PETAL

Bakhtin, Dialogism, and This Week’s Theory Tuesday Discussion

This week I had the distinct pleasure of giving the Theory Tuesday talk at USA’s College of Education. The title of my talk was “Bakhtin, Dialogism, and a Novel Approach to Interaction,” and it focused on how Mikhail Bakhtin’s thought can be applied to how we think about delivering instruction online. And while my research deals mostly with Bakhtin’s concept of novelness, the majority of my talk dealt with his better known concept of dialogism.

2

The term “dialogism” is often misunderstood to simply mean “concerning dialogue.” It certainly does have many similarities with “dialogue,” and you could say that most forms of dialogue would be considered dialogic. However, when the word “dialogic” (or “dialogism”) is used in most academic/theoretical discussions, the Bakhtinian sense of the word is usually invoked, and it is important to point out that dialogism goes well beyond two people talking and essentially includes any form of two-way semantic interchange so that it can be between speakers, but also between texts or even within texts, as well as between readers and texts.

One way to think about it is as a kind of interactive textuality, and by that I am invoking Roland Barthes's concept of "Text" (as opposed to a "work"—a work sits on a library shelf, whereas a Text comes alive in the mind of the reader), so that, in this sense, dialogism happens when there is interaction between the reader and the text. Of course the marks on the page don't change, but the play of signifieds generated by those marks does change in the experience or consciousness of the reader. I should also note that we should be thinking of "texts" here in the Derridean sense that any collection of signifiers is a text: it doesn't have to just be words on a page.

The important thing, however, is that a strong understanding of dialogism can help us rethink how we deliver the “texts” that constitute our teaching practice that can fundamentally alter and improve how we teach and how students learn.