Learning Across Sites: New tools, infrastructures and practices - Earli

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248 O. Dysthe et al.
A Vygotskyan understanding of intersubjectivity in joint activity is particularly
relevant for our discussion of the Law and Education cases. 7 It is based on his theory
about interpsychological communication being transformed through processes of
participatory appropriation (Rogoff, 1995). Matusov (1998) has pointed out that
‘unlike intersubjectivity as sharing, the participatory notion of intersubjectivity is
joint- activity oriented rather than individual- oriented’ (p. 32). He claims that ‘The
traditional concept of intersubjectivity as sharing stresses reproductive aspects of
learning and culture as a whole at the expense of their productive, creative aspects.
This notion of sharing is designed to describe stable, preservative trends in the
culture’ (p. 33). Rommetveit (1974) theoretised intersubjectivity as a reciprocal
perspective focused on the importance of the participants building a ‘temporarily
shared social reality’ (TSSR). As the discourse continues, this shared reality is progressively
modified and expanded. His point is not that TSSR is a goal in itself but
that it provides a point of departure for the negotiation of meaning when multiple
interpretations collide. This is in our view relevant for feedback conceptualised as
joint activity, because it involves sharing, but needs to transcend this in order to
create new meaning.
Bakhtin’s concepts of ‘authoritative and inner persuasive word’ are particularly
useful for understanding our two models of feedback. Bakhtin’s dialogism (1981,
1986) represents an alternative analytical perspective and epistemology to monologism,
which is still the dominant perspective in many fields (Linell, 2009).
Where monologism is concerned with transmission of knowledge, dialogism sees
knowledge as emerging from the interaction of voices and is concerned with transformation
of understandings (Nystrand, 1992). While feedback has traditionally
been conceptualised as the teacher’s transmission of the correct standard or norm
(authoritative model), in a dialogic model it is a process of gradual, participatory
appropriation of the words of others to make them our own:
The word in language is half someone else’s. It becomes ‘one’s own’ only
when the speaker populates it with his own intention, his own accent, when
he appropriates the word, adapting it to his own semantic and expressive
intentions.
(Bakhtin, 1981, p. 293)
In a dialogic perspective, students’ revision processes can thus be understood as
adapting the words of others to their own intentions, ascribing it their own accent.
Obviously, the two perspectives on learning underlying our two models entail
different ontologies and will support different practices. Particularly relevant to
our discussion is Bakhtin’s distinction between ‘the authoritative and the inner
persuasive word’. The authoritative word demands that the listener acknowledges
it as ‘the truth’. Because it is hierarchical and distanced, bearing a previous authority,
it binds the listener regardless of any power it may have to persuade him or
her internally. It does not demand free reflection about its content, but ‘our
unconditional allegiance’ (Bakhtin, 1981, p. 343). Internally persuasive discourse