Applying Bakhtin Scholarship on Discourse in Education: A Critical Review Essay.

Recently, Bakhtinian philologists have charged scholars of education with misapplying Bakhtin’s scholarship in their field. In this critical essay, Eugene Matusov reviews two recent edited collections relevant to this issue: Arnetha F. Ball and Sarah Warshauer Freedman’s Bakhtinian Perspectives on Language, Literacy, and Learning and Bonny Norton and Kelleen Toohey’s Critical Pedagogies and Language Learning. He uses these texts to consider whether Bakhtin has been misapplied in education, how and whether Bakhtin’s literary scholarship can be useful for education, and how education can inform Bakhtinian scholarship. Matusov shows that the philologists’ critique of educational scholars is grounded but unjustifiably all-encompassing. Finally, he problematizes whether Bakhtin’s notions of dialogism and internally persuasive discourse are compatible with institutionalized education. Since the early 1990s, educational scholars have shown increased interest in Mikhail Bakhtin’s work. In this essay I review two edited volumes that are good examples of such interest: Arnetha F. Ball and Sarah Warshauer Freedman’s Bakhtinian Perspectives on Language, Literacy, and Learning and Bonny Norton and Kelleen Toohey’s Critical Pedagogies and Language Learning. As I will argue in my analysis of these works, the central contribution of Bakhtin to education is his emphasis on ‘‘internally persuasive discourse’’ as the goal that should guide educational design. My review is organized as a polemic with Bakhtinian philologists about the quality of Bakhtin scholarship in education. Our (that is, Western English-speaking educational scholars’) contact with Bakhtin’s work is mediated by philological studies of Bakhtin. Unfortunately, we cannot engage his work directly because we need at least three translations to access his scholarship: one is obviously a translation of Bakhtin’s texts from Russian to English, another is a translation from his philosophico-literary work into the problematics of education, and the third is translation of Bakhtin’s Russian-Soviet cultural, social, historical, and political context into our modern Western context. None of these translations would exist without the work of philologists. Until our contact with Bakhtin’s scholarship matures, we must depend heavily on philologists in applying his ideas in education. I think that, especially for now, educators who try to use Bakhtin cannot and should not ignore our relation with Bakhtinian philologists. 1. Arnetha F. Ball and Sarah Warshauer Freedman, eds., Bakhtinian Perspectives on Language, Literacy, and Learning (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004); and Bonny Norton and Kelleen Toohey, eds., Critical Pedagogies and Language Learning (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004). For all subsequent references, these two works will be cited in the text as BP and CP, respectively, followed by the specific chapter number and (for quoted material) page number(s). 2. Of Bakhtin’s own work, it should be noted that with the exception of one known article on education – M.M. Bakhtin, ‘‘Dialogic Origin and Dialogic Pedagogy of Grammar: Stylistics in Teaching Russian Language in Secondary School,’’ Journal of Russian and East European Psychology 42, no. 6 (2004): 12–49 – his scholarship focused on literary material. EDUCATIONAL THEORY j Volume 57 j Number 2 j 2007 2007 Board of Trustees j University of Illinois 215