Bakhtin’s Chronotopes in Education: Conventional and Dialogic

Bakhtin defines chronotope in his literary dialogic theory as the unity of time and space where events occur. Here, in this conceptual paper, I expand and apply this notion to education, discuss, and illustrate the three major espoused educational chronotopes that I abstracted in my analysis of educational practices around Dialogic Pedagogy. First is the Assignment Chronotope based on a type of monologic pedagogy, the most common in conventional, but also in some innovative, schools, focusing on making students arrive at preset curricular endpoints. Second is the Dialogic Provocation Chronotope based on narrowly defined dialogic pedagogy and involving promotion of the students’ responsive critical authorship. Third is the Journey Chronotope focusing on promoting the students’ self-assignments and self-initiated educational journeys that can propel self-generated critical authorship in a targeted practice (or a network of practices). Educational examples, concerns, and consequences of these chronotopes are considered.

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