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Dialogic Pedagogy: An International Online Journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu 
DOI: 10.5195/dpj.2023.544  |  Vol. 11 No. 3 (2023) A42 

  

 
 
Questioning in Bakhtinian dialogic pedagogy and 
argumentation theory 

 
 
Kiyotaka Miyazaki 
Waseda University, Japan 

Abstract 
This paper examines differences between Bakhtin’s dialogic view and argumentation theories with respect to 
questioning and analyzes the significance of these differences for the theories of pedagogy. In argumentation theories, 
a question is thought to be shared among the parties in a discussion. In the fields of argumentation and education, in 
particular science education, not only is a question shared, but also an answer is integrated into one among the 
participants (Schwarz and Baker 2017). Bakhtin’s view on questioning, advanced in his later writings, shows how new 
questions emerge continuously in answers to the previous questions so that a question is not shared by a questioner 
and an answerer. Using the Bakhtinian framework in the analysis of some Japanese pedagogical thoughts and 
classroom interactions, it is shown that each student can develop her/his own unique understanding of the topic – not 
the shared, integrated understanding – by finding out a new question in seemingly wrong answers, or by discovering 
different questions in the same problem. Finally, the reason why new questions emerge in question-and-answer 
exchange is investigated within a constructivist perspective from cognitive science. 

Keywords: dialogue, questioning, Bakhtin, deliberative argumentation, outsideness, personal history of understanding 
 

Kiyotaka Miyazaki is a professor emeritus at the Faculty of Human Sciences, Waseda University, Japan. 
His research interest is examining the views of Japanese elementary and early childhood education 
teachers’ knowledge of practice and making them encounter Bakhtin’s view on dialogism to discover some 
universal principles of dialogic education. 

ÏÏÒ 

Introduction 
This paper proposes an important difference between dialogue and argumentation that has been 

overlooked so far and examines its significance for pedagogy. We should first draw a clear difference 
between dialogue and argumentation and then explore how this distinction can be bridged. 

Some researchers (Schwarz & Baker, 2017) argue that a conversation is dialogic when it is 
performed with interpersonal care and mutual respect. Furthermore, such an inquiry becomes intellectual 
when it follows the rules of argumentation. For those researchers, the dialogue itself is not an intellectual 
inquiry but only refers to social regulation between the participants of the inquiring conversation for them. 
In opposition to these views, this paper proposes that dialogue is itself an intellectual and critical inquiry, 
although it is distinct from argumentation, and the difference between the two comes from their orientation 
toward questioning. In argumentation theory, the participants in an argumentative discussion share the 

ISSN: 2325-3290 (online)  



Questioning in Bakhtinian dialogic pedagogy and argumentation theory  
Kiyotaka Miyazaki 

 
 

Dialogic Pedagogy: An International Online Journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu 
DOI: 10.5195/dpj.2023.544  |  Vol. 11 No. 3 (2023) 
 

A43 

same question. On the contrary, in dialogue, new questions continuously emerge in the exchange of 
questions and answers, and a focus on newly emerging questions makes a dialogic inquiry rich and fruitful. 

The problem of questioning is central to Japanese pedagogies where the term Hatsumon, or asking 
a question, has been and is popularly used as one of the teacher’s important teaching acts (Toyoda, 2007). 
Here the term “question” means the problem or issue in the learning material which the teacher presents 
to students to make them explore/discuss/think in the lesson. This act often appears as an I-term of the 
IRE/IRF sequence. The presentation of the problem or the issue in asking questions does not necessarily 
take an interrogative form. Making a claim can be the presentation of the problem or the issue. In this case, 
making an affirmative claim, “It is an A”, is equivalent to asking a question about whether “it is an A or a 
non-A.” This paper uses the term “question” as the problem or the issue in the learning material and the 
term “questioning” as the generation and presentation of the problem or the issue in the learning material. 
In difference to the case of Hatsumon, however, this paper supposes that questioning is not entirely an 
activity of teachers but also an activity of students. Students generate and present the problem or the issue 
in the learning material, sometimes intentionally but other times unintentionally or rather unconsciously. 

Theories of argumentation insist that participants in a discussion share the same question. For 
example, van Eemeren et al. (2014) hold that participants have common starting points at the opening 
stage of a critical discussion (van Eemeren et al., 2014, p. 529). This view is followed by pedagogical 
approaches based on argumentation theory. In science education, in particular, participants are not only 
assumed to share the same question but also expected to arrive at the single same answer at the end of 
the argumentative discussion. For example, Schwarz and Baker (2017) insisted that argumentation in the 
lesson has a dialogical and, at the same time, a dialectical aspect and the argumentation converges into 
one final answer because of its dialectical nature. The epistemological function of the argumentation 
depends on its dialectical nature, and the dialogical aspect works only on the interpersonal horizon, like 
having the respect to other participants. 

My view of dialogue is based on Bakhtin’s views of questioning in his later writings (Bakhtin, 1986, 
p. 168) as well as on the pedagogical thinking of certain teachers in Japan. For Bakhtin, the answer to a 
question always produces a new question. This would include even wrong answers to a question. When 
the participants in a dialogue do not adhere to the original question but identify a newly emerging question 
in a wrong answer and pursue it, a new inquiry can begin, in which each participant can develop her/his 
own unique understanding. 

The difference between the dialogical view of questioning and the argumentation theory is that, in 
Bakhtin’s view, the question is not shared by the participants. Although this characteristic seems to produce 
confusion in dialogue, it actually advances dialogue. As Bakhtin wrote, a new question is always emerging 
in a dialogue (Bakhtin, 1986, p. 168). In Bakhtinian dialogues, the dialogue works not only on the 
interpersonal horizon, for example, respecting others, but also has the epistemological function of 
understanding the world. In a dialogic class, each student can develop his or her own understanding by 
becoming aware that she/he does not share the same question with the others. Thus, students can discover 
the questions newly emerged in them by, for example, interpreting the teacher’s question and exploring it. 
Each one’s answer different from others can be explored as the true answer to each one’s unique question 
and does not finally converge into one unified answer – which normally happens in a dialectical process. 
The dialectical process of convergence into one unified answer sometimes occurs in any class. What is 
important, though, is for participants to become aware of, objectify, and develop each one’s unique 
questions. 



Questioning in Bakhtinian dialogic pedagogy and argumentation theory  
Kiyotaka Miyazaki 

 
 

Dialogic Pedagogy: An International Online Journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu 
DOI: 10.5195/dpj.2023.544  |  Vol. 11 No. 3 (2023) 
 

A44 

The dialogic type of students’ understanding has been truly realized in the class lessons of some 
Japanese teachers. These teachers listen to students’ answers and identify their unique questions or 
encourage students to formulate their unique questions for the given problems. These experiences make 
it possible for the students to develop their own, unique understanding. These, dialogic teachers have 
developed their pedagogical views by accumulating and reflecting on their practices. While they are not 
influenced by Bakhtin or any other dialogic thinkers, their views approach Bakhtin’s view, in particular with 
respect to their views regarding questioning. 

This paper describes the Bakhtinian view of dialogue and dialogic pedagogy by problematizing the 
characteristics of questioning in Bakhtin and Bakhtinian dialogic pedagogy to compare them with theories 
of argumentation and the pedagogy based on them. In what sense and how do the participants of a dialogue 
develop their own unique understanding by realizing the new question that they have developed during the 
exchange of question and answer? What characteristics of human understanding allow new questions to 
be developed in question-and-answer exchanges?  

In the following section, the most relevant argumentation theories are analyzed to show that they 
all maintain that participants are supposed to share one question during their discussion. Then, Schwarz 
and Baker’s (2017) view on pedagogy based on deliberative argumentation is discussed, in particular in 
the field of science education. Next, Bakhtin’s view of questioning is examined, considering three specific 
aspects: first, new questions emerge continuously in an exchange of questions and answers; second, the 
process in which such a new question does not emerge is monologic; third, new questions emerge due to 
the mutual outsideness of the questioner and the answerer. Then, the dialogic pedagogical views – 
specifically on the topic of questioning – of some Japanese teachers are introduced. Then, the processes 
of students’ understanding within science education are examined from a dialogic perspective. The 
scientific context is particularly relevant because, in science, it is generally considered that only one correct 
answer corresponds to a given question, making it an appropriate field for testing the idea that new 
questions develop from wrong answers, making such answers in a way correct with respect to the newly 
emerged questions. Finally, we return to the problem of why new questions emerge continuously in a 
question-and-answer exchange and examine this issue from a constructivist perspective. It is argued that 
the mutual outsideness of the questioner and the answerer is a result of each person’s unique history of 
understanding acquired from experience, which leads to unique questions and unique understanding 
resulting from such questions for each person. 

Argumentation theories and the dialogic pedagogical thoughts based on them 
Questioning in theories of argumentation 

According to some researchers (van Eemeren et al., 2014; Schwarz & Baker, 2017), the theories 
of argumentation can be classified into two types: monological and dialogical. Toulmin (1958) and Perelman 
(1977) provide monologic theories, while van Eemeren and colleagues (van Eemeren et al., 2014; van 
Eemeren & Snoeck Henkemans, 2017) and Walton (2000, 2006) propose dialogic theories. This 
terminological distinction is not Bakhtinian but only indicates whether a theory supposes only one 
(monological) or multiple (dialogical) participants in the argumentation. For example, Schwarz and Baker 
(2017, p. 66) claimed that Toulmin diagrams are “produced by a single person rather than of interactive 
dialogue between different people.” Walton clearly stated that “a dialogue is a type of goal-directed 
conversation in which two participants (in the minimal case) are participating by taking turns” (Walton, 2006, 
p. 2). Between the two schools, questioning is an explicit focus of the latter, for example, Plantin (2005). 
According to Schwarz and Baker, Plantin asserted that argumentation dialogue is a confrontation of 
discourses, from which a question to be debated emerges. The discourse and counter-discourse are 
justifications for the answers, either ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ (Schwarz & Baker, 2017, p. 98). 



Questioning in Bakhtinian dialogic pedagogy and argumentation theory  
Kiyotaka Miyazaki 

 
 

Dialogic Pedagogy: An International Online Journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu 
DOI: 10.5195/dpj.2023.544  |  Vol. 11 No. 3 (2023) 
 

A45 

Questioning is also a central concept in Walton’s theory (2006), even though his definition of the 
term is different and narrower than the one defended in this paper, which instead would correspond to 
Walton’s issue. For Walton, the issue is one of the five main characteristics of the dialogue and is defined 
as a “governing question” about what should be done (Walton, 2006, p.188). The issue is made up of two 
statements, called the theses, whose truth (or rather acceptability) is unsettled (Walton, 2006, p.3). Plantin 
(2005) asserted, as shown above, that a question emerges from the confrontation of discourse and counter-
discourse. It shows that Walton’s term “issue” corresponds to Plantin’s “governing question”, and this 
paper’s term “question.” For Walton, questioning is one of the moves to set and develop the issue, along 
with asserting a proposition in which something is asserted positively or negatively to set the issue. Different 
from asserting a proposition, questioning sets the issue by raising “doubts about argument but not going so 
far as to rebut it by putting forward a counter-argument” (Walton, 2006, p. 17). 

Walton’s characterization of questioning is suggestive of grasping the important characteristic of 
questioning in this paper’s sense. Walton asserted that questions have presuppositions, and such 
presuppositions should be shared by the questioner and the answerer. If we ask, “when will Mr. Yamada 
leave Tokyo?” we presuppose that Mr. Yamada will leave Tokyo, and this presupposition is shared by both 
the questioner and the answerer. When the answerer responds, “this afternoon,” s/he admits the 
presupposition. Walton’s definition of a presupposition is “a proposition that a respondent becomes 
committed to in the dialogue in virtue of giving any direct answer to the question” (Walton, 2006, p. 211). 
Thus, a presupposition determines the meaning of a question. Sharing a presupposition indicates that 
participants share the question. Walton thought that the participants can commit to a fair argument to reach 
a collaborative conclusion by virtue of sharing a question. The concept of a presupposition is important for 
discovering illegal acts in an argument, such as posing a loaded question, namely a question that contains 
a presupposition not shared by the answerer. That is, a fair argument is possible only when the participants 
share and acknowledge presuppositions. 

Walton’s statement that participants need to share the meaning of question is applicable to both 
his concept of an “issue” and our notion of “questioning.” Other dialogic argumentation theorists adopt the 
assumption that a question should be shared by the participants in an argument, even though the term 
question is not explicitly used. For example, van Eemeren et al. (2014) consider that an argumentation 
moves in stages: “a difference of opinion manifests itself through an opposition between one or more 
standpoints” (van Eemeren et al., 2014, p. 529), at the confrontation stage, and then “the division of the 
discussion roles of protagonist and antagonist is agreed upon” (van Eemeren et al., 2014, p. 529) at the 
opening stage. The opposing standpoints indicate the possible answers to one question, which shows that 
setting and sharing a single question is naturally assumed in this process. Moreover, the rules of a critical 
discussion proposed by van Eemeren and Snoeck Henkemans (2017) state that participants should accept 
a given presumption as the starting point of an argument. This can be taken to indicate the necessity of 
sharing a question. 

It should be added that the questioning’s characteristic of being shared by the participants does 
not imply that the question does not change in the flow of argumentation. It can, but it should be shared by 
the participants in each moment of the argumentation flow. 

Dialogic pedagogy influenced by argumentation theories 

Even though many types of research in dialogic pedagogy are based on argumentation theories 
(Asterhan, et al., 2020; Boyd, 2016; Chin & Osborne, 2008; Duschl & Osborne, 2002; Felton & Crowell, 
2022; Haneda, et al., 2017; Howe, et al., 2019; Omland, et al., 2022; Rapanta & Felton, 2021; Resnick, 
Michaels, & O’Connor, 2010), this study focuses on Andriessen, Baker, and Schwarz’s view (Andriessen & 



Questioning in Bakhtinian dialogic pedagogy and argumentation theory  
Kiyotaka Miyazaki 

 
 

Dialogic Pedagogy: An International Online Journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu 
DOI: 10.5195/dpj.2023.544  |  Vol. 11 No. 3 (2023) 
 

A46 

Baker, 2006; Baker, Andriessen, & Schwarz, 2019), and in particular on Schwarz and Baker (2017), in 
which the relation between dialogic pedagogy and argumentation theory was very clearly developed. 

Schwarz and Baker are developing a learning theory based on van Eemeren et al. (2014)’s 
approach to argumentation. On this view, a type of discourse “in which differences of perspective are 
handled critically and at the same time collaboratively” (Schwarz & Baker, 2017, p. 20) – named deliberative 
argumentation - is claimed to be desirable for use in education. According to Schwarz and Baker, the theory 
of the processes by which students learn by engaging in argumentative dialogue does not exist yet and it 
is necessary to integrate theories of learning, communicative interactions, and argumentation to build the 
foundation for it (Schwarz & Baker, 2017, p. 18). 

Let us see their view more closely, considering first their perspective on questioning based on 
argumentation theories, particularly of Plantin (2005), as noted above (Schwarz & Baker, 2017, Chapter 3). 
For them, questioning is located at the center of argumentation, as arguments emerge when questioning 
produces a diversity of answers (Schwarz & Baker, 2017, p. 79). They do not refer explicitly to the basic 
characteristic of questioning in argumentation theories that I pointed out above, namely, the participants’ 
sharing of the question. It seems that this is taken for granted by them, especially considering the fact that 
van Eemeren et al. (2014) is one of their theoretical bases. 

One important point made by them on questioning is that questions can evolve into more theoretical 
or conceptual issues in the flow of argumentation, and this characteristic is of great importance for education 
(Schwarz & Baker, 2017, p. 81). As noted above, the participants’ sharing of a question and the 
development of questions in the flow of argumentation are independent issues. As far as I understand, their 
assertion means that participants always share a question which is changing in the flow of argumentation. 
It does not assert that the shared question becomes not shared in the process.  

There seems to be one more important feature on questioning in their view in addition to the sharing 
of a question. They seem to think that, in science education in particular, participants’ answers to the shared 
question are finally integrated into one. From the perspective of this paper, this idea is quite different from 
Bakhtin’s view on questioning. To clarify this issue, it is necessary to know the basic framework of their 
notion of deliberative argumentation. As already seen above, differences of perspective are handled 
critically and at the same time collaboratively in deliberative argumentation. That is, there are two aspects 
- the critical and the collaborative one - in this argumentation. These two aspects can be replaced by two 
terms: dialectical and dialogical, respectively. Schwarz and Baker thought that Alexander’s (2005) view of 
dialogic teaching is not enough, and that there must be not only the dialogic aspect but also the dialectical 
aspect which should be integrated with the former. Here, “dialectic” means an exchange between people 
to handle disagreement, and “dialogic” means multi-voicedness in language production (Schwarz & Baker, 
2017, p. 103). As Schwarz and Baker referred to the Bakhtinian concept of multi-voicedness (Bakhtin, 
1984), their characterization of “dialogic” is not the same as the one used in argumentation theories – in 
which it means the conversation of two participants - but it is more Bakhtinian. However, it is necessary to 
investigate more to know in what sense their concept of dialogic is Bakhtinian, and also the meaning of 
their concept of dialectic. 

Schwarz and Baker’s view can be observed most clearly in the discussion of the role of 
argumentation in the field of science education. These authors mention a critical discussion as the 
argumentative practice that can be used in the field of science education, which echoes van Eemeren’s 
pragma-dialectical model of argumentation (van Eemeren et al., 2014). In this view, there is no room for 
pluralism in science, as “arguments naturally lead to the public selection of strong arguments and the 
disqualification of weaker ones” (Schwarz & Baker, 2017, p. 116). Put simply, there is a single truth in 



Questioning in Bakhtinian dialogic pedagogy and argumentation theory  
Kiyotaka Miyazaki 

 
 

Dialogic Pedagogy: An International Online Journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu 
DOI: 10.5195/dpj.2023.544  |  Vol. 11 No. 3 (2023) 
 

A47 

science, and propositions outside it are considered to be in error. Thus, in the scientific argument, scientific 
truth should be supported and actually supported by the majority, and other thoughts are judged to be errors 
and belong to a marginalized minority. As a consequence, the minority who answered erroneously gets 
pressured and avoids participating in scientific discourse. The “only reasonable way” (Schwarz & Baker, 
2017, p. 116) to solve this situation is to add in a dialogic approach by “instilling dialogical norms through 
practices such as listening to each other’s contributions, respecting each idea put forward” (Schwarz & 
Baker, 2017, p. 116) and so on. 

In their view, arguing whether some assertion is reasonable, scientifically significant, or not, that is, 
exploring the understanding of the objects, belongs exclusively to the dialectical aspect of argumentation. 
The dialogic aspect of argumentation is to take an attitude of respect, consisting in avoiding situations in 
which interlocutors choosing erroneous, minority views drop out of the argument. Having respect for the 
wrong views of a minority does not imply finding out, through collaborative reasoning, potential correctness 
in the minority’s seemingly wrong views. Respecting others is only an interpersonal deed and not an 
epistemological deed of understanding the world. 

This characteristic is clearly shown in a study presented as an example (Berland & Lee, 2012) 
centering on a science lesson for fifth and sixth graders. In this lesson, children were asked to discuss what 
an animal that invaded a hypothetical ecological system would eat, using a simple computer simulation. In 
this study, the students who had wrong ideas felt more listened to by other students and were more 
comfortable in changing their positions when their ideas were legitimized by other students. Note that 
“legitimization” only means making a concession. For example, students with the correct view might say to 
those with incorrect ones that their idea might be partially right. The authors explained making a concession 
as saving face (Goffman, 1974) of the students with the wrong views. The students with the correct view 
here did not identify the actual correct aspects of the incorrect views of the other students. A concession is 
simply an aspect of regulating the interpersonal relationship. 

Schwarz and Baker (2017) considered dialogicality in deliberative argumentation detached from its 
epistemological function. The intellectual pursuit of the truth is given in the enacting of the dialectical aspect. 
They referred to the concept of multi-voicedness as noted above, but it only means for them to respect 
others in the interpersonal horizon. This view on dialogue is quite different from Bakhtin’s views.  

The central idea of Bakhtin’s dialogue is that the participants have equal rights vis-à-vis the truth of 
the topic (Bakhtin, 1984). This idea is the core of the concept of multi-voicedness of Bakhtin. This statement 
does not refer to saving face but to the epistemological right of the participants to understand the world. 

It might be said that in the characterization of dialogue, at least in the field of science education, 
Schwarz and Baker are correct, and Bakhtin is not. As Schwarz and Baker argued, there is no room for 
pluralism in science, such that, in science education, students’ answers must ultimately be brought to 
exemplify a single correct answer, the one provided by science. On this view, Bakhtin’s dialogic thought, 
according to which each participant has an equal right vis-à-vis the truth, would not be tenable. However, 
behind this view lurks a fundamental understanding of questioning, namely, that a given question is or 
should be shared by all participants in a dialogue. Moreover, in science education, it is also thought that 
only one correct scientific answer to a shared question can exist. It is needless to add that this view does 
not mean that the argument goes straight from one shared question to one final answer. There will emerge 
many different views, sometimes funny and/or wrong, in the process of argumentation. However, 
argumentation in science education is thought to converge finally and be integrated into one view, which 
corresponds to the one that is – if not absolutely correct – at least the one that mirrors the temporary 
scientific majority view. 



Questioning in Bakhtinian dialogic pedagogy and argumentation theory  
Kiyotaka Miyazaki 

 
 

Dialogic Pedagogy: An International Online Journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu 
DOI: 10.5195/dpj.2023.544  |  Vol. 11 No. 3 (2023) 
 

A48 

However, as described above, Bakhtin’s view of questioning is different from the common view. 
This makes it possible to apply his view on dialogue even to science education. In this view, a question is 
not shared by a questioner and an answerer: new questions continually emerge in the exchange of the 
questions and answers, and multiple correct answers can exist, whose “correctness” depends on the 
questions that emerge. In science education as well, students produce new questions that are unique to 
each participant and whose answer may be correct, even if it is not identical to the one provided by 
institutional science. In the next section, my interpretation of Bakhtin’s views on the questioning is 
presented. 

Bakhtin’s view on questioning 
What does it mean that question and answer are not logical relations? 

To the best of my knowledge, Bakhtin explicitly discussed questioning in only two places. One 
place appears in Toward a Methodology of Human Sciences (Bakhtin, 1986). Though this document is a 
very short one, I believe that it has great significance for his thinking on dialogue. 

Question and answer are not logical relations (categories); they cannot be placed in one consciousness 
(unified and closed in itself); any response gives rise to a new question. Question and answer presuppose mutual 
outsideness. If an answer does not give rise to a new question from itself, it falls out of the dialogue and enters 
systemic cognition, which is essentially impersonal.  

The various chronotopes of the questioner and the answerer, and various semantic worlds (I and other). 
From the standpoint of a third consciousness and its “neutral” world, where everything is replaceable, question 
and answer are inevitably depersonified (Bakhtin 1986, p. 168). 

What does it mean to say that “question and answer are not logical relations?” When an answer 
connects logically to a question, whether the answer to the question is correct or not is determined logically. 
When there are no logical relations, in contrast, the answer will deviate from what the question logically 
requires. Thus, the answer can no longer be classified as correct or wrong. 

How do non-logical relations between the question and the answer occur? Before approaching this 
issue, let us look more closely at the case when the question and the answer do bear a logical relation. 
Here, whether the answer is correct is determined unequivocally, including in cases where there is no 
correct answer, or there are multiple answers. The question finishes when the answer is determined. The 
questioner and the answerer become one “closed consciousness,” in the sense that they share a 
presupposition regarding what is the correct answer. In other words, they are in the same systemic 
cognition. For Bakhtin, this means that they are in a monologic relation. In this way, the question and the 
answer form part of a single, unified consciousness, and each person’s uniqueness can only exist in the 
form of an error. On this point, Bakhtin (1984) wrote, “Idealism recognizes only one principle of cognitive 
individualization: error. True judgments are not attached to a personality, but correspond to some unified, 
systemically monologic context. Only error individualizes” (p. 81). 

Idealism is the most typical case of monologism for Bakhtin (1984): “ideological monologism found 
its clearest and theoretically most precise expression in idealistic philosophy” (p. 80). In monologism, true 
judgment, or the correct answer, belongs to one unified consciousness, regardless of whether the answer 
is given by an individual or is the product of a group discussion. Here, the question is not explicitly stated, 
but it must exist, corresponding to the judgment or the answer, which are part of the same, unified system. 
In fact, for the answer to be correct, it should belong to a single, unified system as the question. By contrast, 
individuality, or an answer that is unique to the individual and cannot be reduced to part of a system, can 
only appear as an erroneous answer to the question. 



Questioning in Bakhtinian dialogic pedagogy and argumentation theory  
Kiyotaka Miyazaki 

 
 

Dialogic Pedagogy: An International Online Journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu 
DOI: 10.5195/dpj.2023.544  |  Vol. 11 No. 3 (2023) 
 

A49 

Question and answer are not logical relation: An example from a classroom lesson 

How do non-logical relations arise between a question and an answer? In this case, the questioner 
and the answerer do not share a unified systemic cognition. Thus, the answerer understands the 
questioner’s question differently from how the questioner understands it. The questioner and the answerer 
do not share the same question. A new question emerges in the answerer that corresponds to the 
answerer’s answer, and thus the original question in the questioner and the answer in the answerer lose 
their logical relation. The answer deviates from the original question. 

Let us make this more concrete by analyzing a classroom lesson in which a new question emerges 
in an apparently erroneous answer to a teacher’s question. The example below (discussed in Miyazaki 
2019) shows a typical instantiation of a process in which a new question comes into being in a student’s 
answer that differs from the teacher’s original intention. This appears in an early phase of a sixth-grade 
lesson on the poem Haru [Spring] by the poet Fuyue Anzai, as taught by Yukio Tsukamoto, whose 
pedagogical thought is shown below. 

Haru [Spring]  
Chouchou ga ippiki Dattan kaikyou wo watatte itta. 
[A butterfly has gone alone over the Dattan Strait]1 

At the beginning of the lesson, the teacher wrote the poem on the blackboard and asked the 
students to read it aloud. Here, the word “chouchou,” meaning butterfly, posed a difficulty, as it was written 
in the older notational system, and the students did not pronounce it properly, saying instead “tefutefu,” a 
meaningless word. So, the teacher asked students by saying, “This (Chouchou) is counted as ippiki. What 
do you think this is?” 

The word “ippiki” is a contraction for ichi-hiki or one-hiki, where hiki is a counter used for many 
types of animals and bugs and, therefore, is appropriate for use for a butterfly. The students provided three 
answers: a butterfly, a fish, and a bird. Tsukamoto asked the question three times. The second time, while 
some students say it was a fish, the majority answered that it was a butterfly. Tsukamoto asked why they 
thought it was a fish, the students said that it passed over a strait that a bird could not pass over. The 
students and the teacher then discussed the meaning of “strait.” Then, the teacher asked a third time, and 
the majority of students replied, that it is a fish. The teacher responded by telling them that it was a butterfly. 
However, he did not end there, adding “the way you feel is great! Maybe a bird, and a fish would be able to 
go over the strait, but a butterfly cannot. It is really a good reading.” See Miyazaki (2019) for details on this 
lesson. 

Tsukamoto’s response was not provided for the students to save face for their incorrect answer, 
nor to prevent students with the correct answer from losing respect for the students with wrong answers. 
Tsukamoto really discovered in the students’ wrong answers a new question. Tsukamoto’s intended 
question here was: how is tefutefu pronounced? The students instead asked the question: what is tefutefu 
that can pass a strait? Tsukamoto’s intended question and the students’ answer have no logical relation. 
The students’ answer deviated from Tsukamoto’s intention. When planning the lesson, Tsukamoto did not 
expect the students to think about the challenge posed by the strait in this early phase of the lesson. In this 
sense, Tsukamoto did not share a unified systemic cognition with the students. 

 
1 The current author translated all the Japanese texts used in this paper into English 



Questioning in Bakhtinian dialogic pedagogy and argumentation theory  
Kiyotaka Miyazaki 

 
 

Dialogic Pedagogy: An International Online Journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu 
DOI: 10.5195/dpj.2023.544  |  Vol. 11 No. 3 (2023) 
 

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Outsideness 

As shown in the previous two sub-sections, an answer deviates from a question in an exchange of 
question and answer, a new question emerges in the answer to the previous question so that a questioner 
and an answerer do not share the same question. Then, how does the deviation of the answer from the 
original question occur? Let us see how Bakhtin answers to this question. As quoted above, Bakhtin wrote 
of the chronotopes of the questioner and the answerer, and their various semantic worlds (I and the other). 
Bakhtin appears to propose that the answerer’s response deviates from the questioner’s intention because 
the two live in different chronotopes, that is, different semantic worlds. Chronotope is “a way of 
understanding experience” (Morson & Emerson, 1990, p.367) in which time and space are inseparable and 
are regarded “as forms of the most immediate reality”(Bakhtin, 1981, p. 85). As it is a way of understanding 
experience, each person experiences it uniquely so that the questioner and the answerer each have a 
different chronotope. It is needless to add that this is opposed to the monologic case, in which true 
judgments are not attached to a personality (Bakhtin, 1984). The answerer and the questioner in a dialogue 
are unique individuals who do not share the same systemic cognition, so the answerer’s response 
necessarily deviates from the questioner’s intention, and the answerer has a unique understanding of the 
original question. 

Where the questioner and the answerer exist in the different chronotopes, they each exist outside 
of the other’s semantic world. Outsideness is a key concept in Response to a question from the Novy Mir 
editorial board (Bakhtin, 1986), another essay in which he refers explicitly to questioning. The theme of this 
essay is creative understanding of a foreign culture. He argued against the view that it is necessary to enter 
the foreign culture and view the world through its eyes, criticizing this view as one-sided and untrustworthy. 
To understand a foreign culture, one should be located outside the object of understanding. “In the realm 
of culture, outsideness is a most powerful factor in understanding” (Bakhtin, 1986, p. 7). 

Regarding questioning, Bakhtin (1986) wrote in this essay that “We raise new questions for a 
foreign culture, ones that it did not raise itself; we seek answers to our own questions in it; and the foreign 
culture responds to us by revealing to us its new aspects and new semantic depths” (Bakhtin, p. 7). A 
person who belongs to culture B can have a question about culture A, which a person who belongs to 
culture A cannot ask. In other words, someone who exists outside of culture A has different questions from 
a person who exists inside culture A. In dialogue in general, as previously noted, a questioner and an 
answerer have different chronotopes, such that the answerer understands the question differently from the 
way that the questioner intended and creates a new question. The fact that a person from a different culture 
poses a new question that someone who belongs to the culture cannot is an example of a dialogic 
relationship between the questioner and the answerer. 

However, Bakhtin did not investigate whether persons in different cultures are aware of their mutual 
outsideness. While he seemed to presuppose that outsideness is self-evident for both persons, this is not 
necessarily so. It is possible that individuals may not understand certain differences between both cultures, 
although they may know that they belong to different cultures. In such cases, the one who is being 
questioned may consider the question strange or wonder why it is being asked. Alternatively, the one who 
asks may think that the response does not provide a real answer to the question. Such responses are 
manifestations of what Bakhtin described as the question and answer being out of logical relation. While 
questions from the outside produce a creative understanding, both those from the different cultures must 
recognize their mutual outsideness and learn of the existence of new, creative questions in seemingly 
strange questions. 

Thus, in Bakhtin’s view, question and answer are not logical relations, and new questions emerge 
in answers to previous ones, as the answerer understands the given question differently from the 



Questioning in Bakhtinian dialogic pedagogy and argumentation theory  
Kiyotaka Miyazaki 

 
 

Dialogic Pedagogy: An International Online Journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu 
DOI: 10.5195/dpj.2023.544  |  Vol. 11 No. 3 (2023) 
 

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questioner. This is because the questioner and the answerer are unique individuals, living outside of each 
other’s semantic worlds. 

At the end of this section, let me add how Bakhtin thought about the dialectics that Schwarz and 
Baker (2017) emphasized in their view on the dialogic pedagogy, based on my understanding of Bakhtin 
so far. From my understanding of Bakhtin, their dialectics belongs to what Bakhtin named monologic 
idealism. As noted above, Bakhtin noted that only an error individualizes in idealism. This applies to their 
view on the dialectics, which shows another problem of their pedagogy. In this pedagogy, where the 
question and answer should belong to a single unified system, each person’s intellectual uniqueness is only 
allowed to exist in the form of an error. Intellectual multiplicity, a definitive feature of the dialogue, is not 
allowed there. It should be added, however, that Bakhtin did not deny the dialectics completely. In Toward 
a Methodology of Human Sciences, he wrote as follows. “Dialectics was born of dialogue so as to return 
again to dialogue on a higher level (a dialogue of personalities)” (Bakhtin, 1986, p. 162). He apparently 
thought of the dialectics as one kind of dialogue. However, this dialogue does “return again to dialogue on 
a higher level” (Bakhtin, 1986, p. 162). In Hegelian dialectics, what the dialectics returns is the synthesis or 
the integration of the opposing terms. Bakhtin asserted that there is no such integration here. 

Bakhtin seemed to admit that there are oppositions between different views developing in the 
dialogical process, but it is only a component of the dialogue and not equal to the dialogue. As noted before, 
the existence of opposition between proposition A and proposition B means the existence of questioning, 
which is correct between A and B from the standpoint of this paper. It seems that what Bakhtin asserted is 
not that proposition C is finally integrated from the opposition between A and B, but that the new question, 
which one is correct between A’ and B,’ emerges from the old question. In the former case, A, B, and C are 
in one unified consciousness. In the latter, the opposition between A and B and the opposition between A’ 
and B’ exist mutually outside of each other. From the standpoint of this paper, the emergence of the new 
question: “Which one is correct – A' or B'?” – is the result of the deviation of the answer to the original 
question: “Which one is correct – A or B?” When the questioner has the question: “Which one is correct – 
A or B?” and the answerer has the question: “Which is correct – A’ and B’?”, a correct answer for each of 
them cannot be the same. 

Bakhtinian dialogic pedagogy and the process of understanding in it 
A teacher’s view on questioning similar to Bakhtin’s 

How do the differences between the views of questioning discussed so far lead to differences 
between the views on understanding what occurs in the classroom lesson? In Schwarz and Baker’s (2017) 
thoughts on dialogic pedagogy, the intellectual process of understanding is not considered to be a dialogic 
process but a dialectical one, in which a single correct answer for a single question collaboratively sought. 
How does understanding develop in Bakhtinian dialogue, in which a new question emerges in the answer 
to a previous question? It would seem that only intellectual confusion would result when an answer deviates 
from what the questioner requests. However, this is not so. Each participant not only encounters a different 
question in dialogue but also becomes aware of her/his own question through an encounter with the other’s. 
In this way, they do not develop one unified understanding in collaboration, but each develops his/her own, 
unique understanding. 

I examine this issue by analyzing pedagogical views developed in Japan. While these were not 
drawn from Bakhtin’s own works or thinking, they are dialogic in his sense. In particular, their views on 
questioning are quite similar to Bakhtin’s, discussed above. Though several teachers developed similar 
views independently, I introduce the pedagogical view of Yukio Tsukamoto, a retired elementary school 
principal, whose lesson on the poem Haru is shown above, as he articulated unique views on questioning 



Questioning in Bakhtinian dialogic pedagogy and argumentation theory  
Kiyotaka Miyazaki 

 
 

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most clearly. Not only Tsukamoto but also many other Japanese teachers think that the teaching-learning 
process in the lesson consists of the triadic relationship between the students, the learning material, and 
the teacher. For them, the lesson becomes dialogic if the teacher is an authentic learner of the students’ 
own learning material in a triadic relationship (Miyazaki, 2019; 2020). Tsukamoto discusses the relationship 
between the students’ questions and the teacher’s questions with respect to the learning materials as 
follows: 

When the teacher asks the question to children, she/he has the expected answer. However, the 
teacher’s question has multiple meanings so that it contains various different questions other than her/his intended 
one. The child interprets the teacher’s asked question, chooses one among many possible implied questions as 
her/his own, and answers it. Sometimes, the child choses a question that differs from the teacher’s intended one. 
In that case, the child’ answer is not likely to match the teacher’s expected answer; the teacher thinks the answer 
is incorrect. However, if the child’s answer can be traced back to the child’s question which brought the answer,… 
the teacher can become aware of a new view of the learning topic hidden in the child’s incorrect answer and can 
put this new view in the flow of the lesson. The child and the teacher become the inquirers of the same question. 
(Tsukamoto, 2014, p. 25) 

His remarks feature three important points. First, he noted that students do not passively accept 
the teacher’s questioning as it is. Tsukamoto considered that the student must interpret the teacher’s 
question in her/his own way and necessarily produces a new question in this way. Thus, while the student’s 
answer seems to be an answer to the teacher’s question, it is in fact an answer to a question that the 
student produces her-/himself. This is the source of the deviance between the teacher’s intended question 
and the student’s produced answer. Second, he pointed out that this deviance often presents to the teacher 
as a wrong answer. However, this answer is likely not to be incorrect with respect to the question that the 
student produces. 

These two points indicate that Tsukamoto’s views on questioning are largely the same as those of 
Bakhtin. Tsukamoto adds another point that is important for the pedagogy. When the teacher can 
understand the student’s answer not as a wrong response to the original question but as a correct answer 
to the student’s own question and can make the student’s new question explicit for other students, a 
collaborative exploration can begin. 

The third point is particularly important for the development of understanding of students and the 
teacher in classroom lessons. While it is widely recognized that listening to children is important, what is 
important is listening to the students’ questions from the standpoint of dialogic pedagogy. The teacher 
should become aware of the new question within the student’s answer that differs from the teacher’s own 
question and presents it back to the student and to other students in the class. The student who has 
unconsciously generated the new question can become aware of her/his generated question through the 
teacher’s presentation thereof. Likewise, other students can observe the new question or, rather, the new 
interpretation of the teacher’s question. The teacher thus becomes aware of the new meaning of her/his 
original question in encountering the student’s new question as well. The class can develop a new 
understanding of the learning material by exploring the new question. How Tsukamoto’s idea is materialized 
in the class was shown partly in the case of Haru above. In this lesson, the teacher pointed out to the 
students that their answers, which are seemingly incorrect, are not necessarily so, but reasonable on their 
own terms. The teacher discovered that his apparently easy question could have a different and unexpected 
but reasonable question. 

New question in the wrong answer: One example from physics 

Let us examine the development of understanding through listening to a different question found in 
a wrong answer in concrete cases. Here, the examples are taken from the field of science. As noted, the 



Questioning in Bakhtinian dialogic pedagogy and argumentation theory  
Kiyotaka Miyazaki 

 
 

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DOI: 10.5195/dpj.2023.544  |  Vol. 11 No. 3 (2023) 
 

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argumentative dialogic pedagogy holds that the process of understanding is dialectical, which means that 
the same question is shared by students, and there is only one correct answer, in particular, in science 
lessons. Thus, science is an important site for testing the universality of the idea that there are new, different 
questions within seemingly wrong answers. 

The first example does not come from a classroom context; it is a hypothetical case drawn from 
the field of physics. It is selected to show the process of understanding more clearly. It concerns a well-
known problem that has been studied for many years in the study of misconceptions in the field of cognitive 
science and the learning sciences (Clement, 1982; McCloskey, 1983). 

A coin is tossed straight up into the air and is moving upward. Which force(s) is(are) acting on the 
coin? 

Many respondents select B among the three choices given: gravity and an upward force act on the 
coin simultaneously. This is incorrect: the correct answer is C – that only gravity is acting on the coin. The 
coin keeps moving upward even in the absence of any upward force due to Newton’s first law, or the law 
of inertia. The coin starts moving upward when it is thrown upward and would continue with the same 
velocity if there were no gravity. As the coin is continually acted upon by gravity, which continuously adds 
downward acceleration, the upward motion slows and then is turned into a falling motion. 

While this is an elementary problem in Newtonian physics, it is infamous in the study of the learning 
sciences, as many adults - including students currently taking elementary physics - answer it incorrectly. 
Most people have learned the law of inertia in the middle school, but they do not apply it correctly even in 
such an easy problem. Have they simply forgotten the knowledge they had from school? 

However, this story is not so simple. Rather, this error has reasonable grounds. The law of inertia 
presupposes an ideal world in which there is no resistance among objects. However, in the real world, 
surrounding objects, such as air, do exert resistance, so that uniform motion does not continue without a 
force acting continuously on an object. When the experimenter, or the teacher asks the question: which 
force(s) is(are) acting on a coin that is moving upward, she/he presupposes that this event is occurring in 
the ideal world. However, many people who answer the question do not account for this added 
presupposition, even if they are explicitly informed of it and think about the question, presupposing that it is 
happening in the real world, in which the resistance has many effects. After all, the people who answer the 
question live in the real world, and it is natural for them to interpret this problem situation occurring in the 
real world. In the real world, motion stops soon if no force acts on continuously. Thus, answer B, which 
considers an upward force as acting on an object moving upward, is correct if the question is understood 

Which force(s) is(are) acting on the coin which is 
tossed straight up into the air and moving upward?

A B C

Figure 1. Force(s) on the coin



Questioning in Bakhtinian dialogic pedagogy and argumentation theory  
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to refer to this case. In other words, answer B deviates from the question as intended. Those who chose 
answer B produced a different question from the one posed by the experimenter/the teacher and answered 
their own question. B is incorrect for the question as intended, but it is correct for the answerer’s own 
generated question. 

How can class lessons be organized using this material? One, maybe common, use of this query 
and response is to bring students to understand why answer B is incorrect so that they can replace the 
incorrect answer with the correct one. However, the teacher could develop another type of lesson in 
response to becoming aware of the students’ own question, which is different from the one posed by the 
teacher or the textbook. In this type of lesson, the students and the teacher can collaboratively explore the 
difference between the real world and the ideal world that is presupposed by Newtonian physics. By this 
means, the students and the teacher can examine collaboratively how, in the real world, the resistance of 
surrounding objects affects the appearance of the law of inertia. In exploring the differences between the 
two worlds, the students can become better aware of the hypothetical nature of the ideal world as an analytic 
tool used to understand the real world. 

New question in the wrong answer: analysis of a science lesson 

In an actual lesson, most of the students’ wrong answers are not the ones like in the above case, 
whose existence and implications are known publicly beforehand. The teacher must, on the spot, grasp a 
student’s unique question in the student’s unique wrong answer. Let us examine a concrete science lesson 
regarding the re-crystallization of ammonium chloride. This concerns a fifth grade class at Nagano 
elementary school attached to the Faculty of Education of Shinshu University, taught by Ken’ichiro Seki 
(Nagano elementary school attached to the Faculty of Education, Shinshu University, 2010). As this lesson 
appeared in Miyazaki (2020), only the outline of the lesson is given here. 

The students watched a movie in which a bottle of liquid ammonium chloride was immersed in cool 
water, after which white crystals emerged one after another in a transparent solution, and they conducted 
an experiment to reproduce this phenomenon. After the experiment, one group reported that when they put 
the bottle in cool water, the quantity of undissolved crystals of ammonium chloride at the bottom of the 
bottle appeared larger. Hideta commented that this means that the undissolved crystals at the bottom of 
the bottle were simply larger. The teacher confirmed Hideta’s idea by asking whether he thought that the 
undissolved crystal expanded and the transparent part of the solution made no contribution to the expansion 
of the crystal. Hideta acknowledged the teacher’s question, adding that the transparent liquid in the bottle 
was mostly water, although a small amount of ammonium chloride was likely dissolved in it. Another 
student, Taka, argued against Hideta, saying that ammonium chloride was necessarily present in the upper, 
transparent part of the bottle, while Hideta counter-argued that the upper layer was not salty in the case of 
the saline solution from a previous experiment. 

Hideta’s answer was wrong, and Taka’s was correct. Nevertheless, Hideta’s answer was 
understandable as it was based on his own experience with a saline solution. While the majority, including 
Taka, asked why the crystal at the bottom of the container expanded, Hideta’s question instead was 
something like why the crystal at the bottom of the container expanded when there was insufficient 
ammonium chloride in the transparent part of the solution. 

The teacher could not grasp Hideta’s question fully. Nevertheless, he discovered in Hideta’s 
response something that was correct in its way. On reflection, the teacher considered Hideta not to be 
wrong, mobilizing all his previous experience to think in the way that he did, while his conclusion was not 
factual. The teacher recognized Hideta’s unique way of exploring nature. Thus, the teacher did not 
contradict Hideta. He provided a schematic drawing of the molecules of the solution to the students and 



Questioning in Bakhtinian dialogic pedagogy and argumentation theory  
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asked them to think of the inner state of the solution. In discussing this, a new experiment was proposed to 
boil down the transparent part of the solution to identify whether there was ammonium chloride. The 
experiment was conducted, and the existence of ammonium chloride was confirmed. 

Here, Hideta’s answer was literally a wrong response to the question, as understood by most 
students and the teacher. However, Hideta’s experience with a saline solution led him to think that there 
was insufficient ammonium chloride in the transparent part of the solution to crystallize. Thus, he posed a 
different question than the rest of the students, for which his answer was correct. The teacher could not 
grasp his answer fully but did not deny his idea. With the assistance of the teacher, the other students came 
to share Hideta’s question on the quantity of ammonium chloride in the transparent part of the solution and 
explored it collaboratively in an experiment. Hideta’s new question in his seemingly wrong answer advanced 
all students’ understanding. 

Answer as the course of each one’s understanding process 

Thanks to Hideta’s unique idea, which differed from that of the majority and helped the class 
develop a novel experiment, the class reached the conclusion that the crystal at the bottom of the bottle 
includes precipitated ammonium chloride from the liquid. Given this, should the intellectual process of this 
lesson be characterized as a dialectical one, in which different views are integrated into one, as the 
deliberative argumentative pedagogy argues? The class record, taken by the teacher, has no detailed 
record showing each student’s response, but it seems not unnatural to suppose that no one, including 
Hideta, opposed the conclusion publicly. I analyze the lesson flow under that supposition. 

Did all students’ ideas become the same, integrated one? My answer is no. Even though the 
students’ thoughts appeared to be the same from the distance, each of them was unique if we take into 
account the full process of answering. After the first experiment, the majority of students, like Taka, thought 
that crystal at the bottom of the container expanded due to the crystallized ammonium chloride from the 
transparent part of the solution, implicitly supposing that there was enough ammonium chloride in this part 
of the solution. They then met Hideta’s view and were with the facts of the previous saline experiment, 
which they may have forgotten about. Thus, they must have implicitly encountered Hideta’s question 
regarding why the crystal on the bottom of the container expanded when there was not enough ammonium 
chloride in the transparent part of the solution. In response to this, Hiro, another student, said the following. 

Hiro:  Though it was not salty before stirring, it became salty everywhere after we stirred it. Well, 
I was confused. 

Hideta’s view undermined Hiro’s confidence in his own thinking. We cannot know what Hiro 
ultimately thought after the second experiment, as no explicit description was provided regarding the final 
phase of the lesson in the teacher’s record. It is probably that he would have returned to his initial answer 
before encountering Hideta’s view. Even so, Hiro’s understanding in the final phase would have become 
different from the one he had held because it would have evolved through the fluctuation caused by the 
encounter with Hideta’s view. His thought might ultimately have been strengthened due to this fluctuation. 
Some students might have not fluctuated in encountering Hideta’s view, so their final understanding must 
have been the same as Hiro’s on a surface level. However, as they had not experienced the process of 
fluctuation and re-establishment, their understanding would necessarily have differed from Hiro’s. 

Hideta would also have understood that there was sufficient ammonium chloride in the transparent 
solution that crystallized on the bottom of the container from the final experiment. More specifically, he likely 
understood the following: there is certainly sufficient ammonium chloride in the transparent solution to 
crystallize on the bottom of the container, although I had thought it was not enough from my previous 



Questioning in Bakhtinian dialogic pedagogy and argumentation theory  
Kiyotaka Miyazaki 

 
 

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DOI: 10.5195/dpj.2023.544  |  Vol. 11 No. 3 (2023) 
 

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experience of the saline experiment. In other words, his understanding must have evolved from re-
examining his own experience. Thus, he did not scrap the old idea and replace it with a new one but 
developed the new idea from a re-examination of what he had thought. 

Hideta, Hiro and others, thus, might have arrived at the same answer. However, they could only 
have done so through different routes. Although their understanding can be summarized in the same words, 
that the ammonium chloride in the transparent solution crystallized, the content of their understanding could 
reflect a unique course of understanding, even though this would not be in their power to express in 
language. For example, it can be that one who experienced fluctuation of her/his own understanding finally 
had more robust understanding than one who did not experience. The students’ intellectual processes 
should not be considered dialectical, as understood by the deliberative argumentative pedagogy. Instead, 
it is dialogic, in that each student evolved her/his unique understanding differently from the others in 
encountering with others’ ideas. 

Different questions in the seemingly same understanding: analysis of another science lesson 

Let us examine an episode in another science lesson where students seem to provide the same, 
correct answer to one question, although their own questions and answers are unique and different from 
each other if their processes of understanding are taken into consideration. This lesson took place in a 
third-grade class taught by Kazuyasu Azegami (elementary school teacher at the time of the lesson, 
currently at Shinshu University) in 1990 at Tamagawa Elementary school, Chino, Nagano, Japan (Azegami, 
1990).2 

The topic of the lesson was a bamboo air pressure gun. This is a toy involving a barrel and a 
plunger. Two balls of paper are put into both ends of the barrel, the plunger pushes one ball, and the ball 
at the other end is shot out by air pressure. The lesson unit consists of twelve classes. In the seventh lesson 
and afterward, the students discussed why the paper ball flew out based on their own individual exploration 
from the previous two lessons. At the beginning of the seventh lesson, the teacher asked Aki to present her 
view. Aki indicated that a paper ball flew when two wet balls were placed at the ends of the barrel but did 
not when only one paper ball was placed at the front end of the barrel. There were two possible reasons 
for this, and she was wondering which one was correct. It could be that the paper ball at the front end flew 
out because the plunger and the paper ball at the rear end worked together on the paper ball at the front 
end. The other possibility was that there was air in the barrel between two balls, and the paper ball at the 
front flew due to the power of the air. Her friend Sayaka took the latter view, and Aki was not sure if the ball 
could fly due to the power of the air alone as the air was spongy. 

Then, Kazu spoke. 

Kazu:  Sayaka said that there was air (in the barrel). I checked it and found out there really was. 
Aki said that she could not understand why the ball flew as the air is spongy. I think that air 
is here (in the barrel), and as you push it (the plunger) hard and it collides with the rear ball, 
the air becomes narrow (sic), and (the front ball) flies due to its’ (the air’s) force. 

After speaking, Kazu conducted the experiment to confirm the existence of air in the barrel. He put 
the bamboo gun in the water tank and shot it to see if air emerged from the barrel. He tried three times 
unsuccessfully and succeeded in the fourth trial. Then Masa spoke: 

 
2 The following analysis is based on the materials that Azegami prepared for presentation and the video record of the class. 



Questioning in Bakhtinian dialogic pedagogy and argumentation theory  
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Masa:  I checked too as Kazu did, using a different method, whether there is air in the barrel, and 
there was. 

Masa also demonstrated his experiment, in which a film of soap was placed at the front end of the 
barrel in place of the front ball to see whether it would bubble when the plunger was pushed in. 

The teacher asked the class whether they accepted that there was air in the barrel, and many 
students answered yes. However, Asa raised her hand, and the teacher asked her to speak after checking 
whether she wanted to speak about this topic or another one. Asa told the class about the experiment that 
she performed in the previous lesson. 

Asa:  I put the barrel (of the bamboo gun) in a plastic bag, put the balls in the gun and sealed (the 
bag) with tape, and fired (the gun). The bag expanded, so there must be air in the barrel. 

After this, the class moved on to discussing the students’ thoughts regarding whether the ball flew 
out for other reasons than due to the air in the barrel. 

Kazu, Masa, and Asa each presented an experiment to explore Aki’s question. Presenting and 
conducting the experiment in the classroom can be characterized as pursuing the question in two senses. 
First, posing the question is asking nature about some natural phenomenon. The result of an experiment 
can be thought as the answer that nature provides to the experiment. Second, more important from a 
dialogic pedagogical perspective, presenting and conducting the experiment in a classroom means asking 
the question of other students and the teacher. The experimenter asks the class this question: “I am 
exploring nature in this way—what do you think?” It is needless to say, that questioning in this paper refers 
to the second one. 

What questions did the three children ask? Broadly speaking, they were raising one and the same 
question: is air in the barrel? They used different methods, however. To specify the method in the 
experiment is to develop the question in a specific form. 

• Kazu: Does air come out of the barrel as a bubble if there is air in the barrel and if the bamboo 
gun is shot underwater? 

• Masa: Does a film of soap put on the front end of the barrel bubble up if there is air in the barrel 
and if the gun is shot? 

• Asa: Does a plastic bag in which the bamboo gun is placed expand if there is air in the barrel 
and if the gun is shot in the bag? 

The students’ understandings from these experiments are, broadly speaking, the same: there is air 
in the barrel. At a closer look, however, their understandings are clearly somewhat different, corresponding 
to the differences in their questions. We can describe their understandings schematically, as follows. 

• Kazu: There is air in the barrel that becomes a bubble underwater. 

• Masa: There is air in the barrel that pushes out a film of soap at the front end of the barrel. 

• Asa: There is air in the barrel that can expand a plastic bag in which the gun is placed. 



Questioning in Bakhtinian dialogic pedagogy and argumentation theory  
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They did not just propose their experiments independently. Masa at least realized the similarities 
and differences between his experiment and Kazu’s. Masa noted this explicitly, stating that his experiment 
was the same as Kazu’s, asking whether there was air in the barrel, but using a different method. Kazu, 
who performed the experiment first, connected his experiment to those of the other two. At the end of the 
seventh lesson, the teacher asked whether there was something in the lesson that the students understood 
well. To answer the question, Kazu referred to the experiments of Masa and Asa, saying, “Experiments 
with the soap and the plastic bag. They made me understand.” Though he did not say what exactly he had 
understood, it is likely the fact that there is air in the barrel. He must have understood it somehow before 
he saw these two experiments by Masa and Asa, as he showed his own experiment first. Still, his 
understanding of the fact that there is air in the barrel must have advanced by addressing basically the 
same but a little bit different question. 

It is not accidental that these students posed similar questions in this class. The attitudes of the 
students were noted by the teacher, who shows a unique view of the experiment and the process of 
understanding. Azegami reported thinking, even in childhood, that his understanding of something cannot 
really be his own unless he confirms it with the experiment that he himself performs (K. Azegami, personal 
communication, July 27, 2021). For Azegami, the experiment is not a device to make a final decision on 
which hypothesis is correct after possible hypotheses are formulated, like experiments in the Hypothesis-
experiment-class pedagogy (Itakura, 2019). For him, to do an experiment is to ask a question about some 
phenomenon, exploring it from some direction and developing a novel understanding. Thus, encountering 
others’ ideas of experiment in the class can lead to an improved understanding of the phenomenon by 
learning how others can explore them. Therefore, he encouraged and helped students to think of and 
conduct their own experiments. This attitude is clearly shown in his interaction with Asa in class. Before 
Asa spoke, many students appeared to agree, perhaps not on the cause of the ball’s flight but on the fact 
that there was air in the barrel. Thus, it did not seem necessary to do an additional experiment to show this. 
However, the teacher allowed Asa to describe her experiment after confirming that she would talk about an 
experiment to show that there is air in the barrel. This episode should not be understood to show how the 
teacher respects her right to speak in general but instead respects her desire to show her unique 
understanding to the class. 

The uniqueness of each person’s understanding produces differences in 
questions 
Personal history of understanding 

Finally, let me clarify why new questions continuously emerge in an exchange of questions and 
answers. In the section “Bakhtin’s view on questioning,” I noted that Bakhtin suggested that this is because 
of the difference between each person’s chronotopes. This answer is too broad and general, and it does 
not explain how a difference in the chronotopes results in the emergence of a new question. In this section, 
I present a view on learning developed in the cognitive sciences to explain this process: constructivism. 

This view is particularly important for the study of misconception and the development of the 
concept (diSessa, 2006; Inagaki & Hatano, 2002; Smith et al., 1994). The basic tenet of this view is that all 
learning involves the interpretation of phenomena, situations, and events, including classroom instruction, 
through the perspective of the learner's existing knowledge (Smith et al., 1994, p. 116). This view rejects 
the tabula rasa conception of learning, in which new information is acquired by being written on the mind 
as onto a blank slate. Additionally, new information cannot simply replace old information. So, confrontation 
with an old idea is not enough for a new idea to be acquired and understood. If new knowledge is to be 
acquired and understood, it should be connected somehow to an existing knowledge base. 



Questioning in Bakhtinian dialogic pedagogy and argumentation theory  
Kiyotaka Miyazaki 

 
 

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The knowledge base of each person is the product of her/his encounter with and experience of 
phenomena, situations, and events. This includes not only directly perceived experiences that are not 
mediated by the other persons but also those that are mediated by the other persons and symbols, as is 
typically the case in education. Each person’s knowledge base is always changing and is renewed in the 
encounter with new phenomena, situations, and events in life. As a result, each person’s knowledge base 
is unique to that person. It constitutes the accumulation of each person’s experience in her/his life history 
and is different for each person. Here, I call each person’s unique knowledge base the personal history of 
understanding, emphasizing the characteristic that it is continually changing throughout that person’s 
history. 

The uniqueness of each person’s knowledge base is not focused in the research tradition of the 
misconception and conceptual development. Instead, these studies investigate the structure of knowledge 
(diSessa, 1988, 2008; Vosniadou, 2007). However, a novel research area has been emerging that is near 
to my research interest in the uniqueness of each person’s knowledge base. These studies focus on 
epistemic heterogeneity or the differences in knowledge base among people from different communities. 
For example, Bang and colleagues (Bang et al., 2015; Barajas-López & Bang, 2018; Medin & Bang, 2014) 
have been studying indigenous ways of knowing among the native peoples of the United States and around 
the world. Likewise, Rosebery et al. (2010) investigated how students come to understand the concepts of 
thermodynamics, such as heat and heat transfer, examining how scientific concepts and the everyday 
experiences relate to their understanding. In this work, they focused on students’ different everyday 
experience based on their original communities. 

As noted in the section “Bakhtin’s view on questioning”, differences between communities and their 
cultures were discussed by Bakhtin (1986). It is unnecessary to emphasize, however, that these differences 
are only a part of the source of individuals’ uniqueness. The research interests of researchers working on 
epistemic heterogeneity thus seem somewhat limited. 

Questioning and the personal history of understanding 

How does the personal history of understanding function in asking a question? This paper 
characterized questioning as presenting a problem/an issue. Something becomes a problem/an issue when 
that something is not understood, so presenting a problem/an issue or questioning is the act of coming to 
know and/or to understand something that is unknown and/or not understood. Naturally, questioning on a 
topic relates to the questioner’s own history of the understanding of the topic. Because someone’s personal 
history of understanding reflects what and how that person has understood things in life, it must influence 
what and how the topic or the meaning of a question about the topic is understood. 

What about the case where person A asks a question of person B? A’s question is understood by 
A, based on A’s personal understanding. B, on the other hand, must understand the meaning of the question 
before answering it, and B does so based on B’s personal history of understanding. The personal histories 
of understanding of A and B are unique to each person and different from each other. In consequence, the 
question that B understands is different from the question that A intended. Thus, a new question emerges 
in B, and B does not answer the question A intended, but the one B has understood, causing B’s answer 
to deviate from A’s question. 

Tsukamoto’s lesson on the poem Haru described above is a good example of this. He asked his 
students: this (Chouchou) is counted as ippiki. What do you think it is? Tsukamoto’s intention was to ask 
how the word is read aloud. However, many students understood the question as follows: what is tefutefu, 
something that can pass a strait. Consequently, these students provided an answer that was wrong with 
reference to Tsukamoto’s intended question. 



Questioning in Bakhtinian dialogic pedagogy and argumentation theory  
Kiyotaka Miyazaki 

 
 

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What is the difference between the personal history of Tsukamoto’s understanding and the 
personal histories of each student’s understanding? Although all we can do is speculate, the reasoning 
might go something like the following. Their understandings might differ not only with respect to the content 
of the poem but also with respect to the procedure of understanding the text in general. For Tsukamoto as 
a teacher, it might seem natural to check the pronunciation of words first and then interpret the meaning of 
the sentence. However, it might be natural for students to begin reading by interpreting the meaning of a 
sentence, even if there are some words with uncertain pronunciations. 

The differences between Tsukamoto’s question and the students’ question can also be 
characterized as follows. Both Tsukamoto and the students refer to the word tefutefu as their topic. 
However, the two sides interpret the topic differently based on their own personal histories of understanding, 
so their questions differ from each other. The structure of the questioning in cases from science education 
shown above is easily describable in this way. Some situations are not well understood by the participants 
in them. These can be called problematic situations, following Dewey (1938). It is the situation in which a 
problem/an issue is discovered. However, the participants do not share a question, even if they focus on 
the same problematic situation. Participants interpret a problematic situation based on their own personal 
history of understanding and try to understand it in their own way. In other words, each one poses a unique 
question for the situation. 

In Seki’s lesson, for example, the problematic situation was to determine why the quantity of 
undissolved crystals of ammonium chloride at the bottom of the bottle appeared larger. Hideta, who 
answered differently from other students, recalled and compared the result of the saline solution previously 
examined. Based on his personal history of understanding, he interpreted this situation differently from 
other students and produced a question that was different from theirs, asking why the quantity of 
undissolved crystals of ammonium chloride at the bottom of the bottle appeared larger if the ammonium 
chloride in the upper, transparent part of the bottle is thin and not dense enough to make the crystal at the 
bottom larger. 

Let me return to Bakhtin’s view, presented in the section “Bakhtin’s view on questioning.” The 
chronotope, in Bakhtin’s conception, at least one component of it, refers to the way of understanding the 
world. Therefore, differences in the personal histories of understanding would be components of differences 
between individuals’ chronotopes. This section shows that the cultural differences that Bakhtin discusses 
using the concept of mutual outsideness in Response to a question from the Novy Mir editorial board 
(Bakhtin, 1986) are the object of research as the epistemological heterogeneity caused by differences 
between communities. It is also noted that heterogeneity based on differences between communities are 
only a part of the difference of people’s personal histories of understanding. Bakhtin’s idea of outsideness 
is caused not only by cultural differences but also by each person’s individual differences so that the 
personal history of understanding is at least a component that causes people’s mutual outsideness. 

Concluding remarks 
This paper examined the differences between the Bakhtinian dialogic view and the pedagogical 

thought based on it, on the one hand, and the theories of argumentation and the pedagogical thought based 
on them, on the other, by focusing on the characteristics of questioning for both of them. The theories of 
argumentation insisted that one question should be shared among the participants for an argument to 
develop. The Bakhtinian view is that a question is not shared by the participants, and a new question 
emerges continuously in an answer to the previous question. For Bakhtin, exchanges that stick to one and 
the same question are monologic. 



Questioning in Bakhtinian dialogic pedagogy and argumentation theory  
Kiyotaka Miyazaki 

 
 

Dialogic Pedagogy: An International Online Journal | http://dpj.pitt.edu 
DOI: 10.5195/dpj.2023.544  |  Vol. 11 No. 3 (2023) 
 

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New questions emerge in dialogue because those who participate in it have unique knowledge 
bases that are the product of the accumulation of their unique life experiences. This paper termed this 
knowledge base – the personal history of understanding. Because of the uniqueness of the person’s 
personal history of understanding, each participant in the dialogue understands the same topic or the same 
problematic situation differently and so produces different questions unique to each. 

When a student’s answer to a teacher’s or other students’ questions seems to be wrong or felt 
strange in the lesson context, this may be the result of a new question implied in the answer that is unique 
to that student. Likewise, when the same idea seems to be presented by different students, it may be that 
each student has a unique question, approaching the same idea from different directions. The lesson 
becomes dialogic as the teacher notices the new question and presents it to the class. 

That is, it becomes dialogic because the participants of the lesson understand that seemingly 
different, wrong, or strange ideas are actually reasonable, having equal rights vis-à-vis the truth to other 
ideas, when the questions in these seemingly wrong or strange ideas are discovered. By finding a new 
question in her/his seemingly different, wrong, or strange answer, the student can explore it further and 
develop her/his understanding. Students who recognize the new question in the other’s seemingly different, 
wrong, or strange answer can investigate this new question and become aware of their own questions and 
develop them further. In this way, each student can develop his or her own understanding based on the 
personal history of understanding by exploring her/his unique question. 

In science and mathematics, there seem to be only one correct answer to any question. However, 
this paper showed that even in the field of science education, supposedly incorrect answers can still be 
correct for the question hidden in the answer. It also showed that, where participants’ thoughts seemed to 
converge finally into one, each one still possesses a different answer corresponding a different question, 
indicating each one’s different path to the final idea. 

This paper does not insist that theories of argumentation are without value. On the contrary, they 
are effective means to organize the methods for participants to reach one consensus, such as at a 
conference. However, education is not for consensus building but for individuals to develop their own 
understandings based on each one’s personal history. The participants might reach consensus on a topic 
in a lesson, but the consensus itself is not important. What is important is each student’s path to this 
consensus or the individual exploration that builds understanding. This exploration, which is unique to each 
person, is her/his questioning. Encountering others in dialogue makes it possible to become aware of one’s 
unique questions. Unfortunately, theories of argumentation ignore individual people’s uniqueness of 
understanding, so necessary in pedagogy, theories that should support unique individual paths to new 
questions and new answers. 

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