The background of the article is an interest in theories of learning and the metaphors of learning they build on and propagate. The basic argument is that the discursive construction of learning plays a central role in theoretical perspectives in research but also in discussions of societal issues in a wider sense. An initial observation is that current metaphors of learning oscillate between emphasizing socializing/reproductive dimensions and perspectives which foreground new-thinking transformations of existing collective knowledge; the culturally given. Hence, our aim is to explore conceptions of learning underpinning dominant theoretical perspectives as behaviorism, cognitivism, pragmatism, and various sociocultural traditions, in the light of this theoretical tension. Our conclusion is that the views of communication and learning inherent to the radical dialogic perspective on communication that stresses the unfinalizable nature of knowing, offered by Bakhtin, add to our understanding of how learning may be conceptualized in contemporary society. Such a dialogic perspective, emphasizing open-ended agency, plurality of voices, and performative potentials of creatively expressing opinions when learning from each other, offers a perspective on learning worth considering in times of diversity, unpredictable risks, and the need for critical self-reflexivity.

One important implication for educators is therefore that non-affirmative education is emphatically critical of educational ideas, ideologies, and curricular policies that overemphasise either socialisation to existing norms in society or the fostering of values that form a predetermined future. In school didactics, the contents of teaching are located at the very centre of the teaching/studying/learning process, maintaining a distinction between the content as intended, as practised, as experienced, and as evaluated. A challenge for both didactics and life-world phenomenology is to what extent they contain conceptually satisfying answers to the question of how teaching is seen as related to learning: in other words, how they explain pedagogical interaction as a movement from one ‘shared world’ to another. Conceptualising subject didactics for school settings is thus different from subject didactics aimed for understanding teaching, studying, and learning outside school settings. In philosophy, there are various ways to understand subject-centred and inter-subjectivity based conceptions of subjectivity.

Memory research has traditionally conceived of memory as an individual skill. Its inherent dialogicality has consequently been neglected and, moreover, little attention has been paid to its communicative functions in the educational practice. The aim of this case study is to explore the role of conversational remembering in preschool education. Using a dialogic lens in the spirit of Bakhtin, the research questions concern pedagogical premises for conversational remembering: how preschool children make sense of conversational remembering and how discursive frameworks might facilitate or restrict young students’ creative reasoning. The empirical case contains transcribed interviews and interaction data from three preschool children (aged 5-6-years old) and their instructing teacher, participating in an educational game about parts of the world. The children’s creative remembering did not merely reveal communicative functions of cognitive memories. They also displayed a sense-making discourse that vividly propelled peers’ reasoning into imaginary play worlds, conceptualised as a narrative play world discourse. This particular discourse contrasts the other key discourse at play: the institutional preschool discourse. Finally, I discuss the findings in relation to the issues of teacher roles and children’s agency in schooling. Allowing for students’ salient voices, as the teacher did in this case, clearly facilitated both peers’ conversational remembering and creative reasoning in and through dialogic spaces.

Learning and development generally cannot be observed per se. As scholars we have to draw conclusions about such central psychological processes by making inferences from indicators of some kind. This implies that metaphors play a central role when we make such phenomena into objects of analysis. Dominant conceptions view learning as a means of achieving a pre-given endpoint understood in terms of mastery of fixed skills. In sociocultural and pragmatist perspectives such an interpretation appears as reductionistic, due to its finalizing character and the assumption of a closure of epistemological meaning-making. As an alternative, education, learning and development may be conceptualized metaphorically as increasing capacities of cultural and dialogic participation. We discuss and exemplify a number of significant learning metaphors, suggesting alternative and competing conceptions of learning and development, which contribute to dialogic growth as an element of education and everyday practices. 

Within research on examination cheating, a common assumption is that plagiarism in the context of examination is increasing epidemically. A uniform definition of plagiarism does not exist, but plagiarism is the category most frequently used when students at Swedish universities are notified and sanctioned for deception. Text Comparison is frequently presented as an effective technology for addressing plagiarism. Plagiarism Detection Services (PDS) are used for detecting text overlaps, particularly in higher education. While Higher Education Institutions in some countries appear to have uncritically accepted the use of text comparison technology, the reception in other countries have been ambivalent or even critical.

The present project studies consequences of the use of text comparison through teachers meaning making regarding the pedagogical task to grade students and the moral task, to report students that try to deceive. We hypothesise that teachers’ epistemological views are contingent on technology and discourses on technology. Text comparisont echnology, therefore, runs the danger of introducing consequential biases to the assessment of student performance. The material has been gathered in five focus group conversations. Focus has been introduced through the presentation of reports from a Plagiarism Detection System. A topical analysis has been performed on the transcribed conversations. From our results, we conclude that teachers’ epistemological views are contingent on technology and discourses on technology. Text comparison, therefore, runs the danger of introducing a consequential bias to the assessment of student performance leaving students open to the accusation about deception.

This study concerns children’s aesthetic meaning making in terms of how it is constituted musically, emotionally, and dialogically. We investigate how two 10-year-old children collaboratively engage in the task of teaching and learning to sing a song. The research questions concern what musical and emotional expressions the participants responsively construct and how these expressions are addressed, both explicitly and implicitly. Adopting a perspective grounded in Mikhail Bakhtin’s dialogue philosophy and more recent educational research in this tradition, the study explores how children’s affective reasoning is co-constructed in the process of song sharing that is also a sense-making enterprise. Interactive talk episodes, including facial displays, are transcribed, analyzed, and discussed. We demonstrate, from moment to moment, how emotive expressivity comes into play and how it refers to double dialogicality, both at the interpersonal and activity-specific level. Finally, on the basis of our findings, we discuss conflicting artistic and educational values.

This paper is a theoretical paper that highlights some implications of a dialogic ontology in educational research. However, for the sake of clarity we will very succinctly setting off to describe the background which is our empirical point of departure. The aim of our current empirical study is to explore how 12 adult students in a Swedish secondary school interpret the school task of doing ‘independent’ project works, addressing the questions of how students talk and reason about their own processes and values of the activity-specific task. In brief, the method is focus group conversations (three participant groups) and the result reveals the fact that the participants appreciated their common teacher, who was considered as a very successful guide. The teacher systematically provided orders, instruction, feedback and, most importantly, planning and staging in a stepwise fashion. In doing so she paradoxically also indirectly fostered her students to be even less independent, that is, more easily adapted to the institutional requirements without bothering too much about how to manage the tasks themselves. Project work is commonly described as a self-regulated form of the task; a common mode of student work in Swedish schools (Eklöf, Nilsson & Ottosson, 2014). As Bergqvist & Säljö (2004) highlight, it could further be conceived of as a disciplining, student-centered practice that is widely used to produce self-organizing learners. Although the students are supposed to work independently, they are considerably dependent on the instructional, organizational and evaluative work of the teachers (Åberg, 2015).

Drawing on a sociocultural perspective on learning, as we do, the notion of individualistic independency is well-known as a problematic stance (e.g., Wertsch, 1998). In the sociocultural version of dialogism social interdependence is a dialogic premise on both the epistemological and ontological level (Linell, 2009). Wegerif (2008) describes how the functional role of difference between learners’ voices is of significance to the Bakhtin-influenced take on multi-voiced dialogue (cf. Kullenberg & Pramling, 2016; Lefstein & Snell, 2014). In such a dialogic framing the teacher is not striving to overcome these differences between, for example, the student’s and the teacher’s opinions. Such recognition holds interpersonal difference seriously and moreover address a fairly uncommon approach to the educational notion of intersubjective agreements (Matusov, 1996, 2015; Wegerif, 2011).

This dialogic approach stresses the issue of student agency and, thus, democratic values of teaching acts. When respecting and promoting students’ own voices a genuine interaction of consciousnesses is possible to create throughout the pedagogical dialogues (cf. Bakhtin, 2004; Matusov, 2015). Hence, what constitutes a genuine interaction is the other-orientation toward the difference of the other, recognizing the learning potentials of the gap between distinct consciousnesses. Philosophically speaking, it further suggests the conceptual need to stress alterity in other-orientation (cf. Linell, 2009).

Recalling our examined students, they report a situated learning that is basically grounded in a “teacher-pleasing relationship” (Matusov, 2011). While working successfully they are heavily dependent on their teacher’s agency rather than developing their own. Indeed, as sociocultural scholars we might notice that there exists a considerably confined teacher agency as well; an agency which is clearly bound to pre-determined institutional goals. This contextual condition did not facilitate the student (and teacher) opportunity to learn and experience something radically unpredicted, for example, being dialogically surprised or challenged by the genuine other. The students in our study do not neither regard themselves as truly independent nor creatively personalized. Due to a Bakhtinian approach to education, independency is an illusion anyhow, but being personalized, rather than socialized, in and through education is a central dialogue theoretical issue (Lobok, 2014).

In our fully elaborated paper we will dwell upon the dialogue philosophical issue on other-orientation and the role of alterity, briefly described above. In addition we intend to provide a more detailed sketch of our study and the implications for dialogic pedagogy, informed by Bakhtin and educational scholars within the field.

References

Åberg, M. (2015). Doing project work: the interactional organization of tasks, resources, and instructions. Diss. Göteborg: Göteborgs universitet.

Bakhtin, M. M. (2004). Dialogic origin and dialogic pedagogy of grammar: Stylistics in teaching Russian language in secondary school. Journal of Russian & East European Psychology, 42(6), 12-49.

Bergqvist, K. & Säljö, R. (2004). Learning to plan: A study of reflexivity and discipline in modern pedagogy. In J.V.D. Linden & P. Renshaw (Eds.) Dialogic learning: Shifting perspectives to learning, instruction and teaching (pp. 109-124). Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers.

Eklöf, A., Nilsson, L.-E., & Ottosson, T. (2014). Instructions, Independence and Uncertainty: student framing in self-regulated project work. European Educational Research Journal, 13(6), 646-660.

Kullenberg, T & Pramling, N. (2016). Learning and knowing songs: a study of children as music teachers. Instructional Science, 44(1), 1-23.

Lefstein, A., & Snell, J. (2014). Better than best practice: Developing teaching and learning through dialogue. London: Routledge.

Linell, P. (2009). Rethinking language, mind, and world dialogically : interactional and contextual theories of human sense-making. Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publ.

Lobok, A. (2014). Education/obrazovanie as an experience of an encounter. Dialogic    Pedagogy: An International Online Journal, 2, S1-S5. DOI: 10.5195/dpj.2014.84.

Matusov, E. (1996). Intersubjectivity without agreement. Mind, Culture, and Activity, 3(1), 25-45.

Matusov, E. (2011). Authorial teaching and learning. In E. J. White & M. A. Peters (Eds.), Bakhtinian pedagogy: Opportunities and challenges for research, policy and practice in education across the globe (pp. 21–46). New York: Peter Lang.

Matusov, E. (2015). Comprehension: A dialogic authorial approach. Culture & Psychology,   21(3), 392-416.

Wegerif, R. (2008). Dialogic or dialectic? The significance of ontological assumptions in research on educational dialogue. British Educational Research Journal, 34(3), 347–361.

Wegerif, R. (2011). Towards a dialogic theory of how children learn to think. Thinking Skills and Creativity, 6, 179-190

Wertsch, J. V. (1998). Mind as action. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

All students in Swedish upper secondary school have to do one mandatory project work course aimed at developing general skills such as independence, initiative, creativity and imagination. The students have to pass the course to receive their upper secondary diploma. Our study aims to investigate how students talk about the task of doing ‘independent’ project works in the diploma course.

Three focus group conversations of totaling twelve students are filmed and analyzed through topic analysis, an analytical approach based on dialogism as theoretical framework. The empirical material is analyzed from a perspective of how the design of the project course and the assessment regime influences the students work. Findings indicate that the students rely heavily on help and instruction from the teacher. They perceive of this help as a crucial asset in passing the diploma course. They state that the kind of help they receive are strongly focused towards the dividing line between pass and fail. Help is hardwired towards the scientific form and the content of their essays are treated as almost uninteresting. Support for independence therefore seems to be significantly restricted in practice. The teacher is in fact working as a facilitator guiding students towards dependence. This is accomplished through framing doing project work as doing template science.

Detta paper är av dialogfilosofiskt slag. Med intentionen att endast föra en filosofisk musikpedagogisk diskussion redovisas därför inte det empiriska underlaget från det artikelprojekt som ligger till grund för bidraget (Kullenberg & Pramling, in press). Med avstamp i ett urval av den musikpedagogiska forskning som gjorts kring problematiken med den instrumentella utbildningsdiskursen, argumenterar jag i liknande anda. Mer precist förs resonemanget med stöd i internationell musikpedagogisk forskning som bygger på Mikhail Bakhtins anti-instrumentella förståelse av såväl mellanmänsklig kommunikation som estetiska uttryckssätt.