Mikhail Bakhtin, and the writers associated with him, have come to be recognised as writers of trail-blazing importance. Working in the extraordinarily difficult conditions of Stalinist Russia, they nevertheless produced a body of writing in literary theory, linguistics, the history of the novel, philosophy, … Continue reading
The book represents a multidisciplinary collaboration that highlights the significance of Mikhail Bakhtin’s theories to modern scholarship in the field of language and literacy. The chapters examine such important questions as: What resources do students bring from their home/community environments … Continue reading
Dialogue has suffered a long eclipse in the history of rhetoric and in the history of philosophy. Socrates, its most important early practitioner, left no writings of his own, and his voice has become inextricably merged with the writings of … Continue reading
The whole idea of being a “participant,” of being an involved actor as distinct from being an “external observer” standing over against or apart from what one is learning about or researching into, is crucial in everything that follows below. … Continue reading
Bakhtin claims that students must learn to write lively prose, but they will not until teachers have a grammar of style that links syntax to stylistic qualities such as “lively” and “creative.” It is, however, unlikely that such a grammar … Continue reading
How can we understand socially constituted selfhood? H. Hermans has addressed this question with the notion of the Dialogical Self that he draws from the philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin. We focus on Bakhtin’s discussion of realism in relation to how he … Continue reading
What we need, I want to claim, is not knowledge in the form of theoretical representations, but of a very different, much more practical kind. My concern today, then, is with the conditions, the relations between us, that might make … Continue reading
Drawing on the works of Martin Buber and Mikhail Bakhtin, the author explores the roles that dialogue, laughter, and spontaneity play in the education of the whole person. Using Mikhail Bakhtin’s concepts of dialogue and carnival, and in connection with … Continue reading
This dissertation develops an ontological understanding of dialogue that is then used to reconsider the forms and purposes of schooling. Employing the works of Martin Buber and Mikhail Bakhtin, the work departs from the literature on schooling that treats dialogue … Continue reading
In Voices of the Mind, James Wertsch outlines an approach to mental functioning that stresses its inherent cultural, historical, and institutional context. A critical aspect of this approach is the cultural tools or “mediational means” that shape both social and … Continue reading
