Narrating education: dialogical tools for interpreting adult literacy learners' accounts of school

The literature of emancipatory education frequently invokes dialogic co-operation. In this theorized pedagogy, personal narratives are often regarded as a “natural” tool for linking education with learners’ lives. Feminist and post-structuralist critiques have exposed difficulties with critical pedagogy’s “dialogical” imperative to speak out of personal experience, warning against narratives that cater to the desire to see learners as tragic or heroic victims in need of educational rescue. My own analysis suggests that claims about the educational value of learners’ personal narratives may often be based on impressionistic interpretations that need reassessing. In this thesis, I develop more nuanced and systematic methods for such reassessment grounded in Mikhail Bakhtin’s work. A range of data was collected at a suburban adult learning centre; here, I focus on interviews with five learners, all of whom were schooled in Canada and enrolled as adults in a high-school completion program. Analysis is informed by Bakhtin’s concept of dialogism, an interconnected set of concerns expressing the notion that discourse is always riddled with and responsive to what has already been and has yet to be spoken. The most obvious embodiment of this notion is a conversation, and the analysis begins by examining the genre of the “conversational” interview. Bakhtin argues that discourse is also double-voiced, dialogized by echoes of utterances made in other places and at other times, and the analysis moves on to examine, through the tracing of reported speech, how the learners’ accounts orient themselves to the already-spoken-about. Next, I examine the idea of the chronotope. Chronotopes are a useful tool for looking at how learners’ relationships to schooling and literacy are accounted for in terms of tacit conceptions of place and (especially) time, and also for examining what their narratives suggest about how things might have been or might yet be different. The analytical tools drawn from dialogism have proven richly insightful and have allowed me to trace subtleties in the dynamics that produce narrative. The questions and insights about narration generated here can be taken up in practice and extended in further research using “naturally occurring” data.

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