The Stand on Dialogic Pedagogy in Our Times of Peace and War: My Perspective on December 12, 2022

This essay represents the publication of my keynote address at the First DPJ online conference on December 12, 2022. In my speech, I defined how I perceive “our times” and how Dialogic Pedagogy in our times of peace and war may try to address these challenges or even if we should do so. I continued developing the concept of Ontological Dialogic Education. What is the role of Ontological Dialogic Education in addressing the challenges of our times, and is it relevant at all? Why and how can it contribute to a vision of a liberal democracy, if at all? This questioning let me introduce a key post-Enlightenment notion of education based on students’ self-determination and dignity

The (Im)possibility of Education: Theory and Method in Paolo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed and Gayatri Spivak’s Righting Wrongs

Postcolonial critics Paulo Freire (1921–1997) and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (1942–) have both made attempts at offering pedagogical formulas that take into account the student’s experiences in order to oust oppressive tendencies from the classroom, and at first glance, many of their ideas seem close to identical: Freire speaks dismissively of “banking” education (75), and Spivak rejects rote learning (“Righting” 551); Freire argues that a reconciliation of the teacher-student contradiction is a prerequisite for proper education (all participants need to be “teachers and students” simultaneously [53]), and Spivak exhorts the educator to “learn to learn from below” (548). In other words, both scholars advocate a pedagogy whose “very legitimacy lies in…dialogue” (Freire 109), and they both undertake what this text labels a methodological leap from theory to practice. The aim of this article, then, is to find out how or to what extent Freire and Spivak render their pedagogical theories practicable and whether they manage to circumvent the danger of transference, of imposing the educator’s agenda on the learner. The article’s response to this question is no, in Freire’s case, and yes, but only provisionally, in Spivak’s. When Freire puts his teacher in charge of deciding what voices in the classroom should be heard and what voices should be gagged, he leaves the door open for renewed oppression and a mere turning of the tables, clearly against the grain of his own line of argument. Spivak, on the other hand, leaves no loopholes for oppressive tendencies in her methodology; however, as she usually shuns “the production of models [of practice] as such,” withdraws her own formulas, and uses deconstruction as a “safeguard against the repression or exclusion of ‘alterities,” her settling for a certain praxis can only be temporary and provisional (“Can the Subaltern” 103, Norton 2110)

Discussion Formats for Addressing Emotions: Implications for Social-Emotional Learning

Scholars of Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) advocate discussion as a promising instructional method yet rarely specify how such discussions should be conducted. Facilitating classroom discussions is highly challenging, particularly about emotions. Furthermore, the SEL literature contains contradictory discursive imperatives; it typically overlooks the gaps between students’ and teachers’ emotional codes and how these codes are shaped by culture, class, and gender. The current study explores different ways in which teachers facilitate classroom dialogue about emotions. We analyze data drawn from a two-year ethnographic study conducted as part of a design-based implementation research project aimed at fostering productive dialogue in primary language arts classrooms, looking in particular at two lessons centered around a story about crying. We found two different interactional genres for discussions about emotions: (1) inclusive emotional dialogue, in which students share emotions experienced in their everyday lives; (2) emotional inquiry, in which students explore emotions, their expressions, and their social meanings. Both types of discussion generated informative exchanges about students’ emotions. Yet the discussions also put the teacher and students in challenging positions, often related to the need to navigate between contradictory discursive norms and emotional codes

Introduction to the Special Issue “Boundaries between dialogic pedagogy and argumentation theory”

Dialogue and argumentation are two processes that complement and mutually influence each other. However, this essential relationship is not sufficiently acknowledged by current educational research. This neglected relation is also mirrored by the lack of sufficient dialogue between two fields that are defined by the dialogical approach to education and argumentation, namely dialogic pedagogy and educational argumentation. In this Special Issue, we argue that dialogue pedagogies and argumentation theory and practice should communicate more, bridging their somehow different perspectives for the common goal of engaging learners in productive and constructive discussions

A dialogic and democratic journey throughout editing a (very) special journal issue

This introductory article to the special issue “Dialogic pedagogy and democratic education” aims to reflect upon the process of putting this special issue together and to pinpoint some of the most relevant aspects of the articles collected within the issue. Therefore, reverberating one of the editors’ perspectives, not only is this paper meant to introduce the DPJ readers to the texts compiled in the volume, as well as it is dedicated to giving you, dear reader, a glimpse of the journey taken by the editors and authors. It also tries and situates the issue in its social and historic chronotope to justify the ever-so-present appeal to reinforce, advocate and share theoretical discussions as well as practical accounts which focus on dialogic and democratic educational efforts – both distant and more recent events – that took place in different contexts, and different parts in the world. It's claimed that the several accounts and discussions highlighted in the papers in this special issue provide DPJ readers with both hints and strong, factual proposals which might foster new ideas and further actions by those who want to consider dialogic/democratic education either as an end or/and as an act of/for social transformation

A paradigmatic dialogue-disagreement in a democratic school: A conceptual analysis of a soul-searching assembly meeting

In this article, I attempt to conceptually analyze points of disagreement among the students of the first democratic high school in Norway, The Experimental Gymnasium of Oslo (EGO). The clashes and disagreements among the students started heating up immediately after the school was opened in the fall of 1967. As they were learning how to run their school, the students discovered profound differences in their views of education and its purposes. Their deep disagreements about the meaning of education and conflicts about their school practices almost broke up their school right at the very start of its existence. Their different understandings of education erupted in a passionate and dramatic general assembly meeting, which they later referred to as the Soul-Searching Assembly. This four-and-a-half hour-long meeting was recorded and its transcript was published (Hem & Remlov, 1969). In this article, I analyze the dialogues from the assembly, looking for the students’ diverse ideological and conceptual positions, views, desires, and underlying values. The tensions and clashes the students voiced echo the profound paradigmatic differences in conceptualizing education throughout the modern history of education, from the Enlightenment until now, a few decades into the 21st century. The purpose of my analysis is to examine these paradigmatically different views and the concerns behind them. These radically different paradigmatic, conceptual, and axiological positions have an effect on what we may consider being good, ethical, just, and true for human existence, human relationships, and human rights in general, and especially in education. The EGO students’ intensive and urgent ontological need to explain their very different positions to each other allowed me to take a closer look into the tensions and conflicts still existing in the larger cultural-historical public sphere of discourse on education

The educational regime of the Bakhtinian dialogue

Many dialogue-oriented educationalists are attracted to the Bakhtinian notion of dialogue. In this theoretical essay, I have abstracted five major features of the Bakhtinian dialogue and considered what kind of educational regime emerges from these features. In conclusion, I problematize the notion of Bakhtinian dialogue and its regime for education. The paper was presented and discussed at the 17th Bakhtinian conference in Saransk, Russia, in 2021

Four person-ideas in a soul-searching internally persuasive discourse

The monologues presented in this article represent a particular Bakhtinian analysis of a transcript of a passionate, dramatic, and conflictual General Assembly meeting held in the first democratic school in Norway, the Experimental Gymnasium of Oslo (EGO), only two months after the school was opened, on November 2nd, 1967. In the meeting, they confronted each other with deep disagreements in their vision of the school and ways to govern it. The Bakhtinian assumption is that a dialogic analysis of any dialogue takes entering into dialogic relationships with the original participants in the analyzed dialogue (Matusov, Marjanovic-Shane, & Gradovski, 2019; Matusov, Marjanovic-Shane, Kullenberg, & Curtis, 2019). By taking the floor in the Soul-Searching Assembly, the students confronted each other fully from the bottom of their hearts and minds. Their ideas were embodied intentions, motives, reasons, and desires – what Bakhtin called the person-ideas (Bakhtin, 1999). I constructed four person-ideas based on the transcript of the Soul-searching assembly. In that process of dialogic abstraction, I attempted to distill specific points of view without depersonalizing them into abstract ideas thorn out of the living moment of their lives. The analysis through the construction of the four person-ideas complements a vignette I wrote based on the same transcript (Marjanovic-Shane, 2023b). It is both a distinctive kind of dialogic analysis, and it also helps me prepare the data regarding the students’ ideas for a further conceptual analysis, where I explore the students' ideological positions, beliefs, and worldviews. That conceptual analysis is published in a separate article of this special issue (Marjanovic-Shane, 2023a)

Bridging dialogic pedagogy and argumentation theory through critical questions

This article explores the relationship between argumentation theory and dialogic pedagogy. Arguments made in everyday discourse tend to be enthymematic, i.e., containing implicit premises. Thus, dialogue is often necessary to uncover hidden assumptions. Furthermore, evaluating logical arguments involves dialectical and dialogic processes. We articulate the role of critical questions in this process and present the Critical Questions Model of Argument Assessment (CQMAA) as a (mostly) comprehensive framework for evaluating arguments. Students can be taught to ask and discuss these critical questions. Yet to facilitate and sustain discussion of these questions, teachers need additional tools drawn from dialogic pedagogy. We draw on Robin Alexander’s conceptual framework for this purpose as well as Michaels and O’Connor’s work on Academically Productive Talk. Alexander’s framework includes six pedagogical principles and eight repertoires of talk. We focus specifically on teacher and student talk moves and propose that critical questions should be considered an important subset of productive talk moves that can bring rigor and purpose to classroom argumentation. Other talk moves are also needed to help students construct arguments, listen and engage with one another, and help sustain discussion of the critical questions. The CQMAA provides both a theoretical and practical link between (1) logical analysis and critique and (2) dialogic teaching

Dialogic pedagogy in democratically run schools: Introduction

The introduction to this special issue has the particular purpose of presenting the philosophical and educational approach of democratic schooling and its practices to readers interested and knowledgeable in Dialogic Pedagogy but without enough information about Democratic education. Namely, many scholars of dialogic pedagogy are not very familiar with democratic schooling, if at all. The term “democratic education” is polysemic (Matusov, 2023), and many educationalists use it to refer to civic education in conventional schools. However, in this special issue, we explore the relationships between dialogic pedagogy and democratically run schools. In the article, I describe democratic education and its current spread and scarcity worldwide. Next, I examine the meaning and the uses of Dialogue in conventional and progressive education. Finally, I introduce the questions about the meaning and values of dialogic pedagogy in democratic education that guided us in putting together this Special Issue