that in out in front of your peers, because 
you had some things that were maybe embarrassing for you, or just uncomfortable 
because you’re upset about it, but you don't want everybody watching you. So, for me, 
it's just an issue of fairness, it’s just an issue of keeping this a safe place emotionally 
for kids. And if a kid feels like their dirty laundry is going to get dragged out in front of 
the whole class… 

[Interview, Steve, 2006-11-27] 

Thus, concerns with comfort and safety appear to outweigh the benefits of students directly hearing 
from their peers; the students’ open-ended responses are considered to be “appropriate” as long as the 
discourse stays at a level of “generality” and “comfort.” The risk and concern, as the teacher Melinda stated 
in an interview, is that no student would “single somebody out” in the public space of “the class” [Interview, 
Melinda, 2007-05-02]. Similar concerns with public scrutinization of students also led the teachers Melinda 
and Steve to go through the Choices box “almost… every time” to check for messages which may reveal 
the identity of the person who is being referred to in the posting. 

The teacher Steve raises a similar concern with the risks of student-to-student discourse which 
could become too “personal” and “particular,” leading to fears of out-of-control shaming and blaming 
discourse. The teacher Steve argued that Andrew “was talking in generalities,” but Ben started “making it 
particular” and a “more personal thing” [Interview, Steve, 2006-11-27]. The teacher Steve appears to 
prioritize the safety of the moral imperative of “feel good” comfort even if he believes that the discussion 
between Ben and Andrew could ultimately have been safe. The assumption Steve makes is that Ben’s 
discourse could only lead to shaming and blaming rather than a constructive discussion of interpersonal 
issues: 



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Teacher Steve: I don’t know, I’m not saying that that conversation couldn't be had in a safe 
way; maybe Ben would just need sort of some gentle reminders to be tactful when he’s 
talking to Andrew. But Choices is supposed to be a place where kids could bring things 
up, and even when you bring up things openly as Andrew did, he wasn’t calling 
anyone out by name, he was talking about like “there’s some people [who have called 
me names on the football field],” and there’s some safety in doing that for everyone. 
You know, I imagine if he said, “well Danny does this,” and “Alex does that,” then we 
get into “Well, no I didn't!” and then you have these kinds of conversations that are, 
when there's a lot of heat, but there’s not a lot of light, you know [Interview, Steve, 
2006-11-27]. 

The teacher Steve further assumes that Choices class will not “work” if students do not feel 
“comfortable and safe” because children “will never want to bring things up, they won’t want to talk about, 
or it will all be things that are all distant from them.” He then claims: 

Teacher Steve: I don’t think they’re comfortable with their having classmates dissect their 
behavior that’s already occurred, but they are comfortable with getting suggestions 
about what they could do in the future [Interview, Steve, 2006-11-27]. 

Steve assumes that “forward-looking” nature of the teachers’ discourse, with all its emphasis on an 
imagined future, comfort, and safety is more desirable to students.  

Regardless of the veracity of this claim (which will be tested shortly with the students in an 
interview), there is little doubt that the “comfortable and safe” discourse is more desirable for the teachers. 
It sanitizes risk and reduces the uncertainty of delving into students’ lived realities. It may also allow for a 
civil “niceness” to be promoted, which may be attractive to parents. The teachers’ concerns with risk and 
discomfort are arguably ontological for them, in that the teachers are held accountable for the safety and 
welfare of the students in the eyes of the parents. The parents are paying money for their students to attend 
a private school, and I hypothesize that the parents, or the parents as imagined by the teachers, wish the 
teachers to provide individualized instruction, create an environment in which their children are excited and 
motivated about going to school, feel safe, and so on. Ultimately, the teachers would want the parents 
(prospective, current, former, or imaginary) to be attracted to and pleased with the private school, not 
concerned about the risks with attending it. As I did not interview the parents to confirm this, I am unable to 
determine if they (or some of them) are in agreement with the teachers regarding these concerns and risks. 
It is possible that the “parents” to whom the teachers address these concerns might well be a fruit of the 
teachers’ imagination. The focus on the parents might also be a phenomenon of the way in which we talk 
about what concerns us through looking “into the eyes of another or with the eyes of another” (Bakhtin, 
1999, p. 287). 

The moral imperative of anti-bullying 
The discourse of “feel good” comfort ultimately became the basis for teachers to focus students 

upon the abstract moral universal of anti-bullying. Just a couple of turns in the discourse from Ben’s second 
contribution to the Choices class, in which Ben further problematizes Andrew’s situation by recognizing the 
responsibility of an unnamed student to the problem, the teacher Melinda abruptly shifts from Ben’s 
contextualized, ontologically eventful discourse toward an abstract, de-ontologized discussion on “bullying.” 
Notice below how the teacher Melinda introduces “bullying” with the students by stating, “this is actually a 
good place to pose a question.” The tone of her utterance sounds as if she means, “this is actually a good 



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place to switch the topic of the conversation and to pose a question which I have been wanting to discuss 
with you for some time now,” especially given the context of her statements later on in the utterance: 

Teacher Melinda [Group 3 teacher]: This is actually a good place to pose a question, 
because it has to do with this, I’m going to ask it, and I want you to go into groups to 
talk about it, just like a minute and a half. What is bullying? How would you define 
bullying, what does bullying look like? What is it?  Just form, you know, talk with some 
people around you. 

[Students form small groups of 2-3 people with each other, and discuss the question with 
each other]  

Boy [in a perplexed tone]: What’s bully-ing?!  
Teacher Melinda: When I ask you to talk with someone, I really do mean that you need to 

talk about it. OK, I would like you to do that. 
[Students discussing the question in groups for about 30 seconds; I overhear Ben’s 

discussion with his group]  
Ben [talking to his fellow group members]: Bullying, is that what we’re talking about?!  

Bullying is like mostly having fun at somebody else’s expense. Like having fun with [?] 
during a [?] and getting someone upset.  

Teacher Melinda: OK, if we could just break out of our groups for a second, because I 
heard a couple of interesting things that went on with that. So go ahead Danny [student 
moderator who then calls on the students to answer the question posed by Melinda].  

[Group 3, Choices class, 2006-11-10] 

The abrupt and awkward nature of the transition to the discussion of bullying is evident by the fact 
that the teacher Melinda must repeat twice that she really intended for the students to “go into groups” and 
talk about the question. Furthermore, when entering their small groups to respond to the teachers’ question, 
the students (notably including Ben) appear to be confused or to forget what it is that they were expected 
by the teachers to discuss, apparently because the discussion of bullying is alienated from the life issues 
and relational problems of the students. Nevertheless, it is indeed quite remarkable how students so readily 
and unconditionally follow teachers’ directions (Sidorkin, 2002).  

From interviews with the teachers, the teachers noted that they chose to discuss bullying with the 
students in response to Andrew’s problem primarily because they had been planning for some time to 
discuss it with the students, and saw that Andrew’s problem appeared to be something that they could “tie 
bullying into.” As the teacher Steve stated in an interview about this class about two weeks after the Choices 
class: 

Teacher Steve: So, it sounded like we had been on the football topic, and it was really the 
issue that was being brought up was getting on somebody's case when they made a 
mistake on the field, and how that feels. So [the teacher] Melinda tied bullying into that. 
In other words, if you're getting on somebody's case and making them feel bad because 
of their performance, then you know that kind of fits into that idea of bullying, and yes, 
I think she did want to bring it up because it's something we've been concerned about 
[Interview, Steve, 2006-11-27]. 

The teacher Steve does not question the relevance of the idea of bullying to Andrew’s problem. He 
sees Melinda’s instrumental use of ongoing lived events to discuss a pre-set concept of bullying as 
unproblematic; Andrew’s problem was one of many possible “opportunities” to introduce “bullying” to 



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address since, as he says just afterward, “kids tend to have a very monolithic view of what bullying is” (cf. 
Olweus, 1993). The problem of bullying is seen as something which exists universally and can be 
understood regardless of context.  

Steve’s comment here thus makes clear that there is a value for the teachers on moving students 
away from their discussion of specific, lived events (which can make people “feel bad”), toward an 
understanding of the abstract, universal, pre-set, emotionally detached concept of bullying. The 
characteristics of this discourse are evident in this discussion of the difference between emotional and 
physical bullying: 

Teacher Melinda: Would you consider it bullying when a person says one nasty thing about 
someone?   

At least 2 students: No. 
Susie: It’s when it’s on-going. 
Marla: Consecutive. 
Teacher Melinda: Yeah, so, so, it has to be over a period of time. Like it’s constant? So, if 

I said to Steve, “Geez Steve, you know, you, I can’t stand it when you do such and 
such!” If I said that to Steve once and then it was over, would that be bullying?   

Students: No. 
Teacher Melinda: OK, that has to be, it has to happen over and over again. OK? And, you 

know, it can be verbal or physical, that’s what I’m hearing you say, social. It can be a 
social-emotional bullying or physical bullying. …Right? Whack-o. And again, like it 
wouldn’t be like I punched Martin once, but every time I saw Martin, I sucker-punched 
him, especially if nobody was looking, that would be bullying. Which is worse physical 
bullying or emotional, mental, or let’s call it emotional bullying? How’s that? 

Students: They’re like the same. The same. They’re equal. 
George: Unless the physical bullying is really, really bad, emotional bullying is worse. 
Andrew: ’Cause it can scar you, can’t it? 
2 students: So can physical! 
[One student laughs] 
Joseph: What I have to say for the difference is that emotional bullying can sometimes be 

worse, because sometimes if it’s not that much, you can kind of ignore it, physical 
bullying, it’s pretty much, you can ignore it, but it’s not going to help. 

Student: Yeah! 
Susie: I think emotional bullying is worse because … [inaudible] freckles or something, and 

you do, oh yeah, Oh yeah, you know, it’s OK, don’t worry about it … physical bullying 
can sound really, really bad. And physical, yeah, it can really hurt sometimes, but 
[inaudible], …  

Andrea: [mostly inaudible] … Mostly … want to do something.., a person or something… 
Teacher Melinda: Is [it] the person who is being picked on [who] doesn’t have friends, or 

the groups that are doing the bullying? 
Girl student: The person that’s [?] 
Teacher Melinda: The bully?! 
Girl student: That’s physical … 
Unknown student: I think that they’re kind of equal, because I think that physically bullying 

someone can hurt just as much as that other one, yeah, emotional, cause they both 
hurt really bad, they can really hurt even though it’s not like emotional bullying, isn’t like 
actually hurting you, it feels pretty much like punching somebody’s stomach …  



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Jamal: I think emotional bullying is worse ’cause it lasts a lot longer than a punch or two. 
Boy student: I think emotional bullying, depending on what they say, it makes you feel bad 

about yourself, and like, maybe a bruise or something,  
Unknown student: I think emotional bullying is worse, verbal bullying, if you get hit in the 

arm or something, it doesn’t hurt as long as if your friends are sort of joking around, and 
they keep saying that if you do something, you do it really stupidly, um, it sort of hurts 
because it just, they’re still your friends, but you feel sort of hurt all over, and you feel 
sort of sad because you know they’re joking, your friends are your biggest bullies. 

Dan: Like Ben was saying, saying something that [?] really bad. 
Teacher Melinda [sense of recognition about the issue]: Um! 
Danny: Melinda 
Melinda: Two things that I wanted to follow-up on what people said, I wondered is it always, 

is the bully always a person who doesn’t have a lot of friends. Can it be someone who 
has a lot of friends? 

[Some discussion] 
Martin: …Gossipping… 
Melinda: Or gossipping, Martin just said, I don’t know if you heard him say, can you say it 

louder? 
Martin: Gossipping is bullying. 
Melinda: Gossipping can be a form of bullying. Um… also, I wanted, I wonder, I don’t know 

what your experience has been, so I’m kind of interested in knowing. Physical bullying, 
punching, hitting, that kind of stuff, do you think that that’s stopped, noticed more than 
emotional bullying? 

[Some students are heard saying yes, and some no] 
Unknown student: Well, not in this school. 
Melinda [laughs slightly]: Not in this school!   
Unknown student: Not in this school. 
Melinda: Well, I don’t know, even in this school. Do you think that, that it’s easier to notice 

and identify physical bullying or emotional bullying? 
Student: Emotional. 
Boy: Notice for?   
Student: Physical. Depends if they cry.  
Student: It depends if you hurt them emotionally so much that they start to cry.  
Student: It depends how hard… 
Student: There can be a whole bunch of… 
Melinda: It seems to be that you’re saying that sometimes physical bullying is sometimes 

more noticeable. [Begins to tell the students that educators have recently become 
“awakened” to the problems of emotional bullying]… But why do people bully was the 
question? Why would somebody bully? I think this is a pretty important question to ask 
ourselves, because we want to be able to identify bullying, and we also want to have 
some idea of what bullying looks like in a community. And also what might be going on 
with the bully-er, the bully-ee. Whatever… I’d like us to think about taking on the role of 
a bully. Where we would actually be, each of us would be a bully, what does it feel like 
to be a bully, and also, what does it feel like to be a victim of that bullying? So maybe 
we could, next week, we could have a little bit of that. 

[Group 3, Choices class, 2006-11-10] 



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The problem of bullying appears to be taken seriously by the teacher Melinda and has significant 
educational import to her, as is evident by Melinda’s prolonged and patient effort to have the students say 
what it is she would like them to say (the desired answers being repeated by the teacher Melinda or verbally 
approved with an audible “Um!”). However, the context under which these classifications are expected to 
apply is not delineated, and any discussion of the specific context appears to have been supplanted by the 
discussion of the classificatory scheme itself. This classificatory scheme exists in spite of the students’ and 
teachers’ interested and emotive participation in the events around them. The discussion of bullying shuts 
down further discussion on specific aspects of the students’ ontological events (and everyone’s 
responsibility to these events), since it moves discussion onto a purely de-ontologized, abstract, 
decontextualized conceptual plane. Any specific lived situations implied by the discussion are purely 
hypothetical, abstracted and alienated from the lived reality of the students to which they are meant to reply. 
The bullying discourse of the teachers focuses upon agreed upon, typified and normalized societal 
phenomenon, whereas Ben’s situated concept of “anger” is potentially contestable and open for 
reinterpretation. 

Bullying also appears to be a pre-set curricular endpoint for the teachers, a ready-made idea toward 
which the teachers were leading the students. Indeed, as one of the CLC teachers commented to me 
informally at some point during the school year, some of the teachers at the school had recently attended 
a professional lecture about the problem of bullying among U.S. youth. Thus, Andrew’s problem could just 
be the “opportunity” or vehicle through which the problem of bullying was expected to be eventually 
discussed. Such a situation appears to be a quite common phenomenon; a very similar case of a nine-year 
old student who annoyed others when playing sports is rather unproblematically labelled as an example of 
“bullying” by Mishna (2012, pp. 67-68). The CLC students sense the fact that there is an expected endpoint 
to the discussion, and follow along in moving toward it. In the discussion of bullying, rather than engaging 
in discourse which judges their experience in an open and contestable manner, the students engage in 
“guessing” what the teacher wants from them (cf. Jackson, 1968).  

In an interview about why she decided to discuss bullying at this point in the class, the teacher 
Melinda stated – with notably circular logic – that it was important to address “[be]cause one’s person’s 
idea of bullying is not another person’s idea of bullying, and so we need as a group to decide, what is 
bullying?!” She also argues that bullying discourse gives the students an “opportunity” to discuss “general 
things” and invariant, universal “bigger idea[s].” The events of the students’ lives thus become incidences 
of an abstract universal concept: 

Teacher Melinda: To try to get them to look at the specific, we want to make generalizations 
from specifics. There are sometimes specific issues that have to be dealt with head-on, 
and also, there are often those specific things come up over and over again, because 
they're part of the more general thing that has to come up. So I think that’s, if we see 
an opportunity to, to give kids a more general, a bigger idea than they're thinking about. 

Researcher Mark: So here the opportunity for bullying was the issue that Andrew was 
raising on the field? 

Teacher Melinda: He was being verbally bullied out there on the field. 
[Interview, Melinda, 2007-05-02] 

Effectively, then, the students’ lived experience is conveniently considered to be insignificant when 
compared to the unquestioned generalizations which the teachers wish to promote among the students. 
Any uncertainty over the meaning of what is happening is also reduced (“he was being verbally bullied out 
there on the field”). While the students may debate (perhaps endlessly) about Andrew’s problem, the 



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DOI: 10.5195/dpj.2019.259 |  Vol. 7 (2019) 
 

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discussion of bullying places a full stop on the discussion, silencing alternative perspectives and voices 
(Morson, 2004).  

The Kantian bullying discourse also justifies its relevance based on untested beliefs of social 
influences impacting students out of the classroom: 

Teacher Melinda: He was being verbally bullied out there on the field. And again, it’s sort 
of close to the beginning of the year, it’s [American] football season, kids are watching 
a lot of football, they're seeing that that's what they're being, football players are 
modelling, they’re doing it. And Steve noticed, too, when he was out there with them, 
there wasn’t that, but the minute he couldn’t go out, the days he couldn’t go out with 
them, then there were more complaints about that verbal abuse happening [Interview, 
Melinda, 2007-05-02]. 

No evidence is provided for the “modelling” hypothesis except that children are watching American 
football games. There is no example provided for this influence within actual events of the students’ lives. 
The teacher Melinda also does not provide any specific example of “verbal abuse” in the events of the 
students’ lives; nor does the teacher Steve backup the claim of “verbal abuse on the field” that he makes 
to the students during the Choices class in response to Andrew’s problem. Any responsibility for the 
problem of “bullying” is externalized and placed upon the broader society or abstract others rather than 
specific deeds within the students’ and teachers’ daily reality within the school.  

It could be argued that the teacher Melinda’s focus on bullying may just indicate her lack of 
familiarity with the relational dynamics surrounding Andrew’s problem. The teacher Melinda did not play 
football with the students during recess time, so her relationship with the events on the football field is quite 
peripheral. In addition, as noted earlier, the teacher Steve, unlike Melinda, questioned whether or not his 
presence or absence on the field has an effect on Andrew’s problem. However, lack of familiarity with the 
events around Andrew’s problem appears not to explain why bullying is discussed with the children. In an 
interview response regarding Andrew’s problem, Melinda recognizes that Andrew’s crying would be 
responded to differently than another student’s crying in the Choices class: 

Teacher Melinda: What are we going to do if it’s [inaudible – one word] that the community 
makes sure one of members is feeling lousy, what can we possibly do?!. Especially if 
there’s a kid who has been annoying, there’s that tendency to get- If Susie had started 
crying, everybody would have been focused on Susie, “Oh, Susie, what’s the matter, 
what’s the matter?” But Andrew crying and feeling lousy, they’re more likely to say, “Oh 
well, we’ll just ignore it.” So I think that was probably the dynamic that was going on 
there. Now, at this point in the year, he’s [Andrew’s] much stronger, he’s really come 
into in his own a lot in many ways, he’s got friends, he’s, um, although he can still be 
annoying, most of the time he's not, he’s not as impulsive as he was, so kids are more 
concerned about him, except for Donald [Interview, Melinda, 2007-05-02]. 

In this interview with me, the teacher Melinda clearly contextualizes and ontologizes the students’ 
problems in their relations with one another. However, I could not find evidence that she ever did this with 
the students directly within the space of the Choices class, a pattern which can similarly be noted within 
Vivian Paley’s (1992) classroom (Matusov & Smith, 2009a, 2009b). Melinda also recognizes here that 
Andrew is “annoying” to other students, but this did not call her attention away from the presupposition that 
Andrew was being “bullied.” 



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DOI: 10.5195/dpj.2019.259 |  Vol. 7 (2019) 
 

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Presuming then that bullying is not discussed in the classroom because of its helpfulness (for the 
teachers and students) as a lens for revealing and understanding students’ relational dynamics, there may 
be other plausible reasons for the emergence of this discourse at this particular place and time. Bullying 
has a status of being a phenomenon discussed by social scientists, which can increase the status and 
authoritativeness of the teachers’ ideas over the students’ ideas, making it possible for teachers to transition 
easily from “messy” uncontrollable discourse to discourse with a clear endpoint that is safer and less risky. 
Alternatively, the teachers may also just wish to “move on” to what they had pre-planned for the day; 
discussions of the problems Andrew and Ben raised would take significant time to discuss, and there would 
not be a clear endpoint to these discussions. Finally, bullying may have been discussed simply because it 
was a desired curricular objective (for at least Melinda) to classify the students’ relational problems as 
bullying problems. 

The persuasiveness of bullying for the students outside of the classroom context 
From my interviews with the students, it is notable that the discussion of bullying is not persuasive 

for the students themselves as a way of framing or understanding their interpersonal realities outside of the 
classroom context. This is seen in the following interview, in which Andrew and five other Group 3 students, 
including Ben, were present: 

Researcher Mark: I’m trying to understand how we got from what Andrew's talking about 
to bullying. 

Ben: Because [?] was bullying Andrew. 
Researcher Mark: Is that true? 
Marla: Wait, someone was bullying Andrew? 
Andrew: Somebody was bullying me? 
Matthew: Oh yeah, when you walked into that tree, you were like yelling at everybody when 

you were like walking off the football field, you turned around and hit the tree! 
Ben: Oh, yeah, when we were playing football! Oh yeah, you turned around, you catched 

the ball, and you ran into the tree. 
Andrew: Oh yeah, I turned around to the catch the ball, and I hit the tree, and Larry started, 

yelling, and laughing, not yellin’ at me. Laughing at me! 
Researcher Mark: Was there bullying involved in what you… ? 
Susie: Oh yeah, bullying. 
Andrew: What I was doing, no. What Larry was doing, yes. 
Ben: Really? 
Marla: Especially here.  
Susie: I think sometimes you just laugh. Sometimes that happens, I don’t know if that’s my 

family and I’m just kind of used to it, but when I [?] my dad laughs. And I don’t really 
think about it too much, maybe because I know that he’s joking, but I think sometimes 
you just gotta not be, not like talking to like Andrew, like some people they just got to 
be not so sensitive to things, and that’s I think one of the problems with our thing in 
school. Like our class this year, I think. Everyone’s really sensitive to things, that’s just 
our class. That happened two years ago when our classes were together, everyone 
was always, there were always problems and stuff, it was just a mix of kids, or... 

[Boys, except Andrew, are fussing around in the back]  
[Interview, Group 3 students, 2007-04-06] 

The students here express ambivalence with regard to the labeling of the dialogic event between 
Andrew and Ben as “bullying.” This is notably different from the teacher Melinda’s unquestioned view on 



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the relevance of bullying. It is also notable how students utilize different ideas such as “laughing” within 
their dialogue to pass judgements on the meaning of the events which bother Andrew (and possibly others 
as well). In turn, the students’ discourse reveals and promotes further analysis of Andrew and the others’ 
responsibility to the problem, whereas the discourse of bullying appears to deflate further discussion of 
these issues. 

Other Group 3 students, in interviews, also questioned the relevance of discussing bullying in the 
class. They reported that they do this questioning indirectly during the Choices class by making comments 
about its irrelevance or meaninglessness under-the-breath and/or quietly to their peers. This is noted from 
this interview of six Group 3 students: 

Marla: Maybe the teachers brought it up ’cause they thought it was a problem for us in 5th 
grade and 6th grade. Next year, we might be going to middle-slash-high school, there 
might be bullies there, so we want to be able, and even here, so we know what’s bullying 
so we can stop it before it gets too big. 

[…] 
Matthew: ’Cause it was the same thing almost over the whole time period. 
Marla: I think they just read out of a thesaurus, they kept saying the same exact thing! 
Susie [slightly admonishing, surprised tone]: Marla! 
Marla: Over and over. Using different words. 
Susie: I think it went on a little too long. Like it was good at first, and a lot of people were 

saying stuff, but it sort of kind of started repeating after a while.  
[Interview, Group 3 students, 2007-04-06] 

In another example of the perceived irrelevance of bullying, a group of Group 4 (Grade 7/8) teenage 
girls commented in an interview how they prefer to apply concepts other than “bullying” to their lived 
experience, such as “drama,” “teasing,” or “name calling.” For them, bullying appears to be something that 
happens “not very often,” but the other concepts regularly emerge with ongoing discourse to judge their 
experience: 

Researcher Mark: I see, for example, the bullying thing kept coming up. 
Katie [with a frustrated, painful expression]: Uh!!! 
Researcher Mark: Is that a problem that keeps coming up in Choices about bullying? 
Jacob: That’s like a girl problem. 
Katie and Kim: Not very often. 
Kim: It’s a lot of girl drama. 
Katie: Yeah, girl drama. 
Jacob: And no one really bullies, except when I— 
Katie: Yeah, no one really bullies at our school, they [she seems to mean the teachers] just 

try to come up with their own versions of bullying. Which is like. 
Alena: Yeah, teachers say that they see bullying, when it’s really not, it’s just teasing, name 

calling. And it’s a joke! 
Kim: It's a joke… and they [teachers or students?] know it’s a joke, and they’re laughing! 
Katie: And some people [students] are overdramatic about it. That’s how a lot of us think, 

it’s just overdramatic. 
[Interview, Informal interview of Group 4 students, 2007-06-05] 



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The concept of “bullying,” in Alena and Katie’s responses, is judged – along with other concepts – 
in terms of its internal persuasiveness to the events of being in the students. The girls wish to demand that 
the teachers take the context of the students’ problems into account. Engaging in “drama” and being 
“overdramatic” have currency in their discourse, but “bullying” does not (Smith, 2019, in preparation). 

The concept of bullying and inarticulateness in response to “events of being” 
Regardless of its relevance to the here-and-now, we might still imagine that the idea of bullying 

may be employed by some students in discourse in the context of their lived interactions with each other to 
help them address problems emerging in their social relations. Yet, in another interview with Group 4 boys, 
the student Jared becomes inarticulate when attempting to apply the concept of bullying to his lived 
experience: 

Jared [after having read a transcript I prepared of a social studies lesson in which the 
problem of bullying was discussed]: When I heard that [Ralph, the Group 4 teacher, 
leading the social studies lesson, wanted to give us the tools to help us with bullying], it 
was like, great! [slightly sarcastic] That's good! That’s really good, I want to be able to 
stop bullying, that’s always helpful. But, yeah, I lost my train of thought. 

Researcher Mark: I just wondered, when you hear that, what are you thinking? 
Jared: First, I was like good, yeah, that’s good. But then I thought, how in the world is he 

going to give us the tools to deal with bullying! Because, I know, I was like, yeah! I can 
stop it. But now I’m like, it doesn’t really work so well […] They definitely pay attention 
to it, but I don’t know if they do the best job of preventing it. 

Paul: It’s definitely that kind of environment – 
Dennis [in a puzzled and surprised tone]: I don’t understand what you’re saying about that! 

There’s not really bullying! 
[Interview, Group 4, Grade 7 students, 2007-04-30] 

Jared claims that the teachers should be “preventing” bullying more, but the tools do not “really 
work so well.” He then states that “I can stop it,” but then places the responsibility for “stop[ping]” bullying 
on the teachers. It may be that in this interview I conducted with Jared, Paul and Dennis, I did not open up 
the social conditions for which Jared could become more articulate about the issues he was experiencing 
(cf. McDermott, 1988). Unfortunately, I did not pursue this discussion further, by asking Jared to provide a 
specific example of what “bullying” means in his daily life. However, it is also telling that he did not provide 
this example, as Jared’s discourse appears to lie squarely within the discourse in which bullying exists, a 
discourse which universalizes lived experience, places students’ lived reality on a plane of “half-being” and 
becoming, and diminishes the value of the specific, ontological event discourse in his life or in the lives of 
his peers in favor of risk prevention and sanitization of students’ lived realities. It is intriguing here how 
Dennis directly rejects the assertion of the relevance of bullying to Jared’s life in favor of demanding 
contextualization of this problem through specific events. 

The recursivity of bullying discourse versus the recursivity of being-as-event discourse 
As noted in the section above, in both the Group 3 and Group 4 student interviews on bullying, 

students report being frustrated and irritated with the frequency in which the topic of bullying emerges in 
the Choices class. For the teachers, however, such recursivity is essential to ensure that students are 
thinking of the more advanced abstract moral universal thinking rather than their own ways of 
conceptualizing their experience: 



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Teacher Melinda: There are often those specific things come up over and over again, 
because they’re part of the more general thing that has to come up. So I think that’s, if 
we see an opportunity to, to give a kids a more general, a bigger idea than they’re 
thinking about” [Interview, Melinda, 2007-05-02]. 

Interestingly, however, some researchers share with the children a frustration with the recursivity 
of the discussion of bullying and its questionable relevance to students’ lives, as noted in this anonymous 
interview of a bullying researcher: 

Some people [have] found the ongoing debates sterile and of limited use in improving the 
lives of children in schools. ‘You know, they keep saying, “How do we define bullying?” I think, “Well, 
we could go on like that forever and ever but meanwhile there’s a big problem out there”’ (Dixon, 
2011, p. 184) 

Recursivity of discourse was also noted within the students’ event-focused discourse. However, 
when present in this context, recursivity of discourse is a sign that students may be stuck in an ontological 
trap, such as Andrew being caught up within a recursive yelling-anger-blaming cycle with his peers. 
Andrew’s frustration with this recursivity appears to be behind Andrew deciding to discuss the problem with 
the class. The recursive “yelling” may be considered to constrain relations between the students, and be a 
cause for further investigation through dialogue.3 	

Bullying as an ideal discourse imposed upon students’ real lived experiences 
It is important to emphasize that the CLC teachers are making instructional decisions – to discuss 

“bullying” and “gossip” with the students – on the basis of imagined student problems and dilemmas that 
are based in the teachers’ consciousness of the world, which may or may not be shared by the students 
(Matusov & Smith, 2007). Thus, teachers do not “problematize” or “subjectivize” the problem of bullying 
within the daily, being-as-event reality of Andrew or any of the students (Matusov & Smith, 2007).  

In fact, in interviews, the teachers discuss a need to supplant the students’ lived being-as-event 
reality with a more detached and de-subjectivized lens which places the students above their responses to 
one another, which are “immediate” and “reactive,” and their “developmental” way of responding to 
problems would contaminate objective logic with the emotional intensity of conflictual relations: 

Teacher Steve: It [bullying] is a Group 3 [Grade 5-6] issue in the sense that I think kids are 
really examining their behaviors, stepping out, they can start stepping outside 
themselves, and have some perspective, when they get to this age, that is much, much 
harder for them to do when they’re [younger]… to take a look at their behavior in a 
more objective way. To be able to kind of look at how they’re behaving and see it as 
if somebody were treating them in that way. To kind of, be able to kind of examine 
themselves and … look at their role in a more global way. As it relates to the way that 
they’re dealing with people and their relationships. I mean, when kids are in Groups 1 
and 2 [Grades 1-2 and 3-4], everything’s so immediate, everything’s reactive. And 
that’s developmental. That’s to be expected. When kids get to Group 3 and 4 [Grades 
5-6 and 7-8], they’re able to pull back and distance themselves, and reflect on their 
behavior a bit, which is one of the things that Melinda [the other Grade 5-6 teacher] and 

 
3 For further discussion of this issue, see the Summerhill School “makeup case” presented in Allen, Getzels, and Getzels (1991), 
which is analysed in detail in Smith (2019, in preparation). 



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I write in our [quarterly written] reports [to parents] under [the] socio-emotional 
[category], “ability to reflect on behavior and accept responsibility.” So when kids get, 
you know, some kids, some adults, never quite get there. But you would hope, and kids 
can start to do that [reflection], when they get to be about 5th, 6th grade. So, anyway, 
just the idea of the kids to be thinking about these issues about bullying in a more global 
way, that they can be subtle, kind of looking at their own behavior, we’re asking them 
to start examining those things now in a way that they hadn’t been really [Interview, 
Steve, 2006-11-27, bold and italics are mine]. 

From the teacher Steve’s perspective, a student like Ben cannot really make valid judgements and 
reflections upon recursive events. The teacher Steve here seems to presume that it is impossible for the 
students to become responsible for one another within being-as-event discourse (being-with addressivity 
to others), since they do not “examine” their lives from the more “global” and “distance[d]” perspective that 
“reflect[ion]” on abstract moral universals like bullying would provide. 

Bullying is seen in the teacher Melinda’s utterance below as an abstract, universal truth (istina) 
which is likely to emerge within the students’ lived experience with one another (although apparently not 
the teachers’ lives). Istina-truth (Russian word, “истина”) can be compared with pravda-truth (Russian word, 
“правда”), and is a distinction in the Russian language made use of by Bakhtin. Istina-truth refers to the 
universal, abstract, de-personalized, objective truth of how things really are, while pravda-truth is “more 
than rational, it is answerable [or responsible]. Rationality is but a moment of answerability [or 
responsibility]” (Bakhtin, 1993, p. 29).4 This istina-truth is rooted in Melinda’s justification for discussing 
bullying with the students below: 

Teacher Melinda: …[We teachers] try to get them [the students] to be beyond 
themselves in the moment. And we know it’s impossible to some degree, you know. 
It’s impossible to, the kids are going to be kids, and this is going to happen behind 
parents’ and behind adults’ backs. But I think it irks all of us here when you hear this 
“boys will be boys,” or bullying happens, and bullying does happen, but especially 
middle school is a real area where bullying can get tough. So, what as a community can 
we do to help bring the awareness – ’cause you can’t just say, “stop it!” Although we 
do. We say “no, you can’t do that!” I mean there is a bottom line, we won’t let you punch 
somebody in the face, and we’re not going to let you verbally abuse somebody. But, 
you know that “just say no” isn’t the answer… [Interview, Melinda, 2007-05-02] 

The teacher Melinda appears to argue above with the voice of students, parents, people in the 
community, or other educators that might reject the truth claim that “bullying” has much at all to do with the 
ontological problems faced by the students (this voice could be an imaginary interlocutor, and/or could also 
have been intended to address concerns that I had raised with Melinda in the interviews). The teacher 
Melinda responds to this voice by stating that the issue is not whether bullying is relevant or not to the 
students now or in the past, but whether bullying is likely and possible for the students to face in their lives. 
The teacher Melinda appears to argue that the severity of the possible “bullying” problems with which 
students could be faced with is one of the rationales for addressing the problem and not ignoring it.  

In an e-mail communication (2010-12-06), the teacher Melinda states that bullying discourse 
provides a “vocabulary” and “explicit strategies” which help students to identify and deal with bullying, which 
is presumably more effective than the students’ own way of responding to these problems. If students are 

 
4 See Sidorkin (2009, p. 150) and Smith & Matusov (2009) for further discussion. 



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left to their own to resolve their problems, their methods are “most often not productive.” Procedures which 
the students are expected to “practice” appear to lie “above” the students’ lived experience, and, again, do 
not address the specific, underlying relational issues and dynamics which result in interpersonal conflict. 
The specific recursive and immediate circumstances which lead to the situation appear not to matter, as 
much as the identification of bullying and the resolving of it. 

One anonymous reviewer of an earlier draft of this text submitted to this journal critiqued the 
argument presented here that the teachers’ moral universal discourse cannot be sensitive and responsive 
to the needs of the students, writing that: 

teachers have the right to recontextualize a lived story in more general terms, for the sake 
of [children] learning from the details. This is what mainstream families usually do in their literacy 
practices (cf. Heath, 1983)… 

The reviewer subsequently argued that the problem presented with the relevance of bullying to the 
students’ lives presented here is not with the relevance of abstract moral universals in themselves as 
applicable to education, but rather may be more an issue with the “weakness” or “underdeveloped analysis 
of bullying” present in Melinda’s instruction. As the reviewer argues: 

Bullying is more than agreeing on a definition, it is also [concerned with] the roles involved, 
the strategies each role should follow, i.e. avoiding self-victimization, promoting whistleblowing of 
bystanders, treating bullies as persons with “concrete needs” as well (cf. Benhabib, 1987)... This 
[would be] a more sophisticated general conversation of a theory of human violence which could be 
useful for the students as well useful to discuss in first-person [in response to] a concrete event (DPJ 
reviewer comments, June 2019).5 

In response to the reviewer, I assert that the broader concerns with bullying discussed by the 
reviewer – bystander whistleblowing, for example – appear also to be concerns of the teacher/adult which 
come from outside the children’s eventful discourse on their lived experience. It is reasonable to presume 
that these discourses would also lie in a “parallel discursive universe” to that of the children’s eventful 
discourse. I suspect to find in the efforts to address bullying presented by the reviewer a similar moral 
imperative to “feel good,” the discourse of “half-being,” sanitization of risk, and a discourse of ideality 
imposed over the events of children’s lived experience. For example, recent research has questioned the 
authoritativeness and analytic power of the bystander perspective of bullying in wrestling with the concrete 
realities of children’s social lives; researchers have noted that there are “several participant positions” within 
peer relations and thus a great difficulty in defining and abstracting “bystanders,” “bullies,” and “victims” 
within the relational field of the children (Schott & Søndergaard, 2014a, p. 8). This recent anti-bullying 
research has also questioned whether children’s peer relations can and should be decontextualized from 
the specifics of the situation in which they are grounded and whether bullying or other aspects of it should 
be discussed at all without specific reference to the “patterns of interaction” – and I would add the “being 
as event” discourse – in the lives of the children (Schott & Søndergaard, 2014a, p. 8).  

In the discussion which follows, I will summarize main arguments in this paper on moral universal 
discourse and its relevance to addressing the lived experience of children in schools. I will return to the 

 
5 The references presented in this set of the reviewer’s comments (Heath and Benhabib) were recommended by the reviewer, and I 
have taken the liberty of including the references in-line in the text for the sake of brevity. 



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ontological dialogic event perspective presented earlier in the text, and I will leave it to the reader to decide 
what position(s) they see as more ethically responsible in addressing children’s interpersonal conflicts. 

Discussion 
This research has explored the tensions between the abstract moral universal discourse of bullying 

and the ontological “being as event” discourse of students in an innovative school, which I have argued 
exist within parallel and disparate discursive universes. As discussed earlier, the unit of analysis of 
ontological event discourse is the specific case or event. Time in ontological event discourse is event-and-
deed based; Andrew is not the same person before Ben’s utterance as he is after it, Andrew’s responsibility 
for the events having been revealed as a dialogic “gift” from Ben (Matusov & Smith, 2009a). I have argued 
that ontological event discourse is not bereft of concepts. Rather, concepts can emerge as nodes which 
can reveal new connections between events and people’s responsibility to these events, offering new 
possibilities for the taking of responsibility and transforming existing relations (e.g., through nodes such as 
“girl drama” or “managing anger”). What is important to understand here, in comparison to anti-bullying 
discourse, is that there is not a pre-set application of a concept nor an endpoint toward which the dialogue 
is going. The nodes instead emerge within dialogue, transform existing networks of relations, and can 
become “penetrating words” which become difficult for involved participants to ignore (Bakhtin, 1999). For 
Andrew, the node of “anger” allowed him to take responsibility for the problem he posed in the Choices 
class even months later (the “torpedo touch” discussed earlier). In essence, concepts in ontological event 
discourse are objectivizations and finalizations of lived experience, but are partial and negotiable within 
dialogue.  

These discourses do not just exist purely in theoretical or philosophical realms, but also exist 
ontologically as “projects,” efforts or deeds to transform what is given in the world (Sartre, 1963). Unlike 
decision-making valued in total institutions like schools, where decisions are based on discrete, bounded, 
rational goals, participants engaged in ontological event discourse make many contextually based 
decisions and prioritizations (cf. people’s decisions about what to purchase in a supermarket, see Lave, 
1988, 1992). In this regard, the project of ontological event discourse is to trust in and have hope for 
transformation of ontological circumstances in a messy, imperfect world of responsibility with others. By 
contrast, the project of modernism – under which Kantian-like moral universal ideas like anti-bullying fall – 
focuses on the normative expectancies of who the person is becoming, promoting a “right path” upon which 
students are to follow, a fantastic future of a world sanitized from risk, “negative actions” and negative 
feelings (Olweus, 1993). This modernist discourse is characterized by its universality, predictability, 
rationality, and even irrelevance to lived events and contextual decisions.  

I have noted that the pedagogical discourse of abstract moral universals like bullying operates 
through translating students’ lived experience from beings fully responsible for themselves in the here-and-
now toward beings who are becoming fully responsible to themselves into “half-beings” (Sidorkin, 2002). 
As Sidorkin writes: 

Childhood is… an experience of becoming rather than that of being. We really come to 
existence through the experience of childhood, which is an experience of not quite being, of half-
existing, and of movement toward full-existence. Acquiring an identity of a child means understanding 
that you do not quite exist yet. It is an identity oriented toward the future, and therefore an identity 
that undervalues the present (Sidorkin, 2002, p. 42). 



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In turn, the messiness of students’ presently lived experience is ignored in favor of a “bird’s eye 
view” of where the students are imagined to be going. Abstract moral universal discourse like bullying treats 
students’ relational problems as predictable consequences of the students’ membership in a particular 
“imagined community” (Anderson, 1991). This community is an assumed normed group within the society, 
such as “teenagers” or “pre-teenagers,” who are expected to face certain problems in the immediate or 
distant future. These imagined groups exist outside of any intentions of their members, and outside of any 
lived events or experiences. What matters for the teachers about the students is what is typical and 
representative; the experience of “bullying” is thought to be part of the “representative body, not the 
personal life” (Anderson, 1991, p. 32). It is not seen to be part of the “specific” (and I would add eventful) 
relationships between individuals; such relationships become “not in the smallest degree problematic” 
(Anderson, 1991, p. 28). Any focus on relevance of the abstract moral universals of “bullying” and “feel 
good community” to the lives of students may not even matter so much for the teachers, since the teachers 
end up addressing the students’ imagined, normative, and expected problems through discussions of 
abstract universals, not through the discourse of lived reality.  

Since anti-bullying discourse translates students’ reality in terms of an imagined future and 
envisions that they are coming-to-be people different from who they are now, students are arguably less 
likely to question the relevance of bullying to their lives. Yet, at the same time, the authoritativeness of anti-
bullying discourse appears to be constrained to the classroom context, as students appear not to grant 
legitimacy to this discourse within the hallways of the school or on the picnic table next to the playground.  

The Bakhtinian “being as event” perspective I have focused upon here is indeed not alone in 
critiquing abstract moral universal discourse in educational contexts. Feminist scholars have critiqued such 
discourse for denying the existence of the “concrete other” and minimizing the role of non-rational decision-
making. For instance, Benhabib (1987) has argued that the dominant universal approaches to moral 
education – what she calls “substitutionalist” forms of moral universalism – presume only the existence of 
a rational, “generalized other” and concomitantly deny the existence of a concrete other whose specific 
“needs, talents, and capacities” are deserving of recognition and confirmation (Benhabib, 1987, p. 87). 
One’s responsibility to the other is said to emerge instead from accepting an “interactive” form of 
universalism which focuses on “right” moral action through the values of sympathetic acceptance, caring, 
and love of the other as a concrete person, developing social bonds with the other, sympathizing with the 
other’s needs and desires, and acting in solidarity with the other. This interactive universalism is argued to 
be a corrective to traditional moral universals. Benhabib thus claims, in contrast with what I argue here, that 
generalized moral universals are essential but not sufficient for right moral action.  

Benhabib argues that moral education should connect students with “the unthought, the unseen, 
and the unheard” (Benhabib, 1987, p. 92), essentially the “oppressed” or the “forgotten” others. Thus, she 
argues for an “interactive” form of moral universal discourse that sees “care” and “sympathy” for others’ 
needs as an unquestionable value that has value in all contexts and situations. Yet, as with any other type 
of moral universal discourse, the rightness and value of caring pre-exists any testing within internally 
persuasive discourse. The truth of caring is thus not dialogic; it attempts to influence students through 
suppression of dissenting voices, violence, and manipulation. Through the lens of any moral universal, 
students are seen as immature “half-beings” whose ways of thinking about the world and others presumably 
do not fully account for the lived experience of the other. The moral universal discourse grants justification 
for teachers to unilaterally “correct” the students’ way of thinking and their presumably uncaring or 
inharmonious peer relations. Unilateralism can thus be justified on a social justice basis in order to elevate 
the voices of those on the margins (cf. Matusov & Smith, 2009a, 2009b).  



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It is interesting to point out that “interactive universalism” and a regime of caring, like 
substitutionalist universalism, supplants students’ responsive and responsible discourse on specific events 
in the lived experience of themselves and their peers toward what is considered to be “right.” It can also 
lead to an even more unilaterally imposed world of “feel-good community” comfort and sanitization of 
children’s lives than what was noted at CLC; a student negating the idea that she or he is a “bystander” of 
“bullying,” for instance, may need to confront the idea that she or he is not “caring” enough about the other 
and denying the other’s existence as a “concrete” person. If a student attempted to acknowledge everyone’s 
responsibility to each other in dialogue and to ongoing “events of being,” this protest could be summatively 
ignored on account of the universal need to understand and account for the lived experience of the 
“unheard” or oppressed other. In reflecting on Benhabib’s position it seems important to ask: who accounts 
for what is “unheard” and who is “unseen” or “unthought” about? Is resistance against “caring” possible or 
desirable? Are social bonds and solidarity negotiable or not, and why? Does caring as a moral universal 
patronize those who need “care” compared with those who do not? What alternative discourses may exist 
to “caring” and how is suppression of these discourses justified?  

Thus, although Benhabib offers moral education a warning to be concerned with the needs and 
experiences of the concrete other, I differ with her in my call for critical ontological engagement of students 
in dialogue with the views and perspective of their peers in regard to ongoing “events of being,” where a 
value is placed on critically testing one’s own and others’ dearly held ideas and values in response to the 
sometimes inconvenient or challenging ideas and views of the other. Bakhtin calls for responsibility to the 
other within dialogue rather than solidarity/singularity of purpose through shared universal values of social 
justice. I argue that the ontological dialogic ethics of Bakhtin radically denies the validity of the application 
of moral universals to human relations, including those of “caring.” Within dialogue on the “events of being” 
of students’ lives, it is not possible to finalize the other or oneself; all actions and ideas are responsible to 
ongoing discourse. Through dialogue, participants engage in a testing of their responsibility to each other 
without an endpoint. Through such dialogue, there is a possibility for interlocutors to transcend their 
ontological circumstances with one another.  

The Bakhtinian “being-as-event” ethical position also considers that moral universals applied to 
human interaction violate the principle of “reflexivity” in human interaction (Soros, 1995). Reality, Soros 
argues, is transformed by people’s decisions, by their participation in the world. A discursive statement 
about an object does not change an object, but a discursive statement about a person can change the 
person. As Soros writes, “a reflexive interaction can change both the participants’ thinking and the actual 
state of affairs, [and thus modernist] timeless generalizations cannot be tested,” at least with people (Soros 
et al., 1995, p. 216). This may be a good explanation for why, as has been noted in this paper, the discourse 
of moral universals and bullying feel forced and alien when applied to the events of being of the students’ 
lives. This may also explain the findings here that students can easily become inarticulate, at least outside 
of the purview of the teacher or the official discourse of the school setting, when they attempt to persuade 
their peers that they themselves (or someone else) is being “bullied.”  

Anti-bullying discourse thus appears better suited to focus upon typologizing and defining student 
interaction (or typologizing and defining political oppressions) than it does in making judgements and 
reflecting upon everyone’s responsibility within ongoing events. This discourse of anti-bullying and 
systematized “interactive” universals of caring are wider projects of social engineering designed to reduce 
or eliminate the unauthorized assertion of asymmetrical power among students. Through being objectivized 
and finalized as “bullies” or “bystanders,” children become subjects of the teacher efforts at engineering 
their social relations to help them “become” more inclusive, caring, and empathetic that what they “naturally” 
are. This is arguably the “espoused” theory of anti-bullying and caring (Schön, 1983). However, there 



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appears to also be a “theory-in-use” of anti-bullying (Schön, 1983). In practice, anti-bullying discourse is 
employed to ensure that the teachers and the school are not liable for any emotional harm or trauma brought 
upon students by their peers in the school. Teachers can point to discussions of abstract moral universals 
as evidence that efforts were made in the curriculum to address students’ interpersonal problems, all the 
while sanitizing the students’ being-as-event discourse, removing the impurities of social exclusion and 
negative emotions like anger, hatred, and so on. The discourses of the “feel good community” and anti-
bullying are thus ontologically important for the teachers in that it can, for instance, make the school feel 
more inviting to parents (who in the case of CLC are paying tuition).  

However, I am concerned that the ontological event discourse of the students is suppressed and 
left unguided by anti-bullying (and perhaps by interactive forms of universalism as well), rather than 
transformed and supplanted (as is the espoused hope of such discourse). In turn, possible discord and 
interpersonal problems may be left unresolved and unguided under the surface. A similar dynamic is found 
in the modernist efforts at classification in the medical field, in which “one may get ever more precise 
knowledge, without having to resolve deeper questions, and indeed, by burying those questions” (Bowker 
& Star, 1999, p. 24). As Bowker & Star make apparent in the medical field, the discourse of classification is 
also intertwined with efforts to reduce alternatives in order to limit perceived harm to others (Bowker & Star, 
1999, p. 25).  

As discussed earlier, anti-bullying derives its truth from its status as an Aristotelian episteme, which 
“concerns universals and the production of knowledge which [are] invariable in time and space, and which 
[are] achieved with the aid of analytical rationality” (Flyvbjerg, 2001, pp. 55-56). It is reasonable to expect 
that one could employ epistemic thinking – promoting invariant, universal knowledge – without being 
excessively certain about the truth of that episteme, but this pattern was not observed in the data here. 
Instead, at least at CLC and in the review of the anti-bullying literature presented at the beginning of this 
study, modernist, moral universal discourse too readily assumes it has a perfect answer to resolve social 
conflict, the last word on interpretation, an unquestioned right to the truth. It is then employed to establish 
a fantastic vision of social relations onto the students’ lives.  

By contrast, ontological event discourse expects imperfect and always testable responses to 
conflict, prioritizing continued dialogue over “solutions” to those conflicts. The truth of ontological event 
discourse is best characterized by phronesis, loosely translatable as prudence, or the pragmatic wisdom 
which emerges within participation in events (Flyvbjerg, 2001). In ontological event discourse, participants 
hope and trust that through dialogue they will be able to transcend any “ontological traps” in which they are 
caught (as was seen in the example of Andrew’s anger and the other students’ response to it, and Andrew’s 
and others’ response to the responses). Teachers who engage in ontological event discourse with their 
students relax or give up pre-set curricular endpoints, and attempt to become, along with the students, 
learners of the lived experience of their students and the way students frame their understandings of the 
issues and concerns in their own lived experience. From the ontological event perspective, teachers cannot 
teach if they are not open to learning about what they are teaching with the students.  

The ontological event perspective also further opens up the truth of the concept of moral universals 
like bullying, for bullying cannot be “true” outside of the response of participants (teachers and students) to 
it within ongoing dialogue. The internal persuasiveness of anti-bullying should thus not be taken for granted, 
and the notion of bullying may or may not have currency within the discourse of the students’ interpersonal 
experience. In an ontological event-driven perspective on interpersonal conflict, educators trust that 
dialogue would uncover what is “true” and persuasive for the students’ lived reality.  



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It could be argued, however, that bullying discourse and other moral universal discourses are 
necessary to “mediate” the “contact” between students giving them “sufficient psychological distance and 
feelings of control to promote true empathy and perspective-taking” (Mar & Oatley, 2008, p. 181). From this 
perspective, ontological event discourse is a form of “direct contact” which “may be experienced as too 
threatening or otherwise emotionally arousing for a great deal of empathy or even sympathy to take place” 
(Mar & Oatley, 2008, p. 181). Indeed, the process of engaging in ontological dialogue regarding 
interpersonal issues can lead to personal discomfort, and to potential social conflict. It may sometimes lead 
to students feeling that they may be coerced to speak and to “confess” to others (Lefstein, Pollak, & Segal, 
2018). Such concerns with direct ontological event discourse being too threatening or arousing, however, 
appear not to be borne by the data presented here, as Ben clearly was empathetic and concerned for 
Andrew’s emotional needs, while at the same time sensitively working – through the node of “anger” – to 
find a way out of the ontological trap in which all were caught. Additional research is needed on the 
perceived threat (for students and teachers) of “dialogic finalizations” and the “torpedo touch” phenomenon 
which was noted in Ben’s dialogue with Andrew. There appears to be a need for policies for ontological 
event dialogue which give students the right to pass or remain silent when discussing certain interpersonal 
issues (Lefstein et al., 2018).  

It could be that one of the challenges to the realization of ontological event discourse in education 
is simply that it is less familiar, as most of us in our schooling have experienced only more traditional forms 
of instruction that do not invite student agency in developing the curriculum. In turn, the notion that 
curriculum could emerge through messy dialogue without an endpoint may not be valued or promoted as 
readily (Rogoff et al., 2001). 

Table 1 summarizes the key comparisons between moral universal and ontological event 
discourses discussed in this analysis: 

Table 1: Characteristics of the anti-bullying discourse and ontological event discourse universes 
Characteristics 
of discourse 

Anti-bullying; Kantian moral 
discourse universe 

Ontological event discourse universe 

Participants’ unit 
of analysis  

Purified, universal concept Specific or recursive case or event 

Notion of truth Episteme: truth as universal, 
analytical, invariant across all 
contexts; truth is pre-defined 

Phronesis: wisdom in practice of events, 
pragmatic, context-dependent; 
participants search for truth in discourse 

Mediation Purified concept: Case/event 
becomes a trigger (“opportunity”) for 
discussion of purified concept 

Concept as nodes: Concepts as nodes 
of similar events and counter-events 
used to analyze responsibility, make 
judgements of events 

Addressivity Being above others: Employing the 
universally right procedure; taking a 
bird’s eye view over events; use of 
authoritative discourse which 
objectifies, pre-exists and transcends 
ontological events 

Being-with others: Analysis of my-you-
our-their responsibility (dialogic 
addressivity); internally persuasive 
discourse (Bakhtin, 1991); participants 
with equal rights 

Emotion Detached, no risk taking, suppress 
drama, concern with “feel good” 
comfort, civility 

“Torpedo touch” and catharsis (e.g., pain 
of Andrew, sympathy of Ben) 



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Time Imagined, universal future, focus on 
normative expectancies of the future; 
predictable; students as “half-beings,” 
rather than fully responsible for 
themselves, others (Sidorkin, 2002) 

Event-and-deed based (e.g., Andrew 
before Ben and after Ben) 

Concept of the 
person 

Excessively finalized and objectivized 
(Matusov & Smith, 2007) 

Inconsistent, unpredictable, participant in 
ongoing events; “spirit” (Bakhtin et al., 
1990) 

Vision Totalitarian, sanitized perfect future 
world (e.g., free from social exclusion) 

How to become better in an imperfect, 
messy world of responsibility 

 

Final questions for consideration 
I leave the reader with suggestions for research and questions for consideration. It seems that one 

of the biggest appeals of bullying for teachers lies in a fear of intimacy (of “getting too close”) in dealing with 
children’s conflicts. How justifiable are teachers’ concerns and prioritizations with students’ comfort in 
addressing interpersonal problems? What degree of embarrassment and discomfort for students may be 
acceptable to educators, and what are the limits of discomfort for most teachers, for most students, and for 
most parents? Is some degree of “indecision” necessary for sensitively guiding students’ interpersonal 
relations? What might the prioritization on students’ comfort say about particular cultural and educational 
priorities? Is prevention of social exclusion a desirable end for students, or is a certain degree of exclusivity 
in relations (i.e., friendships, etc.) not only expected, but also desired by some students (Matusov & Smith, 
2009a, 2009b)?  

Finally, are there situations where the modernist, abstract moral universal discourse of bullying, 
“feel good” comfort, and “interactive” caring are more or less advisable or authoritative to students? What 
are those situations? It is possible that bullying discourse is more authoritative under more traumatic or 
extreme examples of “weaponized shame” that I did not investigate here, such as extreme taunting, 
intensive cyber harassment, homophobic intolerance, intolerance toward transgender people, domestic 
violence, sexual abuse, or racial harassment (Fast, 2016, p. 7). This would need to be further investigated. 
It is hoped that this study will spark further study of educational practices which value and promote dialogue 
as an end in itself to investigate and understand everyone’s responsibility for interpersonal problems of 
concern to students. 

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