The Golden cage: Growing up in the Socialist Yugoslavia

From the mid 1950s through roughly the 1980s, some or many children and youth of the Socialist Yugoslavia, especially those of us in Belgrade, the capital, lived in a curious, almost surreal “window” in the space and time. This surreal window of space-time, offered to children and youth of Yugoslavia, unprecedented opportunities for personal development, exposure to the classic cultures and the newest events in the cultural worlds from all over the world, freedom of speech, gathering, activism and opportunities to travel and interact with a multitude of people of the world who came to Yugoslavia.  Such special window in time and space sounds impossible to believe, all the more, in the light of the subsequent brutal and bloody civil wars of the 90s in which Yugoslavia perished. And yet, for many of us this window in time and space did exist! It was a product, I think, of several paradoxical tensions that may have created unprecedented loopholes in the fabric of an otherwise authoritarian and often brutal regime that had its ugly underside in suppression of any actions and words which would be critical of the ruling regime and its leaders.One could arguably say, that, when I talk about this curious, surreal time, I talk from a point of view that can only belong to the children of the privileged: children of the high officers of the Communist party, of the Belgrade political, intellectual, cultural and economic elite. Of course, in many ways, I cannot escape, some of the privileged vistas of my own background – as no one can entirely escape the bent of their own lives. However, my privileged view comes from being among the intellectual elite of Belgrade, rather than the political elite. But my views were also based on the experiences of “ordinary” others which I shared in the everyday ways of life in which I was not segregated from everyone else: my neighbors, school mates, people I met in various other gathering places. In this auto-ethnographic essay, I explore a uniqueness of my Socialist Yugoslav childhood, where a lot of children and youth lived as if in a golden cage. This golden cage had an internal reality that was in many ways protective of our wellbeing. In this reality we experienced freedoms, stood for justice, had many opportunities to participate in cultural clubs, art studios, musical bands, poetic societies, sports clubs, summer and winter camps, etc. At the same time, the world that surrounded us, and even in many ways created our childhoods, was harsh, often brutal and did not hold any of the high ethical principles and values that we believed and lived in.

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

"Spoilsport" in Drama in Education vs. Dialogic Pedagogy

In this paper I compare and contrast two educational paradigms that both attempt to overcome alienation often experienced by students in the conventional education. These two educational paradigms are embodied in different educational practices: First, Drama in Education in its widest definition, is based on the Vygotskian views that human cognitive, semantic (meaning-making), and social-emotional development happens in or through play and/or imagination, thus within the imagined worlds. Second, Critical Ontological Dialogic Pedagogy, is based in the Bakhtin inspired approach to critical dialogue among the “consciousnesses of equal rights” (Bakhtin, 1999), where education is assumed to be a practice of examination of the world, the others and the self. I reveal implicit and explicit conceptual similarities and differences between these two educational paradigms regarding their understanding the nature of learning; social values that they promote; the group dynamics, social relationships and the position of learners’ subjectivity. I aim to uncover the role and legitimacy of the learners’ disagreement with the positions of others, their dissensus with the educational events and settings, and the relationships of power within the social organization of educational communities in these two diverse educational approaches. I explore the legitimacy of dissensus in these two educational approaches regarding both the participants’ critical examination of the curriculum, and in regard to promoting the participants’ agency and its transformations. In spite of important similarities between the educational practices arranged by these two paradigms, the analysis of their differences points to the paradigmatically opposing views on human development, learning and education. Although both Drama in Education and Dialogic Pedagogy claim to deeply, fully and ontologically engage the learners in the process of education, they do it for different purposes and with diametrically opposite ways of treating the students and their relationship to the world, each other and their own developing selves

A paradigmatic disagreement in "Dialogue on Dialogic Pedagogy" by Eugene Matusov and Kiyotaka Miyazaki

I read with a great pleasure the heated dialogue on Dialogic Pedagogy between Eugene Matusov and Kiyotaka Miyazaki. It provided me with one of those rare occasions where I could both witness, and also join, the workings of two minds as they struggled with and against each other to construct, de-construct, and reconstruct their visions of dialogic pedagogical approaches to education. As I was reading, I had a lot of questions and remarks. I try to summarize them here – while many are still left on the margins of the original manuscript

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

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)

A Soul-searching assembly: Vignette

In this article, I develop a dialogic analysis of a democratic school’s General Assembly meeting in the form of a vignette. As a qualitative method, a vignette is a suitable way of preparing evidence and constructing data for further analyses. It is also an ideal medium for a full-fledged dialogic analysis of the described events and dialogues that took place among the participants. I grounded this vignette on a transcript of an audio recording of a General Assembly meeting held in the first Norwegian democratic high school – the Experimental Gymnasium of Oslo (EGO) on November 2nd, 1967, shortly after it started to work in 1967. Using the students’ voices raised in this meeting, I aimed to recreate the meeting’s dramatic atmosphere. My approach follows the art of dialogic analysis (Matusov, Marjanovic-Shane, & Gradovski, 2019; Matusov, Marjanovic-Shane, Kullenberg, & Curtis, 2019), as I attempt to dialogically join the students, adding my reactions and interpretations of the meeting’s unfolding debates and dialogues. I also add my dialogic replies to the students and insert other comments judging their positions dialogically in an attempt to also create rich data for further conceptual analysis, which is published in another article in this special issue, “Paradigmatic dialogue-disagreement in a democratic school: A conceptual analysis” (see Marjanovic-Shane, 2023b)

Radical Proposal for Educational Pluralism and The State’s Educational Neutrality Policy

Currently, in institutionalized education, the balance between global and local forces is skewed in favor of the global through the State (and University) monopoly on educational philosophy. We think that the local has to be prioritized over the global in the balance of these forces. In our view, this promotion should occur both in depth (through open pedagogical experimentation and democratization, defining local values, creating a global dialogue), AND in breadth (through providing opportunities for students and parents to join and financially afford it). We propose that education has to be separated from the State. In our proposal, the State should focus on providing financial access to K-12 education for all citizens through redistribution of taxes while constraining itself through pedagogical neutrality: accepting any educational philosophy for public funding. In our paper, we will consider some of many diverse concerns raised by our colleagues in response to our radical proposal of the State’s educational neutrality, organized in a question-answer format

Freedom, dialogue, and education in a democratic school

This article is based on two interviews between Jim Rietmulder, the founder and lead staff at The Circle School (in Harrisburg, PA), and Ana Marjanovic-Shane, an Independent Scholar and a Co-Editor of this Special Issue. We discuss and examine the daily practice and the philosophical approach of a particular democratic school as we discuss democratic education in general. The main purpose of these interviews has been to introduce democratic education and explore the place for dialogic pedagogy in a democratic school, where the students are free to choose what to study, when to study, in what ways they want to study, with whom they want to study, etc. What happens to dialogic pedagogy if the students are not engaged around the same topics together? The question is whether the students’ legitimate status of free persons with equal rights of opinion and decision-making also creates opportunities and conditions for the students to engage in the critical dialogic examinations of the world, of their life and learning, and of their desires, motivations, and values

Promoting students’ ownership of their own education through critical dialogue and democratic self-governance

We define genuine education as students’ active leisurely pursuit of critical examination of the self, life, society and the world. It is driven by the person’s interests, inquiries, needs, tensions, and puzzlements. Thus, it is based on the students’ ownership of their own education, rather than on the society’s needs and impositions on the students. Hence, genuine education cannot be forced on the students, but rather the students need to be supported and guided to find and pursue their own education as their existential need. We view genuine education as students’ authorship based on the students’ learning activism. In our opinion, the primary condition for the students’ ownership of their education is the students’ freedom to participate in making decisions about their education. In our paper, we discuss pedagogical experimentation aimed at promoting learning activism and ownership of their own education through critical dialogue and democratic self-governance.However, to our surprise, we found out that merely engaging students in decision making about their own education does not work for many students. After several years of practicing the Open Syllabus pedagogical regime in our undergraduate and graduate classes, we have experienced and abstracted two major mutually related problems: a problem of “culture” and a problem of “self-failure.” The issue of “culture” involved a tension between building a new democratic educational culture while practicing it. We also found that our undergraduate and graduate education students do not follow their own freely chosen educational commitments, and thus they feel betrayed by themselves. Analyzing students’ reflections on the self-failures, we found that they felt pressured by life and institutional survival and necessities. Because of that, they did not have the luxury of prioritizing their own educational self-commitments. In response to this and other concerns, we developed a hybrid pedagogical regime, called Opening Syllabus. We focus on tensions within this new, hybrid pedagogical regime, by analyzing students’ reflections and contributions in class