Narrative Dialogism in National Memory

This chapter examines how the meanings of national narratives are shaped by their context of use. The introduction and first section lay out the notion of “narrative dialogism.” This is followed by a section on “hidden dialogism” that examines how narratives can subtly, but powerfully respond to one another in ways that shape their meaning. A discussion between Vladimir Putin and a British journalist is used as an illustration. The next section concerns “authoritative and internally persuasive discourse,” which involve more condensed forms of narrative dialogism. The notion of authoritative discourse can be harnessed to address how individuals take over the official discourse and memory of the state. An example from a classroom in Soviet Estonia is used to clarify this form of dialogism. The next section on “bivocalism” examines a kind of double-voicedness that involves tentative, ambivalent ways of speaking about the past in which Georgians are both heroic defenders of national honor and self-condemning for being traitors. The final major section of the chapter is on national narrative projects (NNPs), which are unlike specific narratives, narrative templates, and other narrative forms because they do not conclude with a final event. Instead, they tell a story that is in progress such as “America’s Quest for a More Perfect Democratic Union,” “Russia’s Spiritual Mission” as reflected in the story of Moscow as the Third Rome, and “China’s Quest as the Central Kingdom.”

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.

Authoritative discourse in a locally-published ELT textbook in Thailand

This study examines cultural contents in a locally-published English language teaching (ELT) textbook for primary 6 students in Thailand. It aims to investigate whether the locally-published textbook depicts sources and themes of cultures in a way that perpetuate and reproduce dominant ideologies and how cultural contents in the locally-published textbook were dealt with by an English teacher in the classroom. Grounded on Bakhtin’s notions of authoritative discourse and internally persuasive discourse, the findings revealed that there were mismatches between the cultural representation in the textbook and students’ lived experiences. Concerning how cultural contents were represented in the classroom, there was no evidence that the teacher assisted learners to forge effective linkages between authoritative discourse and their everyday life. The findings are discussed regarding how cultural contents are ideologically depicted in the textbook and how the cultural contents adversely affect students’ learning experience. Implications and recommendations for textbook authors, language teachers, and future research are presented.

“We Know for a Fact”: Dyslexia Interventionists and the Power of Authoritative Discourse

Although researchers have studied dyslexia for over a century, there is still much debate about how dyslexia differs from other reading difficulties and how to support students labeled dyslexic. Nevertheless, dyslexia policy and practice are steeped in authoritative discourse that speaks of a definitive definition, unique characteristics, and prescribed intervention programs that are not well supported by research. In Texas, and increasingly in other states, only educators trained in these programs are considered qualified to provide intervention for students identified as dyslexic. In contrast to earlier research, which found that the word dyslexia decreased teachers’ confidence and feelings of self-efficacy, the dyslexia interventionists we interviewed expressed a high degree of confidence and certainty about dyslexia and the interventions they used. Bakhtin’s notion of authoritative and internally persuasive discourse helped us think about the reasons for these findings and how to initiate a broader and more inclusive conversation about dyslexia.

Knowing and interpreting prekindergarten policy: A Bakhtinian analysis

Many state-funded prekindergarten (preK) programs are implemented through school-community partnerships, which has been promoted as a way to increase preK access, to meet the needs of families, and to ensure program quality (Schumacher, Ewen, Hart, & Lombardi, 2005). In spite of the potential benefits of such partnerships, there are also challenges to bringing together the K-12 and ECE systems (McCabe & Sipple, 2011). In this paper I use Bakhtin’s (1981) notions of authoritative and internally persuasive discourse to analyze the discourse that staff members at a Lakeville, Wisconsin, ECE partner site used to situate their approach to assessment in opposition to state and district assessment policy. ECE partner site staff drew on their institution’s long history and strong sense of best practice in early education to characterize required preK assessments as unnecessary, too aligned with the elementary grades, and a duplication of other approaches to assessment that they valued. Yet, even as they resisted the assessments, ECE partners’ internally persuasive discourse shifted slightly over time; staff members conceded that some aspects of the assessment policy had a positive effect on their program. This discursive analysis provides insight into some of the challenges associated with bringing together the ECE and K-12 systems. It points to the need for policy to address the particular challenges faced by ECE partners as they encounter new mandates in public preK and for the need to ensure that partnerships are characterized by mutual understanding.