Dialogue Dialectic and Boundary Learning-Bakhtin and Freire (2011) - 20pp

Bakhtin and Freire: Dialogue, dialectic and
boundary learningepat_606 924..942

P R
Centre for Adult Education, University of KwaZulu-Natal
Abstract
Dialogue is a seminal concept within the work of the Brazilian adult education theorist, Paulo
Freire, and the Russian literary critic and philosopher, Mikhail Bakhtin. While there are
commonalities in their understanding of dialogue, they differ in their treatment of dialectic.This
paper addresses commonalities and dissonances within a Bakhtin-Freire dialogue on the notions
of dialogue and dialectic. It then teases out some of the implications for education theory and
practice in relation to two South African contexts of learning that facilitate the access to
education of disadvantaged groups, one in higher education and the other in early childhood
education.
Keywords: Bakhtin, boundary, dialectic, dialogue, Freire, learning
All of each individuals words are divided into the categories of his own and
others, but the boundaries between them can change, and a tense dialogic
struggle takes place on the boundaries. (Mikhail Bakhtin, From Notes Made
in 197071, [Bakhtin, 1986, p. 143])
Introduction
Mikhail Bakhtin (18951975) and Paulo Freire (19211997) lived worlds apart.
Bakhtin was born in Tsarist Russia and weathered the cataclysms of the Bolshevik
revolution, Stalinism and World War Two to emerge from thirty years of internal exile
as a foremost literary and cultural theorist. Freire was born roughly a generation later
in the North-Eastern Province of Brazil and, despite the setbacks of imprisonment and
exile, pursued a career as a world-renowned adult educator with a passionate com-
mitment to the liberation of the oppressed. However, they share remarkable common-
alities of interest and some biographical parallels which are suggestive for a dialogic
engagement between them. Both were teachers, both were fascinated by language and
by ideas of dialogue, and both insisted on the situated socio-political nature of the
word and its users. There is no evidence that they engaged with each others work.
This paper brings them into dialogue with regard to issues of learning and transfor-
matory practice. In particular, it focuses on the notions of dialogue and dialectic
within the learning project.
Educational Philosophy and Theory,Vol. 43, No. 9, 2011
doi: 10.1111/j.1469-5812.2009.00606.x
2009 The Author
Educational Philosophy and Theory 2009 Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia
Published by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ, UK and
350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA
What kind of dialogue do we establish with a writer whose key idea is dialogue? asks
Caryl Emerson, one of Bakhtins foremost translators, in her editors preface to Problems
of Dostoevskys Poetics (Bakhtin, 1984a). This question is equally pertinent for Freire, for
whom dialogue is not only a key theme, but also central to his style as a writer and praxis
as an educator. I answer Emersons question in three ways. First, I acknowledge my own
context as a convener of and participant in this dialogue. Second, I try to use a dialogic
form to explore some of the commonalities and differences between Bakhtin and Freire.
Third, I engage with their ideas in relation to two South African learning contexts, one
a university course and the other a community early education project.
While ranging across the work of both authors, who developed their ideas over
considerable periods, I concentrate on their later writings, assuming that these represent
their ideas in their developed forms (I avoid using the word nal or suggesting that
they realized a synthesis of ideas, as these terms are contested within their work). The
key works are Bakhtins 1963 revision (Bakhtin, 1984a) of his original 1929 work on
Dostoevsky, and his Speech Genres and Other Late Essays (Bakhtin, 1986).
1
Besides Paulo
Freires renowned Pedagogy of the Oppressed (Freire, 1972), I refer mainly to his Pedagogy
of Hope (Freire, 1998a), in which he revisits his classic text, and three of his last books,
Letters to Cristina (Freire, 1996) and the posthumous Pedagogy of Freedom (Freire, 1998b)
and Pedagogy of the Heart (Freire, 2000).
Both Bakhtin and Freire were drawn to dialogic engagement with others. Bakhtin was
a key gure in a number of intellectual circles between 1918 and 1924, rst in Nevel and
then in Vitebsk and Leningrad, involving Marxist intellectuals such as Voloshinov and
Medvedev, in which profound questions about the nature of philosophy, language, art
and social change were examined.
1
At a textual level, we see his brilliant dialogues
with the work of Dostoyevsky (Bakhtin, 1984a) and Rabelais (Bakhtin, 1984b). Freire
engaged in collaborative educational action in various countries, including Brazil, Chile
and Guinea-Bissau, around literacy and agricultural extension. He also co-wrote a
number of talking books which presented dialogic engagements with other educators
and scholars (Freire & Faundez, 1989; Freire & Shor, 1987; Freire & Macedo, 1987;
Horton & Freire, 1990).
A number of authors have sought to compare Freire with other theorists, writers and
activists within a broadly critical tradition, thus extending the kinds of dialogues that
Freire himself engaged in through his talking books. These comparisons include Freire,
Gramsci and Illich (Allman, 1988), Freire and Gramsci (Mayo, 1999), Freire and
Guevara (McLaren, 2000), Freire and Habermas (Morrow &Torres, 2002), Freire and
Milani (Mayo, 2007) and Freire and Hesse (Roberts, 2007a). These works testify to the
resonance of Freires praxis across a range of geographical and theoretical contexts, and
the continuing dialogic import of his work after his death (Roberts, 2007b). Given the
penchant for dialogic engagement of both Freire and Bakhtin in their own lifetimes, and
the continuing dialogic resonance of their work, it is likely that they would have relished
the prospect of dialogue with one another, especially as both emphasized the open-
endedness of dialogue and the unnalizability of human being.
Both Bakhtin and Freire insist on the spatially and temporally situated nature of the
word. This is reected in Bakhtins notions of chronotope and event, and Freires
notions of situation and epoch. Given my own participation in this dialogue, it is
Bakhtin and Freire 925
2009 The Author
important to set out briey the contexts from which I engage with Bakhtin and Freire,
and that draw me to their ideas about, and practices of dialogue.This provides a horizon
of what an interlocutor might see over my shoulder, to use Bakhtins analogy (Bakhtin,
1990).
I discovered Paulo Freires Pedagogy of the Oppressed, which was banned at the time,
while teaching young adults at a non-governmental education project in Johannesburg in
the 1980s. The project drew on Freires ideas in developing an emancipatory alternative
to apartheid education. I became acquainted with Bakhtins work in the 1990s while
teaching African Literature at the University of the Witwatersrand and drew on his ideas
in teaching and theorizing African autobiography. My interest in the two thus spans the
boundary between literature and adult education. In the heteroglossic context of South
Africa, with its eleven ofcial languages and volatile democratic transition, I am involved
presently in two projects that are of particular pertinence, one inside the academy and
the other outside:
As a lecturer at the University of KwaZulu-Natal on a Certicate of Education
(Participatory Development) module titled Lifelong Learning for community devel-
opment workers who would not usually have access to university education;
As a board member and researcher on the Siyabathanda Abantwana (We cherish the
children) project which provides a community-based model of care and support for
poor and vulnerable young children under the auspices of Little Elephant Training
Centre for Early Education in the rural Midlands area of KwaZulu-Natal.
These involvements situate me on a number of other boundariesbetween the academy
and communities, between orality and literacy, between families and schooling, between
civic participation and exclusionwhere dialogic engagement is fraught and fascinating,
and carries the potential to challenge and transform participants lives, my own included.
At the level of scholarship, I have developed the notion of dialogic space, drawing on
both Freires and Bakhtins ideas about dialogue, to characterize educational projects
with emancipatory potential (Rule, 2004; Rule & Harley, 2005; Rule, 2006).
Bakhtin, Freire and Education
While there are considerable bodies of scholarship that examine the life and work of
Bakhtin (see Clark & Holquist, 1984; Todorov, 1984; Coates, 1998; Holquist, 1990;
Mihailovic, 1997; Hirschkop, 1999; Pechey, 2007) and Freire (Collins, 1977; Taylor,
1993; McLaren & Lankshear, 1994; Gadotti, 1996; McLaren, 2000;Vella, 2002; Darder,
2002), there is little that engages in much depth with their ideas together.
Nevertheless, a number of scholars see an afnity between Bakhtin and Freire
(Farmer, 1998; Bowers, 2005; Philpott & Benyon, 2005; Pechey, 2007). Pechey (2007,
p. 31) argues that, after Franz Fanon, Bakhtins project nds particular resonance in
South America and is most closely paralleled in the pedagogic writing of Paulo Freire ...
and the theatre of Augusto Boal.
Bakhtin himself lives in the ghting, praying, dialogizing, carnivalizing thinkers
of the continental bodys transgressive lower half. (Pechey, 2007, p. 32)
926 Peter Rule
2009 The Author
Farmer (1998, p. 192) sees Freire as a thinker quite distinct from Bakhtin but one who
shares a number of theoretical afnities with Bakhtins understanding of dialogue. My
own work (Rule, 2004) locates Bakhtins and Freires notions of dialogue within a
genealogy that stretches back to the Socratic dialogues of Plato and includes, more
recently, Buber and Habermas. Interestingly, both Bakhtin and Freire read Buber, who,
like them, understands dialogue as an authentic way of being rather than simply as a
technique or type of communication.
Bakhtins ideas have been applied to a wide range of disciplinary areas, most obviously
Literature, but also Cultural Studies, Theology and Sociology. Education less so,
although Shields (2007, p. 1) introduces his ideas of dialogue, chronotope, heteroglossia
and carnival as complex and truly original approaches to teaching, learning and leading
and applies them to education settings. Philpott & Benyon (2005) apply Bakhtins theory
of authoritative and internally persuasive discourses (Bakhtin, 1981) to analyzing
teachers views on social justice education and refer to Freires notion of teacher agency
in engaging with learners and parents.
Bowers (2005) comes closest to an explicit dialogic engagement with and between the
ideas of Bakhtin and Freire. As a progressive liberal Canadian university educator,
Bowers explores the application of the ideas of Bakhtin and Freire to the university
seminar class. With his emphasis on tolerance and generosity, Bowers tends to underplay
the role of dialectic within Freires thought, and on the relation between reection and
action within praxis.
The studies that link Bakhtin and Freire have arisen mainly from North American
contexts in relation to university Humanities classrooms. This article locates a Bakhtin-
Freire dialogue in relation to an African context with reference to issues of access to
education in both the institutional and epistemic senses.
Commonalities and Contrasts
Both Bakhtin and Freire lived through extraordinary periods of political change, intel-
lectual ferment and questioning. For Bakhtin, this was the period immediately after the
1917 Russian Revolution, lasting until Stalins clampdown in the late 1920s. For Freire,
this was immediately before the military coup of 1964 in Brazila period of democra-
tization and popular education in which Freire developed his ideas about literacy as a
liberatory praxis; and in the period of his exile in Chile.
Although they lived through tumultuous times, Bakhtin and Freire engage with their
own socio-political contexts in their works quite differently. Freire constantly refers to his
own experiences of working with adults in Brazil, Chile and Africa. His biography is more
than just a backdrop to his theoretical and practical work on literacy. It is an explicit
reference point and a source for critical reection and meditation, often in that most
interpersonal of genres, the letter (Freire, 1996; 1998c). He had an obsessive streak when
writing Pedagogy of the Oppressed to the extent that he would discuss it with whoever
entered the house, including his daughters anc, until she told himtotone it down a bit
(Torres, 1998, p. 96). Bakhtin, on the other hand, avoids personal references. He wrote
very few letters and, when asked by an interviewer whether he would consider writing a
memoir, replied Certainly not. What sort of memoirs could I possibly have? (quoted in
2009 The Author
Emerson, 1997, p. 32). He also excises explicit reference to the political context of
Stalinismfromhis work.There is no direct reference to Stalinist repression; to do so would
have been to forsake any possibility of publication and to risk almost certain persecution.
His attack on monologism might be read as a rejection of totalitarianism, and scholars
have seen his characterization of the authoritarian 16
th
century French Catholic estab-
lishment in Rabelais and hisWorld (Bakhtin, 1984b) as an allegorical critique of Stalinism
(Coates,1998; Pechey, 2007).This obliquely allegorical, Aesopian engagement with their
perilous contexts was characteristic of the radical Soviet intelligentsia (Emerson, 1997).
Both Bakhtin and Freire are inuenced by Christian faith and Marxism, but in
different ways. Bakhtins was arrested and exiled by the Bolsheviks in 1929 apparently
for involvement with banned Russian Orthodox discussion groups as the Soviet Union
moved into its long Stalinist winter. Freire was arrested and exiled by the military
government in Brazil for his involvement in community education projects.
2
In South Africa, the period before and immediately after the overthrow of apartheid
was similarly tumultuous in its questioning of the nature of society. It was during this
period that Freire was most frequently cited in political and educational circles, as
notions of peoples education and education for liberation were explored.
Dialogue and Dialectic
With Buber, Bakhtin and Freire share a profound ethical concern regarding the rela-
tionship between the self and the other. For Buber, the primary words that humans
speak are I-Thou and I-It, and these two primary words intimate relations. The
relation between I and Thou is a relation with a present whereas the relation between
I and It is a relation with an object, with the world of things. The relation between I and
Thou constitutes the I: I become through my relation to the Thou; as I become I, I say
Thou. All real living is meeting (Buber, 1958, p. 11). Thus Bubers I-Thou relation is
at one and the same time about relationship, communication and becoming. However,
the relation between Self and Other can also become an oppressive I-It relation in which
the Self sees the Other as an object to be dominated. Bubers I-Thou and I-It primary
words form the basis of Freires understanding of the relations between Self and Other:
The antidialogical, dominating I transforms the dominated, conquered thou
into a mere it in Martin Bubers phraseology. The dialogical I, however,
knows that it is precisely the thou (not-I) which has called forth his own
existence. He also knows that the thou which calls forth his own existence in
turn constitutes an I which has in his I its thou. The I and the thou thus
become, in the dialectic of these relationships, two thous which become two
Is. (Freire, 1972, p. 135)
Interestingly, Freire grafts into the dialogic relationship between the I and thou a
dialectic of mutual becoming. In this sense, dialectic is the interactive dynamic of growth
and development within the I-Thou dialogue. It is the way dialogue works itself out in an
authentic relationship.
Bakhtin regarded Buber as the greatest philosopher of the 20th century (Emerson,
1997). There is a certain stylistic afnity between the two: they share meandering,
928 Peter Rule
2009 The Author
allusive, recursive ways with words that suddenly coalesce in startling insights, and an
interest in the process of authoring. For both, I and Thou were mutually constitutive,
but for Bakhtin much more precariously, concretely, provisionally and historicallya
relationship not guaranteed by Bubers God, the Eternal Thou, who for Bakhtin seems
to be a possibility rather than a necessity. Whatever the differences, Bubers conception
of I-Thou remains a profound inuence on Bakhtins dialogics.
Bakhtin and Dialogue
Bakhtin uses the term dialogue to characterize a number of planes of human existence.
At its broadest, he sees dialogue as a characteristic of human life itself: Life by its very
nature is dialogic (Bakhtin, 1984a, p. 293).What he means by this is that humans engage
in dialogue in multiple ways and this dialogic engagement manifests what it means to be
human: The very meaning of man (both internal and external) is the deepest commun-
ion. To be means to communicate (Bakhtin, 1984a, p. 287). Communication takes not
only the form of words but also gestures, facial expressions, postures, the whole array of
body language, apparel and social behaviour:
In this dialogue a person participates wholly and throughout his whole life:
with his eyes, lips, hands, soul, spirit, with his whole body and deeds. (Bakhtin,
1984a, p. 293).
Dialogue is both ontologicalreecting the way we are constituted as humansand
ethicalthe way we should be. Bakhtin describes the open-ended dialogue as the single
adequate form for verbally expressing authentic human life (Bakhtin, 1984a, p. 293).
This implies that monologism, which reduces the other to the status of an object, which
denies the I of the other, is inauthentic.
Bakhtin expresses the dialogic nature of life in his use of the term event, which in
Russian means co-being (Emerson, 1997). Event is therefore not just something that
happens but rather a process of experiencing the world with others. Relationship with
others, which is expressed in dialogue, is constitutive of being human. Through this
emphasis, Bakhtin repudiates the radical individualismwhich he associates with
capitalismwhich separates the I from the thou and turns the thou into an object.
This he sees as a form of corrupt idealism, the notion that the world ows from and is
created by the autonomous individual, as opposed to a world that is social, relational and
dialogic. However, the I-Thou relationship is not guaranteed; it is a task, a site of
struggle, something that requires constant effort and renewal.
Freire and Dialogue
For Freire, dialogue is a horizontal relationship between persons. It comprises commu-
nication between Subjects in a critical search or quest for something. Freire denes
dialogue as the encounter between men (sic: Freire later repudiated sexist language),
mediated by the world, in order to name the world and to transform the world (Freire,
1972). It is a process underpinned by values of mutual respect, humility, trust, faith,
hope, love, and critical thinking (Freire, 1972; 1998c). It is central to an authentic
educational process which explores the role of men and women as subjects in the world
2009 The Author
and with the world. Dialogue is thus essential to communication; value-laden, educa-
tional and transformatory: Without dialogue there is no communication, and without
communication there can be no true education (Freire, 1972, p. 65).
Later, in Pedagogy of Hope (1998a), Freire argues that dialogue does not eliminate
difference but troubles it, engages with it, in an attempt to deepen understanding: the
agents in the dialogue, not only retain their identity but actively defend it, and thus grow
together (Freire, 1998a, p. 117). He contrasts dialogue with anti-dialogue, a vertical,
unloving, acritical relationship which does not communicate but issues communiqus.
For Freire, dialogue is not just a descriptive category but also an ethical, axiological
and ontological one. Dialogue is something that characterizes authentic human beings
and their relationships as they strive to become, as they engage in their ontological
vocation of being human. Dialogism is a requirement of human nature (Freire, 2000,
p. 92), where human nature is understood as socially and historically constituted,
unnished, self-conscious, hopeful and curious.
Thus, for both Bakhtin and Freire, dialogue is central to what it means to be authen-
tically human. It happens both internally, within consciousness, and externally, with the
other. It is a value-laden process of acknowledging and engaging with the other as a
subject. Both contrast dialogue with an inauthentic way of being: monologism (Bakhtin)
and anti-dialogue (Freire), which are associated with the suppression of the other and its
reduction to the status of an object.
Freire and Dialectics
Freire has a dialectical understanding of history, society, education and, at a foundational
ontological level, interpersonal relationship. It is a position that emphasizes the con-
tradictory relation between elements or forces; the critical role of human agency; the
open-endedness of the future. He explicitly identies his position as dialectical and traces
this back to his involvement in the Movement of Popular Culture (MPC). His dialectical
view of history is evident in Pedagogy of the Oppressed as he denes a key concept, the
epoch:
An epoch is characterized by a complex of ideas, concepts, hopes, doubts,
values and challenges in dialectical interaction with their opposites, striving
towards fulllment. (Freire, 1972, p. 73)
He identies the basic contradiction of the epoch as between oppression and libera-
tion, leading dialectically to humanization, which liberates both the oppressor and the
oppressed to become more fully human. This movement does not happen automatically
but only in so far as people surmount the limit situation of oppression through a process
of thinking about and acting on reality
He associates his dialectical view with an antimechanist, antideterminist position, but
never an idealistic one:
In a dialectical, nonmechanistic conception of history, the future evolves from
the transformation of the present as it occurs. Thus, the future takes on a
problematic and undetermined character.The future is not what it needs to be,
but whatever we make of it in the present. (Freire, 1996, p. 111).
930 Peter Rule
2009 The Author
This position rejects both a reductive materialism, which sees the future as determined
by historical forces regardless of subjective agency. It also rejects idealism, which sees
history as a product of consciousness.
Freires theory of society is dialectical in a Marxist sense regarding its assumptions
that some form of socialism is superior to capitalism, and that socialism arises from the
contradictions within capitalism. While I am a radical and substantive democrat, I am a
socialist (Freire, 1996, p. 114). Although he is critical of Stalinism and the potential
perversions and authoritarian distortion of socialism (Freire, 1996, p. 136), he is clearly
committed to a broadly socialist agenda. This is witnessed in his membership of the
Workers Party and participation in the Sao Paulo department of education as Secretary
of Education (198991) under the leadership of this party. Forging the unity between
democracy and socialism is the challenge that inspires us ... . It is a challenge and not
certain destiny, hope of utopia and not fate.The future is a problem, a possibility, and not
inexorable (Freire, 1996, p. 137).
In so far as dialectic involves contradiction between opposites, evolution and change
through this contradiction, and attainment of a higher level, Freires theory of learning is
dialectical. For example, he sees a liberating, problem-posing education as resolving the
contradiction between oppression and liberation, teacher and learner (Freire, 1972, p. 65).
Freires dialectic refuses dichotomies and insists on relations. He associates with the
dialectical understanding of Antonio Gramsci and Amilcar Cabral of culture and its role
in the liberation of the oppressed (Freire, 1996, p. 116). He sees the relation between
oppositions as the crucial site of learning and transformation:
Educator (Relation of dialogue) Learner
People (Relation of transformation) World
Limit (Relation of problem-posing) Freedom
Theory (Relation of praxis) Practice
Through these dialectical relations, new levels of consciousness and new possibilities for
action are created.
His theory of learning is thoroughly dialectical in that it recognizes the contradiction
within the psychology of the oppressed: that the oppressor lives within the psyche of the
oppressed. Through a process of conscientization the oppressed is able to externalize the
oppressor, to recognize how he is oppressed and to begin to use his own words to name
his own world.
Bakhtin and Dialectics
Bakhtin rejects dialectics as an abstraction that strips away the specicity and uniqueness
of the utterance. He addresses the relation between dialogue and dialectics in his From
Notes Made in 197071, among the last that he made:
Dialogue and dialectics. Take dialogue and remove the voices (the partitioning
of voices), remove the intonations (emotional and individualizing ones), carve
out abstract concepts and judgements from living words and responses, cram
everything into one abstract consciousnessand thats how you get dialectics.
(Bakhtin, 1986, p. 147)
2009 The Author
This fragment captures Bakhtins essential objections to the notion of dialectic: that
it is reductive; that it is abstract; that it suggests closure and nalizabilitythe image
of carving out concepts and judgements; that it is monologic in that it cram(s)
everything into one abstract consciousness and therefore obliterates dialogue and
polyphony.
Bakhtin rejects Hegels dialectic because it reduces everything to one transcendental
consciousness (Coates, 1998, p. 77), which he sees as monologism as opposed to the
polyphony which he nds in Dostoevskys novels. Coates argues that synthesis of any
kind, including within a Marxist materialist dialectic, is anathema to Bakhtin because
of its overtones of dogmatism and closure (Coates, 1998, p. 78). Perhaps Bakhtins
rejection of dialectic relates to the context of tyrannical Stalinism which, after the brief
Bolshevik Spring of the 1920s, overshadowed much of his adult life, and for which
dialectical materialism was the ofcial ideology. The way that this ideology played itself
out under Stalin was anything but dialogic. Stalin ripped dialectic, in the Socratic and
Buberian senses of the word, out of dialogue and appropriated it as a coercive mecha-
nistic device within the monologue of authoritarian dictatorship. Bakhtin survived
Stalinismbecause of ill health he was exiled rather than imprisoned for alleged involve-
ment in covert church groupsbut he had to contend with the torment of exile and of
censorship of his work.
If Bakhtin rejects dialectic and synthesis, does this mean that he rejects any possibility
of mutual growth and understanding? His writing indicates otherwise. The person who
understands must not reject the possibility of changing or even abandoning his already
prepared viewpoints and positions, he argues. In the act of understanding, a struggle
occurs that results in mutual change and enrichment (Bakhtin, 1986, p. 142). Here
Bakhtin indicates a progressive development of consciousness (change and enrichment)
through a process of engagement which might involve conict, opposition, struggle.
Active agreement/disagreement (if it is not dogmatically predetermined)
stimulates and deepens understanding, makes the others word more resilient
and true to itself, and precludes mutual dissolution and confusion. The clear
demarcation of two consciousnesses, their counterposition and their interre-
lations. (Bakhtin, 1986, p. 142).
This sounds a lot like dialectic in the way that Freire understands it.
One Evening in Havana ...
Given the insistence of both Bakhtin (chronotope, event) and Freire (epoch, situa-
tion) on the denitive importance of time and space, the setting for their metalogue
(imaginary dialogue) is a room in Havana, Cuba, some time after the revolution. Freire,
an admirer of Castro and Guevara, is interested in the Cuban mass literacy campaign
and its relation to personal and social transformation. Bakhtin is interested in the
contested nature of language in a post-revolutionary society, the literary forms that it
manifests and the dialogic struggle that takes place as new wine is poured into old
wineskins of meaning. Given the Soviet inuence and the plethora of uniforms, he feels,
somewhat strangely and not altogether comfortably, at home. Freire sometimes rises and
932 Peter Rule
2009 The Author
paces the room, gesticulating and stroking his beard as he speaks. Bakhtin, because of
an old leg injury, prefers to sit. He wipes his brow with a large white handkerchief,
unaccustomed as he is to the tropics. Both partake of the local cigars, incorrigible
smokers that they were to the end.
Well, Freire might respond, I agree that humans are always yet-to-be, I agree on the
unnalizability of human beings and on the open-ended nature of dialogue, but if you
remove the possibility of synthesis, of resolution and fullment, if you insist on unchang-
ing difference within dialogue, how is any growth and development possible?
Of course, growth is possible, replies Bakhtin. Ideas live in dialogue. This is where
they develop, change, contest one another. But they dont become one another. Two
voices are the minimum for life, the minimum for existence.
Im thinking about this educationally, whereas you come at it from a literary
angle, counters Freire. Yes, in Dostoevskys novels, the characters do not merge. They
retain their own identity and consciousness; they embody particular Ideas. But the
culture circle, the classroom, the project is one of becoming, both individually and
collectively, of attaining a wider and deeper level of consciousness through the process
of dialogue.
But why call this dynamic of dialogue dialectic? Why bring in abstract ideology,
which is always monologic, which always reduces the many to the one?
I would argue that the dialectical movement of thought is not simply a movement to
the abstract, a reduction of the concrete to the abstract, but a movement between
abstract and concrete, maintaining both elements as opposites which interrelate dialec-
tically in the act of reection.
What I insist on is that each consciousness is integral and unrepeatable. Each
consciousness has its own position, its own here and now, from which it moves to the
boundary with other consciousnesses. And this is a boundary on which struggle, conict,
growth occur though the dialogue of unmerged and distinct subjects. But dialectic, and
the synthesis that it implies, erases the individual consciousness and turns it into an
object.
The two pause for a moment, dragging on their cigars, each engaging with the other on
the boundary of a rowdy, polyphonic silence.
Perhaps it is a question of language, the burden of meaning, posits Freire. Yes, the
term synthesis carries a philosophical load from Hegel and Marx, and bears the weight
of their systems of thought. But you yourself use the binary agreement/disagreement.
Through dialogue, two subjects may reach an agreement that extends them both, that
raises the level of the consciousness of each and stimulates action to transform the
world. This is in no way a nal agreement, a resolution of all problems, an answer to all
questions, but a step along the road, a denite step forward. And yes, there are still two
who walk the road, who make the road by walking.
On this we agree, replies Mikhail, there can be no nal word. Each word is an answer
that poses yet another question, each word is reborn in the mouth of its next user.
Yes, this is the foundation of education: that as humans we are incomplete and
unnished, we are in a permanent movement of search. Perhaps this is the central theme
of a possible collaboration, my friend, a talking book that both manifests and explores
2009 The Author
the inner workings of dialogue and the problematic of dialectic, drawing on our very
different experiences.
To collaboration and conversation, I say yes. But I am not one for memoirs. If you
wish to write a book drawing on our dialogue, by all means, but under your own name.
I have to pause over every word I write as the censor peers over my shoulder, ensuring
that I signify to an addressee beyond what he and his checklist can encapsulate. Under
your name, my friend, since I have enough difculty authoring myself !
Discussion: Being and Knowing in Freire and Bakhtin
One way of understanding the differences between Freire and Bakhtin regarding dialec-
tics is to distinguish their views on ontology and epistemology. Freire and Bakhtin share
distinct commonalities in their understandings of the ontology of human being. For
both, human being is social being, it is being-with-others and being-in-the-world. They
reject the notion of the isolated and divided individual human subject of Cartesian
philosophy. Humans become through a process that is with and through others. Dialogue
is a foundational aspect of this being-with-others and expresses human being as social
being. This ontology underpins Freires understanding of the relationship between
teacher/learner and learner/teacher, a relationship that is both between them and within
each of them, and Bakhtins understanding of the relationship between addressor and
addressee and even author-character in Dostoevsky. For both, human being is thus also
a being-in-language.
Both also understand human being as unnalized, as always becoming.This is a strong
theme in their writings. Freire refers to the unnished nature of our historical presence
in the world and out consciousness of that unnishedness as the cornerstone of the
adventure of education (Freire, 1998b, p. 127). Similarly, for Bakhtin, human existence,
like language and meaning, is open-ended, always yet-to-be (Bakhtin, 1990). Dialogue
reects and enacts these processes of becoming, whereas monologue (Bakhtin) and
anti-dialogue (Freire) negate it.
Where Freire and Bakhtin differ is in their epistemologies. Whilst it is important to
acknowledge that neither Bakhtin nor Freire were rst and foremost philosophers,
Freires implicit critical realist epistemology asserts that it is possible to know the world
through a process of critical reection on reality, a political process that strips away
oppressive myths and uncovers the truth, and so opens the way to transforming
realitya process of conscientization. This is a collective process that happens in culture
circles, classrooms, community projects, a process that is both political and educational.
The truth that such a process engenders might not be nal and inalterable, but it is
possible, as a committed and collective enterprise. Given this epistemology, dialectic is a
productive dynamic of engagement between people, ideas, experiences that produces
development at a number of levelsinterpersonal, political, epistemological.
Bakhtin rejects the single unied consciousness of European philosophy and its claims
to a unied truth. He sees this claim as existing within idealism, rationalismwith its cult
of a unied and exclusive reason and utopian socialismwith its faith in the omnipotence
of the conviction (Bakhtin, 1984a, p. 82). For him, these are all manifestations of
philosophical monologism which make the interaction of consciousnesses and genuine
934 Peter Rule
2009 The Author
dialogue impossible. However, this does not mean that he rejects the notion of a unied
truth.
It is quite possible to imagine and postulate a unied truth that requires a
plurality of consciousnesses, one that cannot in principle be tted into the
bounds of a single consciousness, one that is, so to speak, full of event potential
[emphasis in original] and is born at a point of contact among various
consciousnesses. (Bakhtin, 1984a, p. 81)
Thus, for Bakhtin, a unied truth is possible, but it is created multiply through a plurality
of unmerged consciousnesses.What emerges is an epistemology that is relational (Pearce,
1994) and inclusive of difference: not a dialectical either/or but a dialogic both/and
(Clark & Holquist, 1984, p7).
Interestingly, Bakhtin did not see the formal pedagogical possibilities of such an
approach to truth. Instead, he found it in literature, particularly in the dialogism of
Dostoevskys novels. For him, pedagogy was a monologic activity in which someone who
knows andpossesses the truth instructs someone who is ignorant of it andinerrorsimilar
to the jug and water method that Freire rejected. Indeed, reports of Bakhtins own formal
teaching style present him as an authoritative expert delivering lectures to students
(Emerson, 1997)very different to the interactive multi-voiced engagement that must
have characterized the informal circles to which he belonged. Freires pedagogy, on the
other hand, grasps Bakhtins event potentialwith its implications of situated co-being
and transforms it into a collective, dialogic and action-oriented quest for truth.
Drawing Dialogue and Dialectic into Practice: Two Contexts of Application
I now relate Freire and Bakhtins notions of dialogue and dialectic to two South African
educational contexts. The rst is a rural project in the eld of early childhood education
that reaches out to poor and vulnerable young children who do not attend pre-school
centres.The second is a university certicate programme that accommodates community
development workers from poor educational backgrounds who would not usually qualify
for tertiary study. The two examples have in common a concern with providing educa-
tional access to disadvantaged groups of learners. In both cases, the boundary between
teacher and learner, school/university and home/community, is a crucial dimension of
the learning terrain. As an adult, community and university educator, I deliberately
choose examples from outside the formal schooling context since I see learning as a
lifelong and life-wide process of which formal schooling is only one aspect; much critical
learning occurs before formal schooling (my rst example) and in work-related and
community learning (my second example). However, my view is that a dialogic approach
to learning is just as relevant to the school classroom.
1. Siyabathanda Abantwana: Community-based Early Childhood Development
The Siyabathanda Abantwana project (We cherish the children in IsiZulu) works with
poor and vulnerable young children in an impoverished rural area of the province of
KwaZulu-Natal. These children, aged 35, are identied at a community meeting as
2009 The Author
being in need of support. They face contexts of extreme poverty, HIV and AIDS, and
orphanhood. They are often cared for by grandparents or older relatives, with their
parents either absent because of migrant labour or deceased because of AIDS. A child
development worker, selected by the community and trained by a local NGO, visits the
child in her home, plays with her and other similar children in the area, who move from
home to home on different days for their play group, and develops a supportive rela-
tionship with her caregiver.
For such children, the boundary between school and family often becomes a barrier
(see Figure 1 above). Given the lack of nancial resources and educational support at
home, they might either never attend school or drop out at an early stage. The child
development worker mediates this boundary in her visits to the children by drawing on
indigenous knowledge such as stories, songs and games in the local language, IsiZulu.
She also introduces school-type activities such as drawing, counting and group work. She
develops a supportive relationship with the caregiver, encouraging him or her to engage
in similar activities with the children. This support can extend to assisting the caregiver
to access ofcial documents for the child in order to secure a child support grant, to visit
the local clinic or to make arrangements for the child to register for primary school.
The child development worker thus creates a dialogue between the world of family and
community and the world of school so that these two worlds do not exist as polar
opposites for the child but rather in a dialogic relationship.
2. The Lifelong Learning module of the Certicate of Education (Participatory
Development) at the University of KwaZulu-Natal
Students enrolling for this certicate generally come from poor and/or disrupted
educational backgrounds. However, an enabling criterion for selection to the course is
some sort of community involvement. This ranges from formal employment in a non-
governmental organization involved in community issues such as the environment, HIV
& AIDS, early childhood development or poverty alleviation, to voluntary participation
Family and
community
School and
wider society
Child development
worker
Child and
caregiver/s
Formal
school
curriculum;
literacy and
numeracy
Indigenous
knowledge;
family and
community
relationships
Figure 1: The Siyabathanda Abantwana project and boundary learning
936 Peter Rule
2009 The Author
in a community-based organization such as a church or a sports club. Another criterion
is some level of awareness of the strengths and weaknesses of a community and the
challenges facing it.
Such students often lack condence as learners in a tertiary institution. The Lifelong
Learning module aims to facilitate academic development that will enable students to
cope with the rest of the course. It does this by mediating between the students world
of community engagement and the demands of the academy (see Figure 2 above). For
example, students write their life histories as part of the module. They thus draw upon
their own experiences of life and learning, and reect on how this has inuenced their
development. At the same time, they develop academically useful skills such as topic
analysis, planning, drafting, editing and revising, and well as critical reection. Their life
histories are thus situated on the boundary between their lives and their studies at the
university, a boundary of potentiality and of becoming. The life history writing creates
dialogue at a number of levels: between the student and their own experience; between
the student and the lecturer who introduces the exercise, reads the essays and provides
feedback; between the students lives and their studies; between the past, memory,
reminiscence, and the present; between their own lives and the wider socio-historical
contexts in which they have lived; and among the students themselves as they share and
reect upon their stories. As Darder (2002, p. 63) argues: Through the retelling of their
stories, students begin to understand history as a living process rather than a reied set
of facts or dates.
The dialogue occurs along and across this boundary as the students encode their
personal and communal experiences in academic genres, and reect on these experiences
drawing on a new language of analysis and reection. The module dialectically mediates
the oppositions of community-academy, students-lecturer, knowledge-experience, in
ways that create an open-ended engagement. Through the narratives, the module facili-
tator becomes a learner in the world of the students and their communities, while helping
students to fashion their writing with reference to academic conventions of planning,
organization and presentation.
Community University
Module facilitator
CEPD
student
Formal
academic
codes,
genres and
procedures
Personal and
communal
experiences,
challenges,
resources
Figure 2: The Lifelong Learning module and boundary learning
2009 The Author
Bakhtin, Freire and Boundary Learning
A key feature of the situations described above is the boundary between teacher and
learner, between school/university and home/community, within a dialogic learning
space. I have developed the notion of dialogic space elsewhere (Rule, 2004; Rule &
Harley, 2005) and understand it as a zone of engagement, underpinned by values of
trust, openness and responsibility, that enables dialogue at interpersonal, intrapersonal
and discursive levels. The notion of the boundary is key to Bakhtins ideas about
dialogue. As the introductory quotation to this article indicates, this boundary is between
the self and the other, and is a site of engagement, struggle and becoming as the self
interacts with the words of the other and rejects them, accommodates them, makes them
his own. The boundary is not some kind of permanent and xed line of division between
teacher and learner, but is rather a permeable and shifting threshold of contact and
communication which is present both between teacher and learner, and within each
teacher-learner and learner-teacher.Within a dialogic approach to learning, both teacher
and learner operate on and across this boundary in a zone of potentiality. As teacher/
learner and learner/teacher, to use Freires expression, they learn each others words and
worlds as they widen and deepen their respective understandings, and the boundary
between them becomes a boundary within that they cross, transgress, redene. Bakhtin
understands this process as one of ideological becoming: the process of selecting and
assimilating the words of others (Bakhtin, 1981, p. 341).
Bakhtins description of the tense dialogic struggle on the boundary is important
because it indicates that there are power relations at play, intrapersonal, interpersonal
and more broadly socio-political.Teacher and learner are not equal.The teacher does not
know the learners words and world as the learner does, and so has to position herself as
a learner, has to cross the boundary and take the side of the learner in order to see herself
as a teacher, and hear her own words as the learner does. This echoes Freires idea that
education can never be neutral. The teacher becomes a learner of learners in order to be
a teacher. As Freire puts it, My openness to a world that is life-denying as far as my
students are concerned becomes a challenge to place myself on their side in support of
their right to be (Freire, 1998b, p. 122). In Example One above, the teacher does this by
learning and using the stories and songs and games that the children know from home,
by visiting their homes, and by developing a supportive relationship with the caregiver of
the child, thus creating pathways for the children from the world that they know to the
world of neighbours and school beyond the home. In Example Two, the students life
histories provide one pathway for the lecturer into the students worlds, and the process
of writing themplanning, drafting, revising, learning academic procedures and con-
ventions on the waya pathway for students into the academic world. Students received
structured feedback from the lecturer on a feedback sheet which presents comments on
their work in relation to the criteria of assessment, as well as suggestions for improving
the work. In reading this feedback, the learner crosses the boundary to see the assign-
ment through the lecturers eyes, and then returns to the position of learner in revising
the assignment. Reading/writing thus becomes part of the dialogical activity of learning
on the boundary and realizing the potentiality of the zone of becoming which the
relationship of learning creates.
938 Peter Rule
2009 The Author
While these examples elucidate the dialogic engagement on the boundary of learning,
where does dialectic t in? For Freire, the dialogic engagement of learning entails a
dialectical progression from a naive form of consciousness to a critical consciousness
(Freire, 1972). For example, by identifying and discussing common themes that emerge
from the students life histories in Example Two, lecturer and students might begin to
identify the socio-political factors that construct the boundaries between their worlds. In
the context of KwaZulu-Natal, factors such as poverty, teenage pregnancy, educational
disruption and political violence create a fraught context of learning that imperils the
very enterprise of education (John & Rule, 2006). An analysis of these factors and their
multiple underlying causes can lead the way to enriched understanding and practice
within the community development activities that students are engaged in, as well as
enhance the lecturers attempts to construct and enact appropriate curricula in response
to this context.
The anathema of dialectics for Bakhtin shifts the emphasis elsewhereto the devel-
opment of the personality, the process of ideological becoming through which the
personality becomes itself, which is always a social and ideological process. In a sugges-
tive passage from Toward a Reworking of the Dostoevsky Book, Bakhtin gives the
movement of the Marxist dialectic from capitalism to socialism a surprising twist:
The materialization of man under conditions of class society, carried to its
extreme under capitalism. This materialization is accomplished (realized) by
external forces acting on the personality from without and from within; this is
violence in all possible forms of its realization (economic, political, ideologi-
cal), and these forces can be combated only from outside with equally exter-
nalized forces (justied revolutionary violence); the goal is personality.
(Bakhtin, 1984a, p. 298)
Unlike Freire, who sees a liberatory educational praxis as part of the movement to
transform society and create a socialist utopia, Bakhtins emphasis is on the creation of
conditions that allow for the attainment of the primary goal: personality. This indicates
Bakhtins orientation towards the concrete, specic, historically situated human subject
and its freedom. This is not the isolated rational subject of Cartesian philosophy that
needs proof of the existence of self, others and the world, nor the fragmented subject of
postmodernism whose meanings are continually deferred, but a relational subject, con-
stitutively related to the other and to the world, in the unnished process of becoming.
Conclusion
I conclude with some thoughts on Freire, Bakhtin and learning. Learning is central to
Freires dialogic pedagogy. It arises from the critical engagement of teacher/learners and
learner/teachers with each other and their worlds, and can take the form of dialectical
resolutions of the contradictions between self and other, teacher and learner, limit and
freedom, learners and their world, and so on. For Bakhtin, with his primary interest in
literature and language, learning is implicit in his dialogical understanding of ideological
becoming.The tense dialogic struggle that each individual experiences on the boundary
of his own and others words is a learning process of selecting and assimilating the words
2009 The Author
of others. Thus, for both Freire and Bakhtin, whatever their differences around the
notion of dialectic, learning is profoundly dialogic, constitutive of human being and of
the unnished process human becoming. This kind of dialogic learning resonates along
the learning boundaries of educational initiatives at very different levels.
Notes
1. There is a literature around the Bakhtin Circle and the question of authorship, with certain
works by other members of the Circle, ValentinVoloshinov (1973) and P. N. Medvedev (1978),
ascribed to Bakhtin himself (see Emerson, 1997; Clark & Holquist, 1984). My view is that these
works adopt an explicitly Marxist framework which is not evident in the works attributed
exclusively to Bakhtin. Thus, while Bakhtin may have contributed to the thinking within these
books and been inuenced by them, I do not share the view that he authored them. In this
article I draw on works his authorship of which is not contested.
2. While Freires commitments to socialism are well-documented, as is his Catholicism with a
social justice orientation, Bakhtins political and religious commitments are much more con-
tentious and oblique. Indeed, he has been claimed by all sorts of ideological persuasions
ranging from Russian Orthodoxy to Marxism and Postmodernism. My own view is that Bakhtin
was much more at home on the boundaries than in any particular camp.
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