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oom atmosphere should not make students ashamed to admit that they do not
understand, or to ask for further explanation and clarification.
This is why pedagogy which relies heavily on a monologic mode of address,
which “pretends to be the ultimate word” (Bakhtin, 1929/1984, pp. 292-293),
where what the teacher says is right “because I say so”, runs the risk of being selfdefeating.
If we do not give students the opportunity to voice doubt and uncertainty,
we have no way of knowing how successful our teaching has been, and miss
the chance to offer a different explanation or illustration which might dispel any
remaining confusion. Listening and responding to students’ concerns and questions
may help them to get a better grasp of a specific concept in mathematics or
Art, say; but it also exemplifies an understanding of what it is to be human, and
how to deal with the problems of interpersonal development that life presents,
namely: “To be means to communicate dialogically” (Bakhtin, 1929/1984, p. 252).
The polyphonic classroom: thinking with vs. talking at
In this chapter, I have suggested that the concept of polyphony, though developed
in the context of literary theory, is pregnant with suggestions for pedagogy. In
the polyphonic classroom (or other community of learners), the teacher provides
space for a plurality of unmerged ideological positions to interact in a collective
process of enquiry. The emphasis is on the need for students to make their reasoning
explicit in the course of discussion and debate, rather than on an expectation
that everyone should arrive at a single approved solution at the outset; where the
nature of the subject means that learners need to master specific algorithms and
laws (e.g. in mathematics and physics), if a student makes a mistake in selecting
or applying such a procedure, then this can be treated as an occasion for joint learning,
in which fellow students can be a potential source of support and constructive
criticism, as well as the teacher.
The teacher in this context addresses the student as a voice of equal weight, at
least in those phases of education which involve developing an understanding of
some novel aspect of practice in mathematics, communication in a first or second
language or other area of the curriculum. The teacher may indeed know more about
the subject matter than the students – one would hope that this is normally the case
– and may therefore need to correct misunderstandings and mistakes, or to step
in with some missing item of subject knowledge, such as the correct form of the
past tense, a piece of unfamiliar vocabulary or an idiomatic expression in second
language learning. But it does not follow that s/he must always rely on immediate
binary evaluations (“right/wrong”) in orienting to student contributions in discussion.
This, the norm of the monologising classroom, treats the discourse of each
student as an object, on which the teacher always has the final word. Under conditions
of polyphony, however, teacher-student communication is seen as a work-inprogress;
it is “unfinalised”, in Bakhtin’s terms, each thought being a rejoinder in an
emergent dialogue (Bakhtin, 1929/1984, p. 32). To affect the developing consciousness
of students means to talk with them, to enter into dialogue with them.
There is, of course, a real legacy of cultural tradition and pressure of societal
and political conditions which impinges on practice in the living situation of
the classroom lesson or university seminar, and these pressures cannot simply be
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