Ana Marjanovic-Shane

Diverse Approaches to Education: Alienated Learning, Closed and Open Participatory Socialization, and Critical Dialogue

We have found ourselves both delighted by and in deep disagreement with van Oers’ article [this issue]. These two evaluative feelings are mutually supported by his work because our disagreements with van Oers have helped us to deepen our own position on the existing diverse approaches to education and develop nuances that we could not have articulated before reading his paper. In our view, van Oers’ major contribution is the clear and coherent articulation of his opposition to alienated, meaningless learning common to conventional schooling, and his effort to offer his alternative for meaningful cultural learning heavily based on Vygotsky’s culturalhistorical approach and Engestrom’s activity theory. Education differs from learning. Not all learning is education. For example, it is doubtful that students learning to hate math would be considered education by any educator. But, in our view, there has been no consensus as to what kind of learning education involves. Conventional schools often define education as students’ dispassionate acquisition of a toolkit of the essential knowledge and skills set up by the society. The assumption of this approach to education is that students will learn this predetermined toolkit of essential knowledge and skills unrelated to the students’ immediate goals and needs, which are often bracketed and delegitimized in the classroom. This essential knowledge and these skills can then be applied later on in life. We call this approach of postponed desire alienated learning . In the alienated learning approach, both curriculum and instruction are predetermined unilaterally by the teacher (and often by curriculum and instruction planners) without seeking

When the footlights are off: a Bakhtinian interrogation of play as postupok

Taking a dialogic approach, this paper examines play from the point of view of the players desire to act upon and through others. As an act-deed (postupok), play is considered as a way of relating to others as well as a means of co-creating and representing subjectivities. With Bakhtins inspiration, play is seen as an act of agency and of becoming. It generates creative events taking place at the boundaries between several simultaneous intersecting worlds in play (‘chronotopes’). We look at how the play acts offer unique means of engaging with others that other social acts do not. Central to our view is the notion that play resides on the boundaries between imaginative and real worlds that exist on the outside of the performative realm, in private, dialogic spaces where ‘the footlights are off’. Here players are dialogically oriented to each other, rather than to an audience. As such the paper makes the claim that play, first and foremost, belongs to the players.

From Play to Art--From Experience to Insight.

This article investigates the role of play and playlike activities (imagination, art) in developing and using symbolic tools. We understand processes of development of symbolic tools as coordination between two types of relationships: the subject–object relationships and the subject–subject relationships. This coordination begins when a new, playlike frame of activity is introduced in the interaction. The imaginary frame of activity changes relationships between the participants. Furthermore, the imaginary activity frame may enter into interaction with the out-of-play activity frames (“reality” frames). Structures and relationships built within the imaginary frames are then used to shape the actual understanding of the world (subject–object relationship) as well as the interpersonal relationships and identities of the participants. Introduction and further development of imaginary frames is a recursive process that takes place on different but related time scales: from microdevelopment through ontogenetic development to cultural development. Our project was designed to demonstrate some of the key moments that occur in the symbolic construction, in an “untangled” manner. To that effect, we designed a drama workshop to outline and illustrate processes that take place at the point of introduction of a new, imaginary frame and at the point when this imaginary frame begins to interact with the out-of-play frames. The aim of the workshop was to magnify each stage in construction of semiotic tools by “walking” professional researchers through a series of playlike activities.

Dialogic Authorial Approach to Creativity in Education: Transforming a Deadly Homework into a Creative Activity

We argue that conventional conceptual frameworks to creativity do not fit the phenomenon because they view creativity as the given. To address this problem, we present our attempt to develop a dialogic authorial approach to creativity in education. In contrast to most existing monologic approaches to creativity known to us, we consider four dialogic aspects of creativity: (a) the addressive—as an act of addressing and responding to somebody in an ongoing dialogue; (b) the existential—dialogic recognition of someone’s act as creative; (c) the axiological—dialogic evaluation of creativity as good or bad, moral or immoral, and so on; and (d) the cultural (meta-axiological)—dialogic valuing innovation over tradition preservation or vice versa. In our chapter, we develop our theoretical approach as we describe and ethnographically analyze an educational event involving Latino/a children doing disengaged homework in an afterschool program, and discuss its pedagogical implications.

Many faces of the concept of culture (and education)

In this theoretical essay, we examine four conceptual gestalt approaches to culture and education: “culture as pattern,” “culture as boundary,” “culture as authorship,” and “culture as critical dialog.” In the “culture as pattern,” education aims at socializing people into a given cultural practice. Any decline from culturally valued patterns becomes a deficit for education to eliminate. In the “culture as boundary,” encounter with other cultures highlights their arbitrariness and equality. Education focuses on celebration of diversity, tolerance, pluralism, social justice, and equal rights. The “culture as authorship” is about authorial transcendence of the given recognized by others. Education promotes dialogic creativity and authorship. Student/author is the final authority of his/her own education. “Culture as critical dialog” promotes testing ideas, opinions, beliefs, desires, and values. Critical dialog is inherently deconstructive, promoting never-ending search for truth. Education aims at the critical examination of the self, life, world, and society. Student is welcomed as an ultimate spoilsport, a devil’s advocate. In conclusion, we discuss complex relationships among the four gestalt approaches to culture and education and the ontology of these gestalt approaches. As a by-product of our analysis, we critically deconstruct the concept of meaning making as deeply dialogic process, separating it from its many masks that are mistakenly identified with it.