Social education through the lens of Bakhtinian theory

A review of Bakhtin in the Fullness of Time: Bakhtinian Theory and the Process of Social Education, Edited by Craig Brandist, Michael E. Gardiner, E. Jayne White and Carl Mika. L.: Routledge. 2020. 160 p. The review of the collection of articles Bakhtin in the Fullness of Time: Bakhtinian Theory and the Process of Social Education represents an analysis of the perspectives, main trends, and interpretations of key points, ideas, and concepts of M. M. Bakhtin in the contemporary theory and practice of Social Education. The book’s nine chapters are grouped within three problem areas, researched by the book’s contributors. This is, in the first place, a re-establishment of those philosophical and sociological sources that trace back to the roots of Bakhtin’s early views that had defined the nature of his responses to the challenges of his time in his early philosophical texts, books about Dostoevsky and books about bildungsroman. Another field of examination is Bakhtin's late dialogue with his contemporaries. Sometimes this dialogue is active and obvious, as it happens in the situation with the latest aesthetic and literary trends in Russia at the beginning of the 1920s. Sometimes this dialogue turns out to be ambiguous, therefore researchers can only guess how to reconstruct it, basing their views on the complementarity of Bakhtin’s ideas and Lev Vygotsky or Paulo Freire’s ones. An equally important aspect of this collection is a number of articles devoted to how Bakhtin's theory is transformed into "classroom practice", whether it concerns the use of dialogue and its capabilities in interaction with foreigners, providing educational opportunities to the most economically vulnerable segments of South African society, or communication with preschoolers in kindergarten. The authors of the book managed to create a convincing picture of how Bakhtinian theory is becoming one of the most important elements of contemporary theory and practice of education. At the same time, not only Bakhtinian ideas, primarily the concepts of dialogue, polyphony, carnival, and chronotope, are important, but also that free polyphony, which puts into effect any creative practice

Dialogue with Raven: Bakhtinian Theory and Lee Maracle’s Ravensong

Bakhtinian theory, with its emphasis on dialogism, has been a particularly productive tool for analyzing and understanding literatures that draw on oral traditions. Lee Maracle's Ravensong raises the question of how, in a colonial context, cultural dialogue is possible on two different levels: within the story of the novel (diegetically) as it depicts the struggles of Stacey, a young Salish woman, and outside the story of the novel (extradiegetically) in the discursive strategies used to tell the story. The idea of dialogue is therefore both effected and interrogated; the work accommodates and yet resists Bakhtin's ideas as it reveals the complex dynamics of dialogue when interlocutors are separated by a cultural, social, and economic divide

The written production of argumentative and dissertation text: a didactic project based on Bakhtin's philosophy

This article is characterized as a theoretical and practical research related to a project developed during the year 2015 in two schools - one public, the other private- , in the city of Birigui, State of São Paulo, Brazil. The main goal of the study was to analyze: the pedagogical project and the teachers’ activities oriented towards teaching and learning of argumentative and dissertation texts. The methodology used in this research comprised: (i) visiting both schools, (ii) producing a description of ongoing school practices, with focus on the teaching of argumentative and dissertation texts, (iii) suggesting a teacher’s activity to improve this apprenticeship, (iv) putting this activity into practice and (v) analyzing obtained results. The theoretical framework used for this study was the Bakhtinian philosophy (BAKHTIN, 2013; 2006a; 2006b; 2006c; 2006d; 2010; 2013; VOLOSHINOV, 1986). This theoretical approach was chosen due to the importance of comprehension of the text not just as an amalgamated set of words, phrases and paragraphs; other than that, we understand it as a structure of meaning, in which we encounter linguistic forms, ideologies and discursive stance. At last, we can say the results show that the argumentative texts render assistance to the development of the students’ argumentative competence and skill, that is, in their ability to argue and organize ideas in a communicative situation

"There and Back Again" in the Writing Classroom: A Graduate Student's Recursive Journey Through Pedagogical Research and Theory Development

International audienceThis article discusses my (recursive) process of theory building and the relationship between research, teaching, and theory development for graduate students. It shows how graduate students can reshape their conceptual frameworks not only through course work, but also through researching classes they teach. Specifically, while analyzing the intersection of modality, evidence, and argument in my students' writing, I began to adopt Bakhtinian (1981) theory of dialogic voicing and appropriation as a framework through which to approach writing development. I examine the influences of curriculum , policy, citation, and plagiarism on student writing and conclude with discussing the changes in my teaching practices

Bahktin and the Carnivalesque: Calling for a Balanced Analysis within Organizational Communication Studies

Bakhtin’s perspective and concepts have generated great interest in American and Western European academic circles in recent years. This review describes Bakhtin’s concept of carnivalesque and how it has been utilized in organizational communication research. The synopsis of the carnival application in organizational communication scholarship shows, however, very limited usage of a Burkean approach to Bakhtinian theory. In this paper, I call for a more balanced application of Bakhtinian carnival concept in the organizational communication field by including both Goffman’s and Burke’s frameworks to analyze organizational communication

Supplemental Aesthetics: Techniques in Live Performance

In this essay, I make a bid for the incorporation of the Derridian supplement into aesthetic discourses as a means of understanding and evaluating live performance. I call this move “supplemental aesthetics,” which, in the end, expands the vocabulary of absence and presence. I contend that a method of supplemental aesthetics adapts Derridian vocabulary to account for the intertextual and multisensory experience of live performance, asking practitioners and scholars to account for both the present and absent aspects of staged production. Supplemental aesthetics encourages a dialectic understanding of aesthetics: we make meaning by the simultaneous experience of reading what is present and what is absent on stage