Faculty Publications

Idea-Dying in Critical Ontological Democratic Dialogue

Document Type

Article

Journal/Book/Conference Title

Learning, Culture and Social Interaction

Volume

20

First Page

68

Last Page

79

Abstract

In our approach to dialogic pedagogy, the teacher aims to engage students in critical examination, development, and transcendence of their own ideas, values, desires, goals, emotions, perceptions, worldviews, and perspectives, support them in ‘internally persuasive discourse’ (Bakhtin, 1991; Matusov & von Duyke, 2010), in which ‘truth becomes dialogically tested and forever testable’ (Morson, 2004, p. 319). One of the problems for many dialogic pedagogy oriented teachers is that such critical dialogues are not guaranteed to always happen for each important idea. Although the suppression of ideas and repressive silence in traditional monologic classrooms are amply documented, idea-dying has not been sufficiently studied nor understood in educational approaches based on dialogue and promotion of student's voices. In this paper, we investigate the dialogic circumstances, relationships, and dynamics of testing ideas in dialogic education; circumstances under which students’ voices are not heard, not willing to be expressed, and/or are suppressed, and thus die leading to oppressive, productive, or ambivalent silences. We describe and analyze three cases in our own classrooms with critical dialogic pedagogical orientation, in which dialogues nevertheless collapsed and ideas died.

Department

Department of Curriculum and Instruction

Original Publication Date

3-1-2019

DOI of published version

10.1016/j.lcsi.2017.10.001

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