Abstract
Deeply engaging the students in education is one of the strongest pedagogical desires of most educators. The desire is to make all students fascinated with a targeted educational subject, so they become active and enthusiastic in studying it. Student engagement is a primary marker of the quality of education. A disengaged student learns little or not at all and often disrupts the teacher and other, engaged students. Progressive educators’ belief expressed by the American educator Jerome Bruner is that “any subject could be taught to any child at any age in some form that was honest” (Bruner, Actual minds, possible words (p. 129). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986). The question is how an educator can find this “honest” way of teaching that creates “an educational vortex” of fascination for every student, which forcefully pulls them in to any curricular topic each moment of the lesson. In other words, the task of the educational vortex is to make students like, if not even passionately love, any academic subject and curricular theme that the society (or the teacher) finds important for them to learn. In this chapter we examine ways that Bakhtinian educators conceptualize and orchestrate an educational vortex in their practice. We discuss if it is always possible to achieve an educational vortex for every student’s engagement in every subject and whether the lack of an educational vortex is necessarily a marker of poor education. Finally, we discuss whether an educational vortex is even desirable as a pedagogical goal.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
Tara’s question is about Case#30, by Bakhtin, that was a part of our book in the first draft. The reader can refer to this in the following published text (Bakhtin, 2004).
- 3.
Students’ rights to remain silent in the class and not to reply to the teacher’s question or explain why they are silent, similar to the Fifth Amendment to the US Constitution, which gives witnesses and criminal suspects the right to remain silent to avoid incriminating themselves (Matusov, 2015; Matusov & Marjanovic-Shane, 2017; Shor, 1996).
- 4.
<<Robi Kroflič, feedback reply (2018-04-26): Yes , but isn’t a task of a teacher to help a student discover his or her ontological need?>>
- 5.
A reference to the definition of torture in the US Constitution.
- 6.
<<Robi Kroflič, feedback reply (2018-04-26): On the topic of student’s authenticity see D. Cooper’s idea of three concepts of authenticity: Polonian, Dadaistic, and real authenticity (which is, in my opinion, always dialogical: “Resoluteness, as authentic Being-one’s-self, does not detach Dasein from its world, does not isolate it as a free-floating ‘I.’” (Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, p. 238). D. Cooper (2011), Authenticity and Learning (Nietzsche’s Educational Philosophy) [London and New York: Routledge]>>
- 7.
Watch an interview with an alumnus of Summerhill, a Democratic school in UK, who chose not learning to read and write—he did not attend any formal class at Summerhill: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o58xTHGYzIY. Later, as an adult he got a degree in economics. In our view, although his life pathway was not easy and straight, his love of learning on his own and confidence of coping with emerging challenges that he developed in Summerhill seemed to enable him to learn later when a need and desire emerged in him. He taught himself how to read and write when he needed it. This Summerhill alumnus experience constitutes an interesting hypothesis that the best “preparation for the future life” is a student’s intense engagement in education about the student’s life at hand. This hypothesis has to be tested.
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Matusov, E., Marjanovic-Shane, A., Gradovski, M. (2019). Chapter 2.3: The Educational Vortex in Bakhtinian Pedagogy. In: Dialogic Pedagogy and Polyphonic Research Art. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-58057-3_6
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