The Epic and the Novel: Dialogism and Teacher Research

Teacher research has been concerned with the generation of knowledge and voice for more than 70 years; teachers are invited to join the academic dialogue by becoming researchers themselves. Yet the promised fusion of communities seems as distant as ever. I want to suggest that for these two solitudes to be brought together, the emphasis needs to change from the generation of knowledge to dialogue about what counts as knowledge. Using the work of the Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin (1895–1975), I argue for dialogic research. In making my case, I present a research problem that was investigated by a group of school administrators and teachers, sketch the previous response of the research community to that issue, take a brief detour through Bakhtin's literary theory, and then show how each of the conceptual resources that he supplies–polyphony, chronoscope and carnival–affected the research project and the ensuing dialogue about knowledge and its relationship to practice.