Applying bakhtin scholarship on discourse in education: a critical review essay

Educational Theory

Volumn 57, Issue 2, 2007, Pages 215-237

  Matusov, Eugene ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF DELAWARE   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 65249113927     PISSN: 00132004     EISSN: 17415446     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1741-5446.2007.00253.x     Document Type: Article

References (62)

1. Arnetha F. Ball and Sarah Warshauer Freedman, eds., Bakhtinian Perspectives on Language, Literacy, and Learning (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004);
2. and Bonny Norton and Kelleen Toohey, eds., Critical Pedagogies and Language Learning (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
3. For all subsequent references, these two works will be cited in the text as BP and CP, respectively, followed by the specific chapter number and (for quoted material) page number(s).
4. Of Bakhtin's own work, it should be noted that with the exception of one known article on education - M.M. Bakhtin, "Dialogic Origin and Dialogic Pedagogy of Grammar: Stylistics in Teaching Russian Language in Secondary School," Journal of Russian and East European Psychology 42, no. 6 (2004): 12-49 - his scholarship focused on literary material.
5. David Shepherd, "Review of [Arnetha F. Ball and Sarah Warshauer Freedman, eds., Bakhtinian Perspectives on Language, Literacy and Learning]," Russian Review 64, no. 4 (2005): 695.
6. Actually, in his presentation at the Bakhtin conference, Shepherd charged not only educational scholars with misapplying Bakhtin scholarship but also scholars in many other nonphilological fields within the humanities and social sciences (such as psychology and sociology). He singled out education only as a typical example of a larger problem. In a similar line of argument, Emerson introduced and discussed "the divide between 'intrinsic Bakhtinians' (translators, Slavists, textologists, intellectual historians) vs. 'extrinsic' (other professions which find his ideas useful and productive in their own fields)" (Caryl Emerson, personal communication with the author, January 28, 2006). My understanding of her argument is that "internal Bakhtinians" mediate the original texts by Bakhtin for "external Bakhtinians" and thus have to be closely followed by the "external Bakhtinians." I will discuss this point in greater detail further in the essay.
7. See, for example, Jean Lave, Cognition in Practice: Mind, Mathematics, and Culture in Everyday Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).
8. M.M. Bakhtin and P.N. Medvedev, The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship: A Critical Introduction to Sociological Poetics, trans. Albert J. Wehrle (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1985), 14.
9. As I will show in the next section, Freedman and Ball (along with Kelleen Toohey and Bonnie Waterstone in CP, chap. 15) also view ideological becoming as the voluntary assimilation of other discourses. I find this concept of "appropriation," which also stems from Bakhtin, less interesting in the context of education, because without a focus on critical discourse, it easily leads to the traditional pedagogical approach of transmission of knowledge masquerading as dialogical constructivism. 8.
10. M.M. Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, vol. 8, ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999).
11. M.M. Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, vol. 8, ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999).
12. It would be interesting to compare internally persuasive discourse as presented in Knoeller's "Narratives of Rethinking: The Inner Dialogue of Classroom Discourse and Student Writing" and Carol Lee's "Double Voiced Discourse: African American Vernacular English as Resource in Cultural Modeling Classrooms" (BP, chaps. 7 and 6). Both Knoeller and Lee studied classrooms in which the students had to grapple with texts that arguably were not addressed to their community.
13. M.M. Bakhtin, Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M.M. Bakhtin, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1991), 342.
14. See also Elizabeth Ellsworth, "Why Doesn't This Feel Empowering? Working Through the Repressive Myths of Critical Pedagogy," in Feminisms and Critical Pedagogy, ed. Carmen Luke and Jennifer Gore (London: Routledge, 1992), 98
15. The concepts Lin refers to here come from four chapters in James P. Gee, Social Linguistics and Literacies: Ideology in Discourses, 2d ed. (London: Taylor and Francis, 1996).
16. Michael Cole and Laboratory of Comparative Human Cognition, "Kids and Computers: A Positive Vision of the Future," Harvard Educational Review 59, no. 1 (1989): 73-86.
17. For a discussion of management by guilt, see Andy Hargreaves, Changing Teachers, Changing Times: Teachers'Work and Culture in the Postmodern Age (London: Cassell, 1994).
18. Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, 288.
19. Ibid., 235.
20. The wording "Underground Man" may sound sexist in English; however, the original Russian wording does not have any sexist connotation. The same is true of the use of the masculine pronoun "he."
21. Troy Richardson and Sofia Villenas, "'Other' Encounters: Dances with Whiteness in Multicultural Education," Educational Theory 50, no. 2 (2000): 255-273.
22. I found Richardson and Villenas's critique of neo-Marxism, humanism, and democracy based on movements to secure the sovereign rights of indigenous people (for example, indigenismo) and tribalism very interesting. They point out the conflicts between Marxist governments and indigenous movements, for instance. However, their analysis contained no corresponding critique of indigenismo and tribalism. This one-sidedness, I submit, promotes an untested romantic relation to these indigenous movements and thus makes the authors deviate from the regime of internally persuasive critical discourse.
23. In Russian culture, silence has traditionally been highly valued. For example, there is a rather popular Russian proverb "Silence is golden," which has taken on different meanings depending on sociopolitical circumstances. For more on silence in discourse, see Barbara Rogoff, The Cultural Nature of Human Development (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003).
24. M.M. Bakhtin, Speech Genres and Other Late Essays (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986).
25. Shepherd, "Review," 694. In this review, he goes on to acknowledges that Ball and Freedman's collection is "an already rich volume" (p. 695), but not because of its fruitful application of Bakhtin scholarship.
26. As to non-Western countries, based on my personal but limited experience of studying, working, and living in the USSR until the end of the 1980s, I can make the following observation. In the USSR, while Soviet philologists contributed significantly to other fields through their distribution and interpretation of Bakhtin scholarship, Soviet scholars within the social sciences and humanities had more unmediated contact with Bakhtin's original scholarship than scholars in the West.
27. To Gee's credit, when he was seriously interested in Bakhtin's work, he made a very important contribution to this scholarship in the field of education through his book Social Linguistics and Literacies.
28. Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, 293.
29. Ibid., 296.
30. Eugene Matusov, Mark Smith, Maria A. Candela, and Keren Lilu, "'Culture Has No Internal Territory': Culture as Dialogue," in The Cambridge Handbook of Socio-Cultural Psychology, ed. Jaan Valsiner and Alberto Rosa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
31. Lee points to an interesting phenomenon of high school students' "signifying," or mocking their own seriousness in interpreting the movie Sax Cantor Riff. She interprets this phenomenon as an effort by the students to satirize "the very literary quality of the [movie] story" (BP, chap. 6, 138). She refers to Bakhtin's notion of carnival in which the serious official culture of the school that privileges figurative interpretation of a text collides with the laughter of the unofficial culture of peers. An alternative (but not mutually exclusive) explanation for this phenomenon may be that the adolescent students did not want to admit publicly the emotional response that the movie and the classroom discussion evoked in them (out of concern that such feelings would not be seen as "cool" by the relevant others in the class). Lee's interpretation might have been more persuasive if she had interviewed her students about their signifying. In general, given Bakhtin's framework, I think it might have been very informative if Lee had analyzed the emerging addressivity-construction of the audience by the participants-in the classroom discourse.
32. See Bakhtin, Dialogic Imagination and Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics.
33. Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (New York: Routledge, 1992), 6.
34. Specifically, see the contributions of Eileen Landay (BP, chap. 5, 112-113),
35. Judy Kalman (BP, chap. 11, 258), and, of course, Gary Morson (BP, chap. 13).
36. Bakhtin, "Discourse in the Novel," in Dialogic Imagination, ed. Holquist, trans. Emerson and Holquist.
37. Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson, Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1990).
38. See also Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics.
39. For a discussion of intertextuality, see Tzvetan Todorov, Mikhail Bakhtin: The Dialogical Principle (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984).
40. For an analysis of the problem with such "Bakhtinian" concepts, see Morson and Emerson, Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics.
41. Henry C. Morrison, The Practice of Teaching in the Secondary School, rev. ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1931), 135.
42. Bakhtin's position on the desirability of authority in discourse is not as clear as it may appear to be at the first glance. At least in some of his work, it appears that Bakhtin envisioned a unity of authority and internally persuasive discourse: "Both the authority of discourse and its internal persuasiveness may be united in a single word [that is, discourse] - one that is simultaneously authoritative and internally persuasive - despite the profound differences between these two categories of alien discourse. But such unity is rarely given - it happens more frequently that an individual's becoming, an ideological process, is characterized by a sharp gap between these two categories: in one the [authoritarian] word (religious, political, moral, the word of a father, of adults and of teachers etc.) that does not know internal persuasiveness, in the other the internally persuasive word that is denied all privilege, backed up by no authority at all, and is frequently not even acknowledged in society (not by public opinion, nor by scholarly norms, nor by criticism), not even in the legal code. The struggle and dialogic interrelationships of these categories of ideological discourse are what usually determine the history of an individual ideological consciousness" (Bakhtin, Dialogic Imagination, 342). Morson makes an important next step in unpacking the dense, fuzzy, and often polysemic concepts articulated by Bakhtin.
43. See, for example, Diana Baumrind, Current Patterns of Parental Authority (Washington, D.C.: American Psychological Association, 1971);
44. and Kurt Lewin, Ronald Lippit, and Robert K. White, "Patterns of Aggression in Experimentally Created 'Social Climates,"' Journal of Social Psychology 10 (1939): 271- 299. I do not have space here to elaborate on how the nonstructural understanding of authority developed by Bakhtin and Morson contrasts with that of the psychologists mentioned previously. Briefly, the notion of authority is based not on a structural (a)symmetry of power but on a discursive process of legitimization of power. I plan to address this issue in my future work on dialogical pedagogy.
45. See Bruno Latour, Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers Through Society (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1987);
46. and Etienne Wenger, Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
47. It would be interesting to consider other authoritative discourses besides the discourse of control - the discourse of care, for instance -but such analysis is outside the scope of this essay.
48. For more on teachers' concern with control, see Philip W. Jackson, Life in Classrooms (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1968);
49. Dan C. Lortie, Schoolteacher: A Sociological Study (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975);
50. Peter McLaren, Schooling as a Ritual Performance: Towards a Political Economy of Educational Symbols and Gestures, 2d ed. (London and New York: Routledge, 1993);
51. Linda M. McNeil, Contradictions of Control: School Structure and School Knowledge (New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986);
52. Alexander M. Sidorkin, Learning Relations: Impure Education, Deschooled Schools, and Dialogue with Evil (New York: Peter Lang, 2002);
53. and Willard W. Waller, The Sociology of Teaching (New York: JohnWiley and Sons, 1932).
54. Bakhtin, Dialogic Imagination, 81 (emphasis added). It seems to me that, in this context of "pedagogical dialogue," Bakhtin is using "dialogue" as a synonym for "pedagogical interaction" - it does not have the same characteristics as Bakhtin's concept of "dialogue" as a certain quality of discourse (that is, internally persuasive critical discourse).
55. David Skidmore, "From Pedagogical Dialogue to Dialogical Pedagogy," Language and Education 14, no. 4 (2000): 283-296.
56. Bakhtin was a very good teacher himself and seemed to use dialogical pedagogy in his teaching. See M.M. Bakhtin, "Dialogic Origin and Dialogic Pedagogy of Grammar: Stylistics in Teaching Russian Language in Secondary School," Journal of Russian and East European Psychology 42, no. 6 (2004): 12-49;
57. and Eugene Matusov, "Bakhtin's Debit in Educational Research: Dialogic Pedagogy," Journal of Russian and East European Psychology 42, no. 6 (2004): 3-11. However, the issues raised here were not addressed in Bakhtin's essay on education.
58. Ira Shor and Paulo Freire, "What Is the 'Dialogical Method' of Teaching?" Journal of Education 169, no. 3 (1987): 14.
59. For an example of this, see Vivian G. Paley, You Can't Say You Can't Play (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1992).
60. Matusov, "Bakhtin's Debit in Educational Research."
61. Consider the discussion of this point in Nicholas C. Burbules, Dialogue in Teaching: Theory and Practice (New York: Teachers College Press, 1993).
62. Bob Fecho provided such an interesting response to my questions that I decided to share it here: "Although IPD [internally persuasive critical discourse] may not be essential to a classroom and may not occur with the kind of frequency some of us would like, it is not nonexistent in classrooms and is certainly more than accidental. If it remains a goal to shoot for, then so be it" (Bob Fecho, personal communication with the author, January 17, 2006).