A student's right to freedom of education and a teacher's fiduciary obligation to support it: A reply to the commentaries

I feel honored to receive so many deep, critical, supportive, expanding, and thought-provoking commentaries on my original paper “A student’s right to freedom of education” from undergraduate university students, educators, and educational researchers. These commentaries involve different genres: on-the-margin contextual comments, theoretical essays, ethnographies of their pedagogical practices, reflective sharing of good and bad personal educational experiences, personal authorial opinions, critiques, students’ course evaluations, analysis of science-fiction literature, investigation of Bakhtin’s biography, video replies, a list of questions, and so on. Once Socrates complained about the print text that it is impossible to ask the text new questions – the text won’t reply to these questions. In this special essay, we tried to overcome this problem by involving each other in address-reply commentaries on each other’s texts. We want to invite the readers of this special issue to join us in our dialogues of agreement and disagreement.                In my reply to the commentaries, I want to focus on the issues raised by the commentators that most touched me. This focus is on the relationship between a student’s authorial education and a teacher’s authorial teaching, where “teacher” is understood on a range between an individual educator and the entire society. I want to apologize in advance if I left out important concerns that some of the commentators wanted me to address (feel free to raise it again on the margin) if I severely misinterpreted their idea or point (please correct me on the margin). Here I focused on the following six major issues raised by the commentators. The first issue is raised by several undergraduate students from Canada, Russia, and South Korea about the possibility (and reality) of some students actively rejecting their freedom of education. Isn’t it a case for rejection of my call for a student’s right to freedom of education? The second issue raised by many commentators is about imaginary and real cases when foisted education is effective and even, arguably, more effective than student-owned education. Do these cases defeat my overall argument that student’s freedom of education is required by education itself? The third issue was introduced by my colleague and a proponent of self-directed learning Kevin Currie-Knight when he asked a deceptively simple question of what I mean by “student.” Usually, the role of a student is defined either by the institution or by the teacher, which implicitly goes against the spirit of my claim for a student’s right to freedom of education. The fourth issue eloquently raised by an Ecuadorian undergraduate exchange student, Juan Francisco Poveda, studying at the Kyung Hee University in Seoul, about whether education must be subordinated to the needs of the society. Fifth, I consider the relationship between the education-for-myself and the education-for-the-other, the new terms introduced by my Russian colleagues. My overall vista in considering this relationship is authorship: the student’s educational authorship or the teacher’s pedagogical authorship. In a disagreement with some commentators and in an agreement with some other commentators, I argue that the teacher’s pedagogical authorship must be subordinated to the student’s educational authorship through the teacher’s pedagogical fiduciary obligation. Finally, I will revisit the Kantian educational paternalism by considering the two, arguably, most powerful and extreme cases for foisted education: foisted education for the survival of the society and foisted education for a student’s agency awakening. In my conclusion, I will summarize the presented reasons for why a student’s freedom is needed for education and briefly discuss how to test my claims

A student’s right to freedom of education

This conceptual essay, which opens the special issue, examines why a student’s right to freedom of education – the right for a student to define their own education – is so crucial for the education itself. Four diverse educational approaches are considered: training, closed socialization, open socialization, and critical examination, along with the Bakhtinian dialogic pedagogy to reveal the need for freedom of education within each of the approaches and the pedagogy. The eight aspects of the right to freedom are explicated. Three major objections against the right are considered and rebuked: 1) the Kantian paradox of autonomy and paternalism in education, 2) the paradox of learning and ignorance, and 3) fear of non-participation in education without coercion. The legitimate limitations of the right are discussed. Finally, the two major pathways to the right – radical and gradual – are analyzed. I sent the earlier draft of the paper to the Dialogic Pedagogy journal community, asking for critical commentaries. Many people submitted their critical commentaries involving their agreements, disagreements, associative readings, extensions, evaluations, and so on. My paper, their commentaries constitute this special, and my reply constitutes this special issue. Three people – David Kirshner, Belkacem TAIEB, and Jim Rietmulder – chose to provide commentaries on the margins. I included most of their comments on the margins as a new genre to promote a critical dialogue in our readers. Also, Belkacem TAIEB and Matthew Shumski submitted short commentaries that I included, below, at the end of this article as Appendix I and II. Jim Cresswell shared the manuscript with his undergraduate psychology students, and one student volunteered to add her commentary. Shelly Price-Jones shared it with her international undergraduate students studying English at a South Korean university. Twenty-one of them chose to provide a video reply. I selected a few of them that attracted my attention. Finally, I chose to address some of the issues brought in the presented critical commentaries either as my reply on the margins or at the end of this special issue. This should not be taken as “the final word” in the debate, but rather a dialogic response inviting other responses in the authors and in the audience

Relationships between Democratic Education and Dialogic Education: Conclusion

In my conclusion, I want to return back to the issue raised by the co-editors of this special issue: what are the relationships between Democratic Education and Dialogic Education, between dialogue and democracy? For that, I consider the following three topics: 1) their polysemy, multiple meanings, of these two concepts, 2) their complementarity; and 3) their tensions and incompatibilities

The relationship between education and learning and its consequences for dialogic pedagogy

Education is often viewed as formalized learning. I argue that the relationship between education and formalized learning is more complex and profound. In this conceptual essay, I examine the relationship between education and learning. Specifically, I discuss the cases when learning is not education and education is not learning. I argue that learning becomes educational when the person, the learner themselves, appreciates their learning. When learning is not appreciated by the learner, it does not constitute that person’s education. Thus, education is an ephemeral subjective construct, prone to appear and disappear as the person’s attitude to their learning changes. Also, education can be non-learning-based when it involves insights – abrupt, discontinuous changes of the person’s subjectivity – which are not caused by and rooted in the person’s experiences. Like learning, for an insight to be educational, it has to be perceived and appreciated by the person. I argue that human life consists of the flow of learning and insight. Noticing learning and insight by the person involves discontinuity of the person’s subjectivity, participation in activities, and other people that is recognized by others and the person. I discuss diverse forms of the person’s appreciation of learning and insights that constitute education. These forms vary from the behaviorist appreciation, as its lowest form, to the critical appreciation through critical dialogue as its highest form. Finally, I consider the consequences of defining education through a person’s appreciation of the transformation of their subjectivity for dialogic pedagogy

Ideological and real socialism of my Soviet childhood, schooling, and teaching: Multi-consciousness

Through my autobiographical reflective ethnography of my Soviet childhood, schooling and teaching, I try to investigate the phenomenon of political multiple consciousness that I observed in the USSR and its development in children. In my analysis, I abstracted eight diverse types of consciousness, five of which are political in their nature

Chronotopes in education: Conventional and dialogic

Bakhtin defines chronotope in his literary dialogic theory as the unity of time and space where events occur.  Here, in this conceptual paper, I expand and apply this notion to education, discuss, and illustrate the three major espoused educational chronotopes that I abstracted in my analysis of educational practices around Dialogic Pedagogy. Frist is the Assignment Chronotope based on a type of monologic pedagogy, the most common in conventional, but also in some innovative, schools, focusing on making students arrive at preset curricular endpoints. Second is the Dialogic Provocation Chronotope based on narrowly defined dialogic pedagogy and involving promotion of the students’ responsive critical authorship. Third is the Journey Chronotope focusing on promoting the students’ self-assignments and self-initiated educational journeys that can propel self-generated critical authorship in a targeted practice (or a network of practices). Educational examples, concerns, and consequences of these chronotopes are considered

Chronotopes in education: Conventional and dialogic

Bakhtin defines chronotope in his literary dialogic theory as the unity of time and space where events occur.  Here, in this conceptual paper, I expand and apply this notion to education, discuss, and illustrate the three major espoused educational chronotopes that I abstracted in my analysis of educational practices around Dialogic Pedagogy. Frist is the Assignment Chronotope based on a type of monologic pedagogy, the most common in conventional, but also in some innovative, schools, focusing on making students arrive at preset curricular endpoints. Second is the Dialogic Provocation Chronotope based on narrowly defined dialogic pedagogy and involving promotion of the students’ responsive critical authorship. Third is the Journey Chronotope focusing on promoting the students’ self-assignments and self-initiated educational journeys that can propel self-generated critical authorship in a targeted practice (or a network of practices). Educational examples, concerns, and consequences of these chronotopes are considered

Pattern-recognition, intersubjectivity, and dialogic meaning-making in education

From a conventional monological view, meaning-making is located in a particular statement. In conventional schools, students are positioned to be enactors of ready-made knowledge and skills on teacher’s demand based on their pattern-recognition and production, rather than to be authors of their own education, learning, knowledge, and meaning. Pattern recognition involves the emergence of active production of diverse potential patterns that may or may not approximate well the targeted pattern (“sprouting”). The sprouting can be guided (“supervised”) by an expert or unguided, mediated or unmediated. These diverse potential patterns are sequentially evaluated about how likely each of them can be close to the targeted pattern. In each evaluation, the probabilistic confidence of some patterns grows while some other patterns decrease. In contrast, according to Bakhtin, meaning-making is defined as the relationship between a genuine, interested, information-seeking, question and serious response to it. From the Bakhtinian dialogic perspective, a statement does not have any meaning until it is viewed as a reply to some question in an internally persuasive discourse. A student’s meaning-making process starts with a genuine, interested, information-seeking, question raised by the student. At least, when a student cannot yet formulate this genuine question, they have to be pregnant with such a question, experiencing a certain puzzlement, uneasiness, curiosity, tension, and so on. Another aspect of dialogic meaning-making is interaddressivity. A student is interested in other people: 1) in what other people may think and how they feel about it; however these people define this it, and 2) in other people as such – in what they are doing, feeling, relating, and thinking about; in the relationship with these people; in the potential that these people may realize and offer; and so on

Teacher as a benevolent dictator: Promoting a culture of democratic dialogic education in a conventional university

This essay provides a grounded critical discussion of why a professor might limit their undergraduate students’ sovereignty of educational decision-making to promote an opportunity for a democratic dialogic culture in the class situated in a conventional university. On the one hand, both democracy and dialogue require voluntary participation by the students in their education and dialogue and their sovereignty over collective decision-making and educational reasoning. On the other hand, this participation is based on the students’ socialization in a special culture which might often be at odds with their sovereignty. It is difficult for many students to freely choose democracy and dialogue in education when they are embedded in a conventional educational institution based on Kantian educational paternalism and foisted education. Also, the students are often culturally unfamiliar with such concepts as “democracy,” “dialogue,” and “self-education,” let alone their practical implications. To address these contradictions, I introduce the notion of the “teacher as a benevolent dictator.” I discuss, problematize, and analyze the forms of this benevolent dictatorship, its potential pitfalls, and promises

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