The Epic and the Novel:

Dialogism and Teacher Research

DAVID COULTER

Teacher research has been concerned with the generation teacher of research literature. Other chapters in the 1994
knowledge and voice for more than 70 years; teachers are invited N.S.S.E. Yearbook, for example, are concerned with knowl-
to join the academic dialogue by becoming researchers them- edge generation (Threatt et al.; Clandinin & Connelly;
selves. Yet the promised fusion of communities seems as distant Hollingsworth & Miller; Lieberman & Miller). In Educa-
as ever. I want to suggest that for these two solitudes to betional Researcher, advocates of teacher research continue to
brought together, the emphasis needs to change from the genera- debate the connection between research on teaching and the
tion of knowledge to dialogue about what counts as knowledge. practice of teaching largely by focusing on the fit between
Using the work of the Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin various conceptions of research and teaching (Wong, 1995a,
(1895-1975), I argue for dialogic research. In making my case, 1995b; I Wilson, 1995; Baumann, 1996). All continue to as-
present a research problem that was investigated by a group of sume a direct relationship between the generation of re-
school administrators and teachers, sketch the previous response search knowledge and the improvement of practice. Wilson
of the research community to that issue, take a brief detourexplains that "learning to do research made me a better
through Bakhtin's literary theory, and then show how each teacher" of the (1995, p. 20) and Baumann concludes:
conceptual resources that he supplies—polyphony, chronotope
and carnival—affected the research project and the ensuing dia-[B]y struggling with ways to integrate inquiry into their
logue about knowledge and its relationship to practice. work, teacher researchers come to know themselves bet-
ter as teachers and persons, learn to understand their stu-
dents and families in ways heretofore unknown, increase
Educational Researcher, Vol. 28, No. 3, pp. 4-13 their professional esteem and credibility, share their
learnings with colleagues locally and beyond, and, most
importantly, help their students develop intellectually, so-
cially, and emotionally. (1996, p. 35)
It is my firm belief that the emancipation and profession- Teachers are invited to join the academic dialogue about
alizing of the teacher's calling rests far more on the origi-
teaching by becoming researchers themselves. Buckingham's
nality, insight, and expertness which the teacher evinces call for teachers to generate their own knowledge about
than upon any considerations having to do with salary, teaching and thereby acquire the resources required to join
tenure, or legal status. Society cannot be compelled to re-
spect anybody or anything. The surest way to win respect the scientific research community seems to echo throughout
is to be respectable.... [Nothing] would so effectively ob-the N.S.S.E. Yearbook and the teacher research movement
tain for the teaching body the possession of professional generally, although to be fair, conceptions of knowledge
expertness . . . as the open-eyed, open-minded, scientific in educational research have changed more than a little in
spirit of inquiry. (Buckingham, 1926, p. iv) the last 70 years (Greene, 1994). Yet the fusion of communi-
ties that teacher researchers envision does not seem to

B
uckingham was making a case for teachers becoming be happening. Despite calls for understanding teachers'
researchers, generating their own professional knowledges (e.gv Grimmett & MacKinnon, 1992), for re-
knowledge and gaining status by becoming members specting teachers' conceptions of their practices (Robinson,
of the research community. Almost 70 years later Susan 1998), and for dialogue between schools and universities
Lytle and Marilyn Cochran-Smith (1994) in a chapter in (e.g., Cuban, 1992), the communities do not seem very good
Teacher Research and Educational Reform: Ninety-third Yearbook
at developing the kind of dialogue around knowledge that
of the National Society for the Study of Education (N.S.S.E.)teacher research promises. Zeichner, whose own chapter in
make a similar case for teacher research as a means to pro- the 1994 N.S.S.E. Yearbook raises questions about teacher
duce knowledge that would give teachers both voice and research and dialogue, later (1995) makes this point bluntly,
standing:
Research by teachers represents a distinctive way of
knowing about teaching and learning.... [Teacher re-
search] will fundamentally redefine the notion of knowl-
edge for teaching, altering the locus of the knowledge DAVID COULTER is an assistant professor in the Faculty of Edu-
base and realigning the practitioner's stance in relation- cation, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, B. C, V6T
ship to knowledge generation in the field. (1994, pp. 35-36)
1Z4; tel:. (604) 822-6196; fax: (604) 822-4244; e-mail:
I believe that these two examples demonstrate a concern david.coulter@ubc.ca. He specializes in philosophical herme-
with the ownership of knowledge that characterizes the neutics, teacher research, and educational leadership.

4 EDUCATIONAL RESEARCHER
explaining that:
[D]espite isolated examples of instances where teacher re-
search and academic research have crossed the borders
that divide them, they have essentially been irrelevant to
each other. For the most part, educational researchers ig-
nore teachers and teachers ignore the researchers right
back. (p. 154)
Zeichner goes on to describe the various factors that keep
the two communities separate and provides examples of
how they have been brought together. I want to suggest that
for these two solitudes to meet, the discussion needs to
move from focusing on the generation of knowledge neces-
sary for scholarly dialogue to examining the dialogue itself.
This means a shift from an emphasis on the generation of
research knowledge to a consideration of the justification of
what counts as appropriate and useful knowledge, that is,
a concern for the hermeneutics of research.
I do not attempt to argue a hermeneutic approach to
social science research. That has been developed very ex-
tensively over the last 20 years (e.g., Gadamer, 1960/1996;
Ricoeur, 1981; Bernstein, 1983; Habermas, 1981 /1984) and
appropriated for teacher research (Carr & Kemmis, 1986;
Elliott, 1987,1991; Winter, 1987,1989). I want to provide an
example of another approach to teacher research that tries
to generate both knowledge about teaching and dialogue
about that knowledge. I argue for dialogic research. In mak-
ing my case, I will use a research problem that a group of
teachers and administrators in a school district investigated
and I will examine how the ideas of the Russian literary the-
orist Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975) informed that research. I
intend to outline the problem and the research commu-
nity's previous response to it, take a brief detour through
Bakhtin's literary theory, and then show how each of the
conceptual resources that Bakhtin supplies affected this re-
search project and the ensuing dialogue.
The Research Problem
Several years ago I was working for a school district in
Winnipeg when one of the recurring issues in schools again
became problematic: the retention of students in grade, that
is, failing students. This is a common practice in North
American schools and has been so for about a century, al-
though its popularity has waxed and waned (and, judging
by the June 15, 1998 issue of Newsweek and President Clin-
ton's 1999 State of the Union Address, is again becoming
prominent in the United States). It became an important
topic in both the city and school district in which I worked.
Groups of parents and teachers decried the increasing num-
bers of students who were being passed on to the next level
without mastering the skills necessary for that level as the
result of "social promotion" and "no fail" policies; this con-
flict was well documented in the local media. Organizations
dedicated to raising educational standards by holding
teachers and students accountable were featured in the
newspapers and local television; letters were written to
newspapers and to local school boards; radio talk shows
lamented failing schools and non-failing students.
The School Board reacted to all this by directing me, as as-
sistant superintendent for programs, to report on the issue.
In response, I asked for others to join me in a research proj-
ect; six teachers and administrators volunteered. The team
began by reviewing the educational literature about reten-
tion in grade; it found no shortage of previous work. In-
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deed, the topic is one of the most researched in education.
Particularly significant was the 1984 work of Holmes and
Matthews, who found over 800 studies in their review of
the literature. In constructing their meta-analysis, they lim-
ited their critique to original studies of matched groups of
students with adequate data and still found 44 studies in
which the results of retention and promotion could be com-
pared, involving a total of over 11,000 students. Subsequent
calculations of effects on self-concept, attitude towards
school, personal adjustment, and academic achievement
were consistent: all favored promoted students. They con-
cluded unambiguously: "Those who continue to retain
pupils at grade level do so despite cumulative research evi-
dence showing that the potential for negative effects consis-
tently outweighs positive outcomes (Holmes & Matthews,
1984, p. 232). Five years later, Holmes added 19 studies,
which led him to conclude: "On average, retained students
are worse off than their promoted counterparts on both per-
sonal adjustment and academic outcomes" (1989, p. 27).
The research team was struck both by the overwhelming
evidence and the resistance of practice to that evidence. Few
topics in education had been as extensively researched; few
topics had such clear findings. House (1989) summarizes: "It
would be difficult to find a more pernicious practice. The
research evidence is absolutely one-sided in finding nega-
tive effects from flunking students. I know of no educa-
tional practice in which the research is in such agreement"
(pp\ 205-206). In determining its own focus, the research
team had two problems. Firstly, Holmes and Matthews did
not need a 64th study for their meta-analysis; this seemed
more than a little redundant. Secondly, the 63 studies al-
ready reported seemed to have had minimal impact on
practice. We decided to develop a different research strat-
egy, one that might be termed dialogic, one guided by the
ideas of a then somewhat obscure Russian literary theorist
that I had encountered in my reading: Mikhail Bakhtin. Be-
fore describing how that occurred, I need to provide an
overview of the ideas that became so important to us.
Bakhtin and Dialogism
Bakhtin (1895-1975) spent much of his career writing in rev-
olutionary and Stalinist Russia, often under pseudonyms; it
was not until the 1960s that his work attracted widespread
attention in the Soviet Union and only after his death was
most of his work translated into other languages. His writ-
ing is not a unitary corpus: he does not articulate and de-
velop one coherent set of ideas. Rather, he touches on the
same topics at different times in his career, sometimes con-
tributing new ideas, sometimes contradicting previous
ones. The topics and ideas are often grouped under the um-
brella of dialogism because of Bakhtin's overriding concern
with dialogue, which, for him, is not simply verbal inter-
change, but the
single adequate form for verbally expressing authentic
human life. . . . Life by its very nature is dialogic. To live
means to participate in a dialogue: to ask questions, to
heed, to respond, to agree, and so forth. In this dialogue a
person participates wholly and throughout his whole life.
(Bakhtin, 1963/1984a, p. 293)
Bakhtin develops his ideas from a concern for literature,
and especially the novel, which he sees as not simply a lit-
erary genre, but the epitome of a world view or cultural
5
framework. For Bakhtin, the novel treats language and dia-
logue in fundamentally new ways, with implications for
reason and morality. To show how dialogism can be useful
in generating a dialogue about teaching, I need to sketch
Bakhtin's views of language, dialogue, and the novel.
Language and Dialogue
Bakhtin emphatically rejects the Saussurean division of lan-
guage into langue (the linguistic system) and parole (the in-
dividual speech act), and especially the view that individual
utterances are composed from units of language without re-
gard to context. For Bakhtin, an utterance, or individual
speech act, presupposes a response from an "other" and
meaning is made between partners in dialogue. As a result,
no two utterances are identical: while the words may be the
same, the partners may be different and the context in-
evitably different.
He distinguishes between two kinds of meaning: the ab-
stract or dictionary meaning and the contextual meaning.
He claims that linguistics is concerned with the former, at
the expense of contextual meaning, an emphasis which dis-
torts communication. Bakhtin then redefines langue, which
is no longer language, but languages. The concept of a uni-
tary language (e.g., standard English) or even an amalgam
of officially recognized dialects (e.g., British, Canadian,
American) is seen as a reified construct. The many different
ways of speaking result from different social experiences,
different values, and different assumptions. Professions,
classes, regions, ethnic groups, and generations have distinct
languages which are more than jargons, but reflect particular
ways of organizing experience and contingent historical and
social forces. Bakhtin replaces the construct of language with
languages, which he calls heteroglossia:
[A]t any given moment in its historical existence, language
is heteroglot from top to bottom: it represents the co-
existence of socio-ideological contradictions between the
present and the past, between the different epochs of
the past, between different socio-ideological groups in the
present, between tendencies, schools, circles and so forth,
all given a bodily form. These "languages" of heteroglos-
sia intersect each other in a variety of ways, forming new
socially typifying "languages." (Bakhtin, 1975/1981, p. 291)
Language is never a unified system, never complete. In-
stead it reflects the complexity and unsystematic messiness
of experience. Language can be unified when life is unified.
The striving for unity is reflected in efforts to systematize
language. Bakhtin does not dismiss these efforts, but is con-
cerned that we should recognize them as an ultimately fu-
tile attempt to impose order: "A unitary language is not
something given, but is always in essence posited" (Bakhtin
quoted in Morson & Emerson, 1990, p. 140).
This centralizing effort to change languages into lan-
guage is countered by corresponding efforts to develop
new languages to deal with diverse and changing experi-
ences. Centripetal and centrifugal forces affect languages
simultaneously: "every utterance participates in the 'uni-
tary language' (in its centripetal forces and tendencies) and
at the same time partakes of social and historical het-
eroglossia (the centrifugal, stratifying forces)" (Bakhtin,
1975/1981, p. 272). To understand an utterance involves
understanding the "dialogue" between centripetal and
centrifugal forces. Bakhtin's notion of heteroglossia goes
6 EDUCATIONAL RESEARCHER
beyond a plurality of viewpoints to the very structure of
language; it is impossible to speak, to understand the
world, without using the languages of others. Gadamer
(1960/1996) makes much the same point about the in-
evitability of prejudices and traditions.
Dialogue between languages is possible, however. People
belong to different groups simultaneously and learn to speak
different languages in different contexts; words can develop
meanings from each of these languages. For example (and by
no accident), military metaphors are often used in sports
(e.g., long bomb, field general), sports vocabulary is used in
business (e.g., fumble the ball, home run), and business ter-
minology is used in schools (e.g., bottom line, TQM, MBO).
In each case, what is being appropriated is not only partic-
ular words or metaphors, but a world view and the values
that are part of that view. The ongoing dialogue between
these languages is part of the development of language and
culture.
Dialogue between languages is not inevitable, however.
Indeed, it often fails: centripetal forces dominate centrifugal
ones, resulting in monologue not dialogue. Monologue dis-
torts communication in two ways: it privileges one speaker
(or group of speakers) in decontextualized communication
and also assumes that all experience can be organized into
a coherent system. Much of the work of Foucault, for ex-
ample, can be read as uncovering and disrupting mono-
lctoc discourse (e.g., Foucault, 1980); much of the critique of
instrumental reasoning involves understanding how it is
used inappropriately to systematize or "colonize" the social
world (e.g. Habermas, 1981/1984, 1987). Dialogue across
such divides is rare, difficult, and often halting (Burbules &
Rice, 1991).
In monologue, meaning is not the product of interchange
between speakers, but the expression of one person's or
group's ordering of experience. Centripetal forces domi-
nate. Other speakers are simply not part of the world being
created:
Monologism, at its extreme, denies the existence outside
itself of another consciousness with equal rights and re-
sponsibilities, another I with equal rights (thou). With a
monologic approach (in its extreme or pure form) another
person remains wholly and merely an object of conscious-
ness, and not another consciousness. . . . Monologue
pretends to be the ultimate word. It closes down the rep-
resented world and represented persons. (Bakhtin,
1963/1984a, pp. 292-293)
The objectification of others facilitates the attempt to or-
ganize the world into systems, that is, it promotes cen-
tripetal forces. In doing so, it ignores centrifugal forces of
diversity and "eventness." Completeness and resolution
are forced on incomplete and unfinalizable experience.
Bakhtin's reservations about the Saussurian separation of
langue from parole concern the inevitable privileging of
langue. Monologism produces incomplete truth that pre-
tends to completeness.
Another term for monologue is ideology, a word which
brings considerable baggage. It is "generally a disparaging
term used to describe someone else's political views which
one regards as unsound" (Audi, 1995, p. 360). But for
Bakhtin, ideology—monologue—is inevitable. The organi-
zation of experience involves generalization from individ-
ual events; this systemization of experience must simplify
and distort that experience. Centripetal and centrifugal
forces are therefore enmeshed in all communication. The
discovery of the monologic aspects in communication—the
uncovering of ideology—may be accomplished by includ-
ing other languages, by creating dialogue; centripetal forces
are countered by centrifugal ones. Bakhtin argues that all
communication includes some ideological/monologic as-
pects that may be revealed through genuine dialogue. This
conception of dialogue is not left as an abstract ideal, how-
ever. Bakhtin provides examples of dialogic communica-
tion in the novels of Dostoevsky and Rabelais and finds in
these novels three strategies that can help with the uncov-
ering of monologue/ideology: polyphony, chronotope, and
carnival.
Dialogue and the Novel
A Bakhtinian, dialogic conception of truth must meet two
criteria: (i) it must respect heteroglossia, that is, it must in-
clude dialogue between languages; (ii) it must involve gen-
uine communication between subjects (langue and parole),
thus including considerations of context. For Bakhtin, the
modern novel (and especially the work of Dostoevsky) em-
bodies dialogism.
The novel has the same effect on the epic in literature as
Galileo's ideas had on Ptolemaic astronomy, that is, world
views are turned upside down.
The novel is the expression of a Galilean perception of lan-
guage, one that denies the absolutism of a single and uni-
tary language—that is, that refuses to acknowledge its
own language as the sole verbal and semantic center of the
ideological world. . . . The novel begins by presuming a
verbal and semantic decentering of the ideological world,
a certain linguistic homelessness of literary consciousness,
which no longer possesses a sacrosanct and unitary
linguistic medium for containing ideological thought.
(Bakhtin, 1975/1981, pp. 366-367)
For Bakhtin, the epic depicts a complete, monologic world.
In the epic, the story is told from one point of view, in only
one language, outside of considerations of time and partic-
ular places: there is only one world, one reality, ordered and
complete.
The world of the novel, on the other hand, is incomplete,
imperfect; many languages compete for truth from different
vantage points in the past, present, and future and from dif-
ferent places in a constantly changing world. Bakhtin uses
the concepts polyphony, chronotope, and carnival to develop
a dialogic view of the novel. I want to try to explain these
three concepts and illustrate how they each affected the re-
tention study and the dialogue that resulted from that study.
Polyphony
The destruction of epic distance and the transferral [sic] of
the image of an individual from the distanced plane to the
zone of contact with the inconclusive events of the present
(and consequently of the future) result in a radical re-
structuring of the image of the individual in the novel.
(Bakhtin, 1975/1981, p. 35)
Bakhtin presents a paradox: how can the novel, a work
which is created by one person, be dialogic? To deal with
this contradiction, Bakhtin uses the concept of polyphony,
which embodies a dialogic sense of truth and includes a
special position for the author. Truth, for Bakhtin, emerges
APRIL 1999
from a genuine communication between people; it is not
imposed by one partner on the other. Truth is "born between
people collectively searching for truth" (Bakhtin, 1963/ 1984a,
p. 110). Bakhtin describes this mutual construction of truth
in a passage that sounds very much like Gadamer's fusion
of horizons:
[The speaker's] orientation toward the listener is an ori-
entation toward a specific conceptual horizon, toward the
specific world of the listener; it introduces totally new el-
ements into his discourse; it is in this way, after all, that
various different points of view, conceptual horizons, sys-
tems for providing expressive accents, various social "lan-
guages" come to interact with one another. (Bakhtin,
1975/1981, p. 282)
The product of this interaction is dialogic truth.
For Bakhtin, it is Dostoevsky's work which best exem-
plifies the achievement of dialogic truth in the novel.
Rather than creating characters from above, manipulating
them in a grand design to achieve the author's planned
truth, Dostoevsky creates " . . . free people, capable of
standing alongside their creator, capable of not agreeing
with him and even rebelling against him" (Bakhtin,
1963/1984a, p. 6). Bakhtin does not, of course, claim that
Dostoevsky does not create the characters in his novels,
but that once created, these characters achieve a degree of
autonomy, and the novel is carried by the interaction be-
tween them. Dostoevsky's novels thus include "a plurality
of independent and unmerged voices and consciousnesses, a gen-
uine polyphony of fully valid voices" (Bakhtin, 1963/1984a,
p.6). The result is no final, complete truth, but unfinalizable,
partial truths generated from the interaction among char-
acters. In Dostoevsky's novels there is not an inevitable
(centripetal) movement towards a unifying systematic con-
clusion: "Dostoevsky—to speak paradoxically—thought
not in thoughts but in points of view, consciousnesses,
voices" (Bakhtin, 1963/1984a, p. 93). Dostoevsky achieves a
new kind of unity, one not based on a unitary idea or theme,
but a unity inherent in the relations between characters
(Clark & Holquist, 1984).
Polyphony in Research
The research that Holmes and Matthews used in con-
structing their meta-analysis might be characterized as
monologic research. Indeed, both the practice of retaining
students in grade and the research on that practice are
monologic. In both instances, only one language is used:
either the business-like language of the school as factory or
the scientific language of professional researchers. This lan-
guage is timeless and classless. It has no history and no
alternatives. Students are the objects of policy or study,
without voice, which helps in efforts to systematize their ex-
perience. Centripetal forces of langue are ascendant in an
epic-like world. There is no truth born between people. In-
deed there is a curious absence of voice: administrators and
teachers do not fail students, they implement policies ac-
cording to objective criteria; researchers present impartial
data in third person narratives.
The Retention Research Team determined to include
some of the voices that were missing from the conversation:
the students who had been retained. Researchers, adminis-
trators and teachers had each had some opportunity to con-
tribute their perspectives, but the students had not. We had
7
an obvious dilemma: talking to children about their experi-
ence of repeating a grade might increase the trauma of an
already difficult experience. Accordingly, we decided to re-
cruit adults who had repeated a grade in school and were
willing to discuss the experience. We advertised in the local
papers and school newsletters, and from a pool of about a
dozen volunteers we interviewed six. The interviews were
taped, transcribed, and then reformatted as stories using
the language of the person interviewed as much as possi-
ble. The stories were then reviewed by the interviewees and
subsequently became the basis of the research booklet Faces
of Failure (Coulter et al., 1993). The stories of Mary, Alex,
David, Suzanne, Lorie, and Linda help to ground the
rhetoric of standards and excellence in the experience of
children. New voices are added to the dialogue.
For example, instead of effect-size calculations about stu-
dent attitudes towards school, David, Linda, and Lorie re-
in the epic, the story is told
from one point of view . . . there
is only one world, one reality,
ordered and complete.
torical inversion" (Bakhtin, 1975/1981, p. 147). In some
call their teachers and the attitudes they inspired. David de-
scribes his attitude towards school and teachers after failing
grade one:
From then on I hated and despised school and teachers for
the rest of my life.... From that time I really had a grudge
against teachers, I really hate teachers. I had that grade
one teacher for three years. I failed in grade one, then I had
her for the second year and then they promoted her to
grade two. She was one of those stern, stern, stern, stern
types. I was strapped on the average of two or three times
a week. For anything, once for not singing. For the life of
me I don't know why I failed (grade one). I could read, I
remember I used to read the paper. I can't see how my
work could have been all that bad to fail in grade one. I re-
member the Dick and Jane books. I remember that I could
read them. (p. 34)
Linda recalls her problems with reading and her relation-
ship with her teacher:
I didn't feel any support from the teacher. I felt condem-
nation. It wasn't like, "You're not reading yet;" it was
"You haven't read; you aren't reading and you will not
read because you can't."
I remember that teacher well. She was young and a sharp
dresser. Her name was something like Windfield or
Windsor. My word association for remembering her
name was "Miss Windyweather," because that's what I
felt like being around her. I felt like the wind was just
blowing me. (p. 29)
But Lorie has a different attitude about teachers and school:
I always liked my teachers. I think teachers were older
than they are nowadays. All my teachers seemed to have
been older. Like 42, where now they're 23, 28. My grade
six teacher was wonderful. Nice. She was young. I guess
8 EDUCATIONAL RESEARCHER
she treated you more like a human being. She tried to re-
late to you. She was nice. We all loved her. We used to stay
behind in school to do things for her. (p. 42)
Faces makes no attempt to summarize the attitudes the six
people interviewed developed about teachers and schools,
much less group their feelings into a number or effect-size.
Their voices are juxtaposed and not blended.
Chronotope
Adding voices is not enough to promote genuine dialogue.
The voices to be added should reflect authentic individual
experience: dialogic truth must respect parole as well as
langue. The truth that develops between characters in a
novel is dependent on their history and the context in
which they find themselves. To reflect this, Bakhtin invents
a term to indicate time / space: the chronotope. Time is a key
factor in the development of the novel: "From the very be-
ginning the novel was structured not in the distanced image
of the absolute past but in the zone of direct contact with in-
conclusive present-day reality. At its core lay personal ex-
perience" (Bakhtin, 1975/1981, p. 39).
The epic's treatment of time results in time being turned
upside down: the epic locates "purpose, ideal, justice, per-
fection, the harmonious condition of man and society and
the like in the past. Myths about paradise, a Golden Age, a
Jieroic age, an ancient truth... are all expressions of this his-
sense, things that should / could be realized in the future are
located in the past instead. The future is disconnected: "The
force and persuasiveness of reality, of real life, belong to the
present and in the past alone—to the 'is' and the 'was'—and
to the future belongs a reality of a different sort, one that is
more ephemeral" (Bakhtin, 1975/1981, p. 147). Characters
in the epic cannot develop, for there is no future to attain,
only a past to regain. The novel reconnects the future to the
present and past and allows characters the possibility and
responsibility of determining that future.
In using the term chronotope., Bakhtin again makes an
analogy to physics, this time to Einsteinian time /space.
Like Einstein, he hopes to redefine reality, but in Bakhtin's
case a literary reality that tries to capture the "eventness" of
reality. Bakhtin emphasizes the individual historicity of ex-
perience by using a term that recognizes that individuals
are located in both time and space. Thus, unlike the epic,
characters in the novel may choose their future. Crucial for
Bakhtin is that characters accept that they are answerable
for their choices, that is, they are morally accountable.
Chronotope in Research
Holmes and Matthews group the effects of retention on
children into four broad categories: self-concept, attitude
toward school, personal adjustment, and academic achieve-
ment. Lost in these efforts to classify experiences is any
sense of what the experience means to children—what it
feels like to be eight years old and be told that you will no
longer be with your friends, that you are a "dummy," or a
"retard;" or what it feels like to overcome the stigma of fail-
ure and succeed. The gain in scope comes at the price of the
meaning of the experience for actual school children.
The Research Team tried to capture the particular expe-
riences of the people interviewed, to supply the context
missing from much of the research on retention. Students,
teachers, administrators, and researchers can be reified con-
structs without individuality. The Team tried to listen care-
fully to how, for example, David and Lorie described being
told that they had failed their years. David explains:
The next September I went with my friends to grade two.
I can see it like I'm looking at you right now. My grade one
teacher came and got me out of the grade two classroom
and took me by the hand back to grade one. I'd failed. I
didn't even know I'd failed. That teacher that took me
back was a vindictive mean witch with a windbag per-
sonality. I can mimic her now forty years later, (p. 34)
Lorie recalls:
It was June 30th, 4 o'clock. The teacher asked me and an-
other girl to stay after school. Everybody got their report
cards. I guess we were told not to open them. After every-
body had left, she told us that we were going to fail and
we'd have to do grade four again. And I remember crying
really hard because I was . . . It was because grade three
and four were on this side and grade five and six were on
that side of the school. So it was really devastating and
everybody was leaving me and I was going to be left be-
hind. But hey, I survived. But it was...very devastating
when she told me. Verry [sic]. I was shocked that I was re-
peating, 'cause I wasn't prepared for this. (p. 43)
David and Lorie begin their recollections by locating them-
selves in particular times and places. Rather than voicing
conclusions, they describe experiences.
Carnival
Adding languages and particular experiences is still not
enough for the kind of dialogue that Bakhtin proposes. He is
also concerned about the range of languages and experiences
represented. All affected need to be included. This not only re-
quires searching outside for voices to be included, but listen-
ing carefully to those voices already present. The sources for
the novel, for example, can be found within the epic. The epic
with its unitary world view, single language, and timeless-
ness was supplanted by the modern novel with its consider-
ations of polyphony and chronotope, yet the very seeds of
that revolution were found within the epic. The epic pre-
sented a stable and unchanging society in which all was in
pre-ordained order and dissent was inconceivable; centripetal
forces were ascendant. But centrifugal forces were never ab-
sent and Bakhtin claims that the novel owes its existence to
the forces of counter-culture, opposition to hierarchy and cen-
tralization: a folk-festive culture best exemplified in medieval
carnival and found in the novels of Rabelais.
Bakhtin claims that popular festivals and rituals depicted
an alternate life for people within official culture. In this sep-
arate world, norms are reversed, hierarchy is dissolved, and
humankind is renewed on a more egalitarian and radically
democratic basis. Carnival values include celebrating open-
ness and incompletion and mocking rigidity and pomposity.
For Bakhtin, carnival " . . . discloses the potentiality of an en-
tirely different world, of another order, another way of life. It
leads men out of the confines of the apparent (false) unity, of
the indisputable and stable" (Bakhtin, 1965/1984b, p. 48).
Carnival is an important resource in the battle against
monologic/ ideological thought. The parody of official, rec-
ognized norms and behavior helps to make the common-
place strange, to defamiliarize the accepted state of affairs.
Sources for a critique of the conventional are immanent
APRR 1999
within the ordinary. The sources for Bakhtin's Utopia are
therefore not in a golden age of the past or future, but
within the prosaic present. Dialogic truth is not pronounced
by philosopher kings, but constructed by ordinary people.
Carnival in Research
Carnival involves discovering the centrifugal in the cen-
tripetal, the novel within the epic. This applies to both
monologic practices and monologic research, that is, what
is being researched as well as the research effort itself.
Dialogic research involves first, finding the voices si-
lenced or marginalized by monologic practices. Mary de-
scribes her relationship with her peers in grade six:
I was shy, plus I was overweight. In grade six of course I
started to change (physically) and there was a lot of teas-
ing. I had one girlfriend, Susan, and that's because she was
on the chubby side too. Other than that it was just isolation.
I isolated myself. That's the year everybody was changing
but they went into their groups—the pretty girls, the boys
... you know. That's the year when they said "Who wants
to associate with her? She can't keep up with us, the rest of
us. I don't want to be seen with her," you know. That was
what it was like. All your friends are pushing you away.
You're changing. You want to go on with them; you don't
want to go on with them. I'm not going to be teased any-
more. That was a really tough year. That was an emotional
year, a very bad emotional year. (pp. 9-10)
*J
Alfex traces his distrust of authority to being tested by a
school psychologist in grade two:
There was a spatial relations test and the fellow was
standing with a clipboard and a stop watch, and I said,
"Well, how long do I have to do this?" And he said, "Don't
worry, we're not timing you." . . .Why was this fellow
lying to me? He was supposed to be helping me, you see,
and he was lying. So, I did the test and again I never found
out what it was they found.... I never really trusted au-
thority after that. You always have to look after yourself.
Because, you know, here's this guy with a stop watch and
he's "not timing" you! (pp. 23-24)
But dialogic research also involves discovering the si-
lenced and marginalized within research itself. A striking
feature of most of the research on retention is the one-
sidedness of the corpus. While a few examples can be
found that support the practice of retention, or at least at-
tack the alternative of social promotion, the vast majority
supports House's aforementioned conclusion: "I know of
no educational practice in which the research is in such
agreement" (1989, pp. 205-206). A dialogic critique of the
Holmes and Matthews research would therefore not only
add languages, voices, and experiences, but would search
for the voices, languages, and experiences hidden within
the research.
The stories are not combined into a uniform portrait of
the experience of failing a year of school. Indeed the people
interviewed disagree about the experience: four of the six
believed that failing somehow benefited them (although in
at least two instances, reading Faces caused them to recon-
sider). David, Suzanne, Mary, and Lorie counterpose their
voices. David explains:
I still think that if I hadn't failed grade one things would
have been different—I've had that undercurrent of failure
with me all the time. Failing gave me an inferiority com-
9
 plex. I have an inferiority complex that is mind-boggling
and I've chalked it up to failing in grade one. It was mor-
tifying, absolutely mortifying. I've just never developed
confidence and have always considered myself a failure.
I'm pleading my case. I don't think people should fail, es-
pecially in grade one. (p. 37)
Suzanne describes how she continues to hide her stigma
long after leaving school:
No one knows that I only have a grade seven education.
I've lied in my job interviews and in my resumes ever
since I left school. I'd never have gotten the jobs I did if
they knew I had failed and I only have grade seven edu-
cation. I have no objections to the way I am now. My life
is wonderful. I've never moved since I was married and I
have a job that pays $40,000 a year. To this day my daugh-
ter doesn't know that I failed grade eight and only have
my Grade Seven Certificate I hope she doesn't do what
I did. She'd feel better about herself if she did it a differ-
ent way. (p. 41)
Mary has a different opinion:
Like I say, I was a late bloomer. Now I pick up things a
heck of a lot quicker. I've more determination. But no, I
don't think I would have finished school even if financially
at h o m e . . . . I don't think I would have continued, I really
don't. I think staying behind helped me. . . . I want to go
back to school.... I might be 42, but I will do it! (pp. 19-21)
Lorie adds:
Oh, I've got a whole family I could bring here for inter-
views. Actually my husband failed grades four and eight.
Now I can't remember if my older one failed, but I know
my middle brother did. My son repeated grade three. I'm
not saying that he's going to go right ahead, but repeating
grade three helped him, most definitely. There's no doubt
about that in my mind. Did repeating the grade help me?
Probably. I don't know. My mom should be here, eh? I
don't know. Probably. Because obviously if I wasn't ready
to go ahead I would have struggled even more. (p. 45)
Five of the six people interviewed left school early. All have
strong attitudes about schooling that can be connected to
their experience of repeating and all have both positive and
negative stories about their teachers. The stories do not lead
to simple policy recommendations; no solutions are offered.
Instead the Research Team offers the hope that the stories
will contribute to a different kind of dialogue.
Dialogic Research
Faces of Failure attempts dialogic research into a monologic
practice, that is, it attempts to uncover the centripetal and
centrifugal aspects of retention in grade, to supplement
monologic research with research that uses the Bakhtinian
resources of polyphony, chronotype, and carnival. It does so
by supplementing monologic research with research that
uses the Bakhtinian resources of polyphony, chronotope
and carnival. New speakers and new languages are in-
cluded in the conversation about retention in grade. Added
to the voices of professional researchers are the voices of
people who have experienced repeating a grade. Alongside
the third person, objective prose of standard research re-
ports are the stories of the informants in their own lan-
guage, using their voices. There is no neat policy "solution"
to an educational problem offered; neither is there an at-
10 EDUCATIONAL RESEARCHER
tempt to arrive at a forced consensus. Instead Faces of Fail-
ure aims to "help move the discussion about retention away
from a linear cause and effect rhetoric to a more complex
and complete view of how we, in schools, affect people's
lives. The stories should make us humble about our ac-
tions" (p. 48).
The stories attempt to locate retention in the lives of
people, in particular times and specific places. Instead of an
epic-life world of "pupils," "schools," and "effect-sizes,"
the report describes David's experience being taken down
the hallway from the grade two classroom back to the first
grade. By describing particular pasts, the Research Team
hopes that connections to present situations can be made,
which might lead to different futures.
Finally, the different voices, languages and stories em-
body different values, values absent from the official dia-
logue. Added to talk about "standards," "promotion gates,"
"outcome-based instruction," "accountability," and "social
promotion" are words like "inferiority," "trust," "guilty se-
cret," and "isolation." These are not found outside the ex-
perience and injected into the dialogue, but are values and
issues that had always been there and were only being un-
covered. The study concludes with a call for
new ways of organizing schools, new metaphors to guide
our thinking. To guide us in this search we need to return
to a discussion of the purposes we have set for our schools
and the values that underlie those purposes. (1993, p. 54)
Calls for increased dialogue at the end of research reports
seem trite. The exchange that followed this report, however,
was different. When Faces of Failure was presented to the
School Board, it w a s picked up by The Winnipeg Free Press,
which ran a front page feature on the project, which, in turn,
generated letters to the editor as well as comment in other
media and between teachers, parents, and the public. Par-
ents and teachers requested copies of the booklet and asked
research team members to come to discuss the report; it be-
came a local best-seller.
A number of schools requested copies of the booklet and
asked Research Team members to provide professional de-
velopment sessions dedicated to the study. Within six
months, most elementary schools and some middle schools
had spent time discussing the booklet. Other school dis-
tricts made similar requests. The Research Team also pre-
sented its work at the annual conference of the American
Educational Research Association in Atlanta (1993).
The result of all of the above was an ongoing dialogue in
which the benefits and purposes of retention in grade were
debated in some new ways. Not all reactions were new:
some teachers and parents dismissed the report, often
without reading it. Others used it to confirm their posi-
tions. Still others, however, understood the issue in new
ways; they heard previously missing voices speaking dif-
ferent languages and providing entry to experience that
had previously been private and inaccessible. A different
kind of public dialogue ensued, one which—to repeat my-
self—reflected understandings which were incomplete,
imperfect, in which many languages competed for truth
from different vantage points in the past, present, and fu-
ture and from different places. The epic w a s supplanted by
the novel.
The issue was not solved, however. The graded structure
of school inspired by the 19th century factory remained.
There was no simple change in policy or direction by the
school district; some students still repeated grades and
courses, but fewer. Decisions about failing students became
even more complex discussions involving parents, teachers,
and administrators, dialogues that had been affected by re-
search, research which had at least some of the characteris-
tics of dialogism.
A Dialogic Critique
Yet Faces of Failure is vulnerable to dialogic criticism. While
guided by Bakhtin's ideas, the team developed its under-
standing of dialogism in the process of its research; the
process was recursive not linear. Faces may include new
voices, but are 6 voices adequate, especially when juxta-
posed with the more than 11,000 that Holmes and
Matthews include? Are there voices and languages still
omitted? What about those who were not failed, but pushed
through the graded school system? Can adults faithfully re-
call their experience from, in some cases, 40 years ago? Is
the report—despite its efforts—still framed by the monologic
research it attempts to remedy? By linking the six stories
and the conventional research, are the stories being con-
trolled by the categories from, for example, the Holmes and
Matthews meta-analysis?
Are the six stories really the stories of the volunteers?
How much did the research team change the stories in tran-
scribing, selecting, and reordering the interviews? Can re-
searchers really tell someone else's story? What are the
differences between telling a story and writing it? How
much of the context is absent? Who is telling the stories of
the teachers and parents mentioned in the booklet?
Some of these criticisms might be answered by more self-
conscious attention to the dialogue. The power of the con-
ventional research to frame the conversation might have
been confronted more directly. Other concerns might be ad-
dressed, but cannot be completely satisfied; for example,
the number of respondents is always limited by practical
concerns in empirical research. Similarly, in order to include
other voices, other languages, the research team had to tell
the stories of the volunteers. This had to be done carefully
and faithfully, but the stories still had to be written by the
researchers.
Finally, and I would argue most importantly, the dialogic
critique is itself vulnerable to criticism. Are centrifugal
forces privileged over centripetal ones? Are openness and
inconclusiveness more valued than the coherence and con-
nection? What are the norms that can be used to resolve the
expanded dialogue that Faces of Failure tries to create? Is it
really adequate to argue for a wider, more complex dialogue
without dealing with the criteria to decide issues, or with the
norms necessary for the dialogue itself, or with overcoming
the enormous barriers in the way of that dialogue?
Dialogism might be accused of valuing dialogue to the
detriment of knowledge claims, that is, dialogism may be
vulnerable to charges of relativism; after all, truth is made
between participants in a dialogue in a particular time/
space location. All of this distorts Bakh tin's work, however,
and focuses only on centrifugal aspects. Certainly Bakhtin
himself is vulnerable to charges that he privileges incom-
pletion and openness, which may be understandable given
his context of Stalinist Russia. Privileging the centrifugal is
not uncommon, however. Elizabeth Ellsworth (1997), for
APRIL 1999
example, using film scholar Shoshana Felman's interpreta-
tion of Lacanian theory, develops a conception of dialogue
that has many similarities to dialogism, but privileges "an-
alytic dialogue," with its concern for discontinuity, over
"communicative dialogue," which is directed towards un-
derstanding. Bakhtin, however, includes both langue and
parole, centripetal and centrifugal forces, in his conception
of dialogic truth. Among the languages included in his
conception of heteroglossia are the languages of tradition.
Dialogues can only occur because of the norms and as-
sumptions built into languages; Bakhtin as a literary scholar
is very well aware of this and wants to make these as-
sumptions more transparent. He argues that dialogue is
only worthwhile because of this background: "It should be
noted that both relativism and dogmatism equally exclude
all argumentation, all authentic dialogue, by making it
either unnecessary (relativism) or impossible (dogmatism)"
(Bakhtin quoted in Morson, 1981, p. viii).
Two other important scholars of dialogue, Michel Foucault
and Jurgen Habermas—one associated with discontinuity,
the other with consensus—echo Bakhtin's view that cen-
tripetal and centrifugal forces are enmeshed in dialogue
(Ingram, 1994). In emphasizing that we speak through
traditions, Bakhtin anticipates Gadamer (1960/1996) and
Maclntyre (1984,1988). In stressing how those traditions are
inevitably the products of power, Bakhtin anticipates both
Foucault (1980) and Habermas (1981/1984). What Bakhtin
adfis to these dialogues are important criteria for evaluat-
ing and uncovering centripetal and centrifugal aspects of
language. He does not supply resources for resolving the
Gadamer-Habermas debate (How, 1995) about the critique
of traditions or the Habermas-Foucault debate (Kelly, 1994)
about the checks to strategic power.
Dialogue, Teacher Research, and Action Research
I want to conclude by connecting the conception of dialogic
research that I have attempted to outline and exemplify
with my concerns about teacher research (and educational
research generally). While it may be valuable for teachers to
pursue this kind of research, why are teachers in any better
position to conduct dialogic research than, for example,
university researchers? My answer is that they may not be,
but they are. The project I outline might just as easily have
been conducted by, for example, a team of researchers from
the University of Manitoba or the University of Winnipeg.
They could have advertised for volunteers, conducted the
interviews, drafted the portraits, and reported to the Board.
They would certainly have been in a better position to con-
tinue the dialogue about the research at AERA, but they
would have been far less likely to initiate and sustain the di-
alogue about retention in the school district. For one thing,
they would not have the same incentive to pursue the dia-
logue within the district; university researchers are rewarded
for their contributions to scholarly dialogue, not practical
discourse. Of even more consequence, however, is the likely
difference in how a university research report would have
been received. Faces of Failure was research produced by
members of a community, for that community, with the co-
operation of community volunteers. University researchers
would have been regarded as outsiders and given a different
response. The intensity and longevity of the dialogue that en-
sued would have been less likely. To repeat Zeichner (1995),
teachers and others would likely have ignored the report. I
11
hope that if researchers and teachers engage in the kind of di-
alogic research I advocate here, the two solitudes might not
remain so separate, that new communities might be formed
that include researchers, teachers, and teacher researchers.
Indeed, what I am arguing for is a new kind of action re-
search, one with a different conception of action from tra-
ditional action research. Action is not only about doing, but
understanding, that is, action can be as Hannah Arendt
(1958) describes, a public dialogue about what is important,
good, and just. Action, in this sense, is about creating the
possibility for communities to publicly debate what it is
that makes them a community. For this dialogue to be an in-
formed dialogue, research must contribute. Some of that re-
search should come from people who have been given the
special privilege and responsibility to study issues: univer-
sity researchers. Some of that research might come from
other members of the community. Some of that research
might be dialogic research.
Dialogism offers no new research methodology. Bakhtin
offers some criteria to use in thinking about how truth is
made between speakers in dialogue. Speakers may use dif-
ferent languages, talk from different perspectives, and pro-
ceed from different and even antithetical value frameworks.
In confronting these dilemmas, I believe that Bakhtin offers
complex and useful ways to think about practice and re-
search on practice. He offers no guarantees, no neat mono-
logic solutions, but valuable conceptual resources. ? Oaks School Division.
These resources may be used both to frame research and
to begin a discussion about that research. Deconstructing
practices is insufficient; educational practices have to be
constructed as well. Bakhtin, I believe, anticipates both the
issue and how it might be addressed in dialogue, but the
character and conditions for such a dialogue about how to
build educational practices are perhaps better dealt with by
others including, for example, Habermas (Coulter, in press).
What Bakhtin does offer, however, are necessary but per-
haps not sufficient resources for that conversation—not an
inconsiderable feat. These assets can help us build a con-
ception of research as dialogue in which
[w]hat matters is an affirmation of a social world accept-
ing of tension and conflict. What matters is an affirmation
of energy and the passion of reflection in a renewed hope
of common action, of face-to-face encounters among
friends and strangers, striving for meaning, striving to un-
derstand. What matters is a quest for new ways of living
together, of generating more and more incisive and inclu-
sive dialogues. (Greene, 1994, p. 459)
Note
I would like to thank Kieran Egan, Graham Kelsey, Benjamin
Levin, Virginia Richardson, John Willinsky, and the editors and re-
viewers of Educational Researcher for their help with earlier versions
of this paper. I am also indebted to my colleagues in Seven Oaks for
letting me work with them on the Faces of Failure project: Louise
Evaschesen, Val McCorkell, Bill Potter, Don Tole, Alfred Wiebe and
Ernie Wilson.
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1999 AERA Election Results

The Tellers Committee met at the AERA Central Office on Tuesday, March 16, 1999.
The results of the official balloting are listed below.

Member-at-Large: Hilda Borko, University of Colorado

Divisional Vice Presidents (to assume office in 2000):

Division A: Karen Seashore Louis, University of Minnesota
Division C: Susan Goldman, Vanderbilt University
Division D: Suzanne Lane, University of Pittsburgh
Division E: Sharon Robinson-Kurpius, Arizona State University
Division J : Linda Johnsrud, University of Hawaii
Division K: Virginia Richardson, University of Michigan
Division L: Jane Hannaway, The Urban Institute

Divisional Secretaries (to assume office in 2000):

Division B: Susan H. Edgerton, Western Michigan University
Division F: Ronald Butchart, University of Washington, Tacoma
Division G: Patricia Baquedano-Lopez, UCLA
Division H: Mary Yakimowski, Virginia Polytechnic Institute
Division I: Marianna Hewson, Cleveland Clinic Foundation

President-Elect Bylaw change:

Catherine Snow The proposed change in the bylaws to allow the Association Council to
Harvard University determine membership dues was approved.

APRIL 1999 13