A paradigmatic dialogue-disagreement in a democratic school: A conceptual analysis of a soul-searching assembly meeting

Main Article Content

Ana Marjanovic-Shane

Abstract

In this article, I attempt to conceptually analyze points of disagreement among the students of the first democratic high school in Norway, The Experimental Gymnasium of Oslo (EGO). The clashes and disagreements among the students started heating up immediately after the school was opened in the fall of 1967. As they were learning how to run their school, the students discovered profound differences in their views of education and its purposes. Their deep disagreements about the meaning of education and conflicts about their school practices almost broke up their school right at the very start of its existence.


Their different understandings of education erupted in a passionate and dramatic general assembly meeting, which they later referred to as the Soul-Searching Assembly. This four-and-a-half hour-long meeting was recorded and its transcript was published (Hem & Remlov, 1969). In this article, I analyze the dialogues from the assembly, looking for the students’ diverse ideological and conceptual positions, views, desires, and underlying values. The tensions and clashes the students voiced echo the profound paradigmatic differences in conceptualizing education throughout the modern history of education, from the Enlightenment until now, a few decades into the 21st century. The purpose of my analysis is to examine these paradigmatically different views and the concerns behind them. These radically different paradigmatic, conceptual, and axiological positions have an effect on what we may consider being good, ethical, just, and true for human existence, human relationships, and human rights in general, and especially in education. The EGO students’ intensive and urgent ontological need to explain their very different positions to each other allowed me to take a closer look into the tensions and conflicts still existing in the larger cultural-historical public sphere of discourse on education.

Article Details

How to Cite
Marjanovic-Shane, A. (2023). A paradigmatic dialogue-disagreement in a democratic school: A conceptual analysis of a soul-searching assembly meeting. Dialogic Pedagogy: A Journal for Studies of Dialogic Education, 11(2), A217 - A244. https://doi.org/10.5195/dpj.2023.445
Section
Articles
Author Biography

Ana Marjanovic-Shane, Independent Scholar, USA

Ana Marjanovic-Shane is an Independent Scholar interested in ethical ontological dialogism and meaning-making in education, democratic education, students’ academic freedoms, and students’ critical and creative authorship in self-education. Her articles in English and Serbian were published in various journals (e.g., Mind, Culture, Activity Journal, Learning, Culture and Social Interaction, Dialogic Pedagogy Journal) and as book chapters in books on play and education. Two recent publications include: Shugurova, O., Matusov, E., & Marjanovic-Shane, A. (2022). The University of Students: A place for joint self-education. Dialogic Pedagogy: An International Online Journal, 10, E1-E42; Marjanovic-Shane, A., Meacham, S., Choi, H. J., Lopez, S., & Matusov, E. (2019). Idea-dying in critical ontological pedagogical dialogue. Learning, Culture and Social Interaction, 20, 68-79, and a book: Matusov, E., A. Marjanovic-Shane & M. Gradovski, (2019). Dialogic pedagogy and polyphonic research art: Bakhtin by and for educators, Palgrave Macmillan. Ana lives and works in the USA.

References

Aarsbergen-Ligtvoet, C. (2006). Isaiah Berlin: A value pluralist and humanist view of human nature and the meaning of life (Vol. 27): Rodopi.

Aristotle. (2000). Nicomachean ethics (R. Crisp, Trans.). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Bakhtin, M. M. (1991). The Dialogic Imagination: Four essays (C. Emerson & M. Holquist, Trans.). Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.

Bakhtin, M. M. (1993). Toward a philosophy of the act (V. Liapunov & M. Holquist, Trans. 1st ed.). Austin: University of Texas Press.

Bakhtin, M. M. (1999). Problems of Dostoevsky's poetics (Vol. 8). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Berlin, I. (1978). Concepts and categories: philosophical essays. London: Hogarth Press.

Berlin, I. (1990). The crooked timber of humanity: Chapters in the history of ideas. London, UK: John Murray (Publisherds) Ltd.

Berlin, I. (2002). Liberty, Incorporating Four Essays on Liberty (H. Hardy Ed.). Oxford: University Press.

Berlin, I. (2006). Two concepts of liberty. In D. Miller (Ed.), The liberty reader. (pp. 33-57). Boulder, Colo.: Paradigm Publishers.

Berlin, I. (2014). Freedom and its betrayal: six enemies of human liberty (H. Hardy Ed. Second Edition / foreword by Enrique Krauze. ed.). Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Berlin, I. (2017). Two concepts of liberty. In D. Miller (Ed.), Liberty Reader (pp. 33-57). New York: Routledge.

Freedman, S. W., & Ball, A. F. (2004). Bakhtinian concepts to guide the study of language, literacy, and learning. In A. F. Ball & S. W. Freedman (Eds.), Bakhtinian perspectives on language, literacy, and learning (pp. 3-33). Cambridge, UK ; New York: Cambridge University Press.

Habermas, J. r. (1996). Between facts and norms: contributions to a discourse theory of law and democracy. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

Hem, L., & Remlov, T. (Eds.). (1969). Forsøksgymnas i praksis. Oslo, Norway: Pax Forlag A/S.

Jørgensen, M. (1971). Fra Skoleopprør til Opprørsskole. Oslo: PAX FORLAG A/S.

Jørgensen, M. (1977). Škola koju su osnovali učenici [A School Founded by the Students, Serbo-Croatian translation of Norwegian book Fra Skoleoppror til Opprorskole, by the same author] (L. Rajić, Trans.). Beograd, Jugoslavija: Beogradski Izdavačko-Grafički Zavod (BIGS).

Marjanovic-Shane, A. (2023a). Four person-ideas in a soul-searching internally persuasive discourse. Dialogic Pedagogy: An International Online Journal, 11(2), A198-A216, doi:10.5195/dpj.2023.478.

Marjanovic-Shane, A. (2023b). A Soul-Searching Assembly — A Vignette. Dialogic Pedagogy: An International Online Journal, 11(2), A165-A197, doi:10.5195/dpj.2023.360.

Marjanovic-Shane, A., Kullenberg, T., & Gradovski, M. (2023). Scandinavian experiments in democratic education. Dialogic Pedagogy: An International Online Journal, 11(2), A158-A164, doi:10.5195/dpj.2023.477.

Marjanovic-Shane, A., & Matusov, E. (2017, February). Pedagogical coercion vs. students’ academic freedoms in higher education. Paper presented at the 38th Annual Ethnography in Education Research Forum, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia.

Matusov, E. (2009). Journey into Dialogic Pedagogy. Hauppauge, NY: Nova Science Publishers.

Matusov, E. (2020). A student’s right to freedom of education. Dialogic Pedagogy: An International Online Journal, 8 (2020), SF1-SF28, doi:https://doi.org/10.5195/dpj.2020.357.

Matusov, E. (2021). The relationship between education and learning and its consequences for dialogic pedagogy. Dialogic Pedagogy: An International Online Journal, 9, E1-E19, doi:10.5195/dpj.2021.425.

Matusov, E., & Marjanovic-Shane, A. (2012). Diverse Approaches to Education: Alienated Learning, Closed and Open Participatory Socialization, and Critical Dialogue. Human Development, 55(3), 159-166, doi:10.1159/000339594.

Matusov, E., & Marjanovic-Shane, A. (2015). Typology of critical dialogue and power relations in Democratic Dialogic Education. In K. Jezierska & L. Koczanowicz (Eds.), Democracy in dialogue, dialogue in democracy (pp. 211-229). Farnham, UK: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.

Matusov, E., & Marjanovic-Shane, A. (2017). Promoting students’ ownership of their own education through critical dialogue and democratic self-governance. Dialogic Pedagogy: An International Online Journal, 5, E1-E29, doi:10.5195/dpj.2017.199.

Matusov, E., Marjanovic-Shane, A., & Gradovski, M. (2019). Dialogic pedagogy and polyphonic research art: Bakhtin by and for educators: Palgrave Macmillan.

Matusov, E., Marjanovic-Shane, A., Kullenberg, T., & Curtis, K. (2019). Dialogic analysis vs. discourse analysis of dialogic pedagogy: Social science research in the era of positivism and post-truth. Dialogic Pedagogy: An International Online Journal, 7, E20-E62, doi:10.5195/dpj.2019.272.

Matusov, E., Smith, M. P., Soslau, E., Marjanovic-Shane, A., & von Duyke, K. (2016). Dialogic education from and for authorial agency. Dialogic Pedagogy: An International Online Journal, 4, A162-A197, doi:10.5195/dpj.2016.172.

Matusov, E., & von Duyke, K. (2010). Bakhtin’s notion of the Internally Persuasive Discourse in education: Internal to what? (A case of discussion of issues of foul language in teacher education). In K. Junefelt & P. Nordin (Eds.), Proceedings from the Second International Interdisciplinary Conference on perspectives and limits of dialogism in Mikhail Bakhtin Stockholm University, Sweden June 3-5, 2009 (pp. 174-199). Stockholm: Stockholm University.

Melheim, R. (2019). Frihet, likhet og demokrati: Historien om Forsøksgymnaset [Freedom, equality and democracy: The history of the Experimental Gymnasium]: Nygaard fors.

Mouffe, C. (2000). The Democratic Paradox. London, UK: Verso.

Neill, A. S. (1960). Summerhill: A radical approach to child rearing. New York: Hart Publishing Company.

Øygarden, S., & Svartdal, O. (1979). The Forsøksgymanset Oslo, Norway in the perspective of lifelong education. Hamburg: Unesco Institute for Education.

Star, S. L., & Griesemer, J. R. (1989). Institutional ecology, "translations" and boundary objects: Amateurs and professionals in Berkeley's museum of vertebrate zoology, 1907-39. Social Studies of Science, 19(3), 387-420.

Zakaria, F. (2003). The future of freedom: illiberal democracy at home and abroad (1st ed.). New York: W.W. Norton & Co.