Mikhail Bakhtin’s Legacy and the Challenges of Modern Education: A 2010s’ Perspective Review of the book: Brandist C. et al. (eds) (2020) Bakhtin in the Fullness of Time

Abstract

A detailed analysis of the collective monograph Bakhtin in the Fullness of Time: Bakhtinian Theory and the Process of Social Education is performed in this article, involving reflections on the place and meaning of the ideas of Mikhail Bakhtin (1895–1975) for theory and practice of Western education in the recent decades. Three major topics are covered in the book. The first one has to do with identifying the philosophical and sociocultural sources that preceded the formation of Bakhtin’s early views and largely predetermined his response to challenges of the time in his early philosophical texts and in his books about Dostoevsky and the genre of Bildungsroman. Another topic is Bakhtin’s dialogue with his contemporaries. Sometimes, this dialogue was open and active, sharply polemical, as in the situation with the latest aesthetic and literary trends of the early 1920s in Russia; at other times, however, it was “inaudible”, so researchers can only attempt to reconstruct it based on the consonance between the ideas of Bakhtin and those of Lev Vygotsky or Paulo Freire. The third topic is the transformation of Bakhtinian theory into teaching practice, whether it is about using dialogue and its potential in teaching foreign students, providing educational opportunities for the most economically vulnerable social groups in South Africa, or communicating with preschoolers in a kindergarten.
The authors of the book managed to create a convincing picture of how Bakhtinian theory is becoming a key element of today’s educational research and practice. Importantly, it is not only Bakhtin’s ideas as such — the concepts of dialogue, polyphony, carnival and chronotope in the first place — that matter: there is also the unrestrained polyvocality which is indispensable for any creative practice.