Can dialogic eventness be created?

ABSTRACT

Turning educational ideas into meaningful learning requires planning for uncertainty. This article presents Bakhtin’s key concept of eventness as an essential aspect of defining dialogic space. To Bakhtin an event is something happening here and now, with a degree of open-ended uncertainty tied to what will happen next. Acknowledging this uncertainty—or eventness—might help researchers and practitioners grasp and support the spirit of dialogue in activities aiming for genuine student participation, which is a core concept in recent curricular reforms in Norway. This article discusses eventness as a hub for dialogic principles, illustrated by examples from student group conversations on literature in Norwegian lower secondary school. The challenge of creating dialogic space is discussed with reference to Bakhtin’s general idea of authorship.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/00405841.2024.2307838

Additional resources

1. Lefstein, A., & Snell, J. (2014). Better than best practice: Developing teaching and learning through dialogue. Routledge.

This book provides an overview of approaches to dialogic teaching. What is unique, is the pragmatic approach to what it is possible to achieve in the classroom. The authors fully acknowledge the complexity of the teacher situation and provide commented examples of classroom events that contain dialogic qualities, even if they are not perfect. The main point to be taken from this book is the reminder that what is good is often better than best practice.

2. Mortimer, E., & Scott, P. (2003). Meaning making in secondary science classrooms. Open University Press.

This book is exemplary clear in the introduction to the theories of Bakhtin and Vygotsky as complementary. On this foundation they introduce a framework for analyzing and planning teaching followed by three extended cases. The book is about science education in secondary school, but key ideas and cases are highly suggestive for other subjects as well.

3. Holquist, M. (1990). Dialogism: Bakhtin and his world. Routledge.

This book is an interpretation of Bakhtin’s work as “dialogism” and displays perspectives on existence, language and novelness conceived of as dialogue, and also make meaningful connections between ideas and concepts that occur at different times in Bakhtin’s career. Holquist suggests that dialogism is a form of architectonics (a word Bakhtin used in his early writings) and as such a science of relations.

Notes

1. In the analysis we explored speech distribution, and found that all students contributed to the conversation, and also substantively—even the ones in the zone of teacher uneasiness (B2 and G2 in the conversation cited above was her most critical concerns, see Sønneland & Skaftun, 2017 for a detailed analysis).