Chronotopes in education: Conventional and dialogic

Eugene Matusov

doi:10.5195/dpj.2015.107

Abstract

Bakhtin defines chronotope in his literary dialogic theory as the unity of time and space where events occur. Here, in this conceptual paper, I expand and apply this notion to education, discuss, and illustrate the three major espoused educational chronotopes that I abstracted in my analysis of educational practices around Dialogic Pedagogy. Frist is the Assignment Chronotope based on a type of monologic pedagogy, the most common in conventional, but also in some innovative, schools, focusing on making students arrive at preset curricular endpoints. Second is the Dialogic Provocation Chronotope based on narrowly defined dialogic pedagogy and involving promotion of the students’ responsive critical authorship. Third is the Journey Chronotope focusing on promoting the students’ self-assignments and self-initiated educational journeys that can propel self-generated critical authorship in a targeted practice (or a network of practices). Educational examples, concerns, and consequences of these chronotopes are considered.

Highlights

Bakhtin defines chronotope in his literary dialogic theory as the unity of time and space where events occur
The teacher’s dialogic provocation differs from the teacher’s assignment of A-Chronotope, described above, because the teaching provocation is aimed at revealing and provoking the students’ position, thinking, feeling, ideas, perception, creativity, collaboration, and “situational interest” not fully known and predicted by the teacher – i.e., critical authorship, – rather than at making the student arrive to some curricular endpoint preset by the teacher
I have discussed the three major espoused educational chronotopes: 1) the Assignment Chronotope, the most common in the conventional schools, focuses on making the students to arrive at the preset curricular endpoints; 2) the Dialogic Provocation Chronotope, which is based on narrowly defined dialogic pedagogy and involving promotion of the students’ responsive critical authorship; and

Summary

Introduction

Bakhtin defines chronotope in his literary dialogic theory as the unity of time and space where events occur. In this A-chronotope, the ontological aspect of the chronotope (i.e., the physical timespace perceived by the participants) is characterized by the participants’ normative expectations about the students’ unconditional cooperation to the teacher’s demands that the teacher (and the school institution) define as appropriate and educational.

Results

Conclusion