Beyond Discourse

Download or read book Beyond Discourse written by Alexander M. Sidorkin and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 1999-07-27 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Using Mikhail Bakhtin's concepts of dialogue and carnival, and in connection with the ideas of Martin Buber, Sidorkin explores the issues of difference and identity in a very postmodern view of the self. He addresses the questions of what it really means to be human, and, likewise, what truly makes a good school. He takes dialogue beyond the framework of discourse, making it an end in itself rather than a means toward better education. His sojourn into a fifth-grade classroom shows that basic forms of classroom talk, which are normally thought to be distracting or educationally useless, are proved to be valuable dialogical moments of discovery in schooling.