Children’s Voices and the Dialogic Imagination

Introduction

Schools are social worlds. Scholarly work has been done to problematize the binary relation of student/teacher hierarchies, and to advance children’s voice and agency within schools, leading to recognition of relational complexities. The implications of this work are furthered through Mikhail Bakhtin’s heuristic of the dialogic imagination. The dialogic imagination frames children’s voice in schools in interesting and productive ways, including the potential to go beyond particular figures of the child and of the teacher within the school context. This entry presents a broad description of Bakhtin’s idea of the dialogic imagination. It summarizes Bakhtin’s key ideas and situates them in relation to children’s voices within schools.

Bakhtinian ideas facilitate appreciation of the situated identities and repertoires of behavior mobilized by children and teachers. The concepts of heteroglossia, polyphony, and the carnivalesque enable layering of the situated identities. These...