Teacher-Focused Dialogical Education: Moving between Centripetal and Centrifugal Positions

Document Type : پژوهشی

Author

• Amin Izadpanah

Faculty member of the department of Foundations of education, School of education and psychology, Shiraz University,, Shiraz ,Iran

10.22067/fedu.2022.67395.1000

Abstract

This paper aims to discuss and analyze the role of teachers in developing and promoting dialogical education through their reaching out to students’ voices in learning environments. The inability of Iranians in the dialog is a major and serious problem of the Iranian society, and it seems that the centralized and bureaucratic education system, with its overemphasis on knowledge acquisition and its negligence of the critical role of human interactions, can be held responsible for this situation. The bureaucratic conception of teachers allows the education system to recruit teachers as its agents in the service of its values, thereby restricting the chances of human interaction and dialog in the educational environments. The Theoretical Foundations of Fundamental Transformation -declared in 2011-seeks to alter the old-fashioned, bureaucratic image of the teachers and portrays them as the cultural forces of society and generators of social capital. Corresponding to this recent reformative policy, this paper puts forward a conception of dialogicality in education with the leadership of teachers, as changing position the between the two conditions of centrifugal and centripetal forces, two concepts introduced by Mikhail Bakhtin. Dialogicality, then, provides practical chances for students’ perspectives to be maintained and their voices heard in education. Also, a model for referring to students’ voices by the teachers for the purpose of promoting multi-voiced and dialogical education is proposed. In this model teachers and students are considered as co-partners participating in shared learning experiences, but from different perspectives

Keywords

• Education
• Teacher
• Dialogicality
• Centripetal
• Centrifugal
• Bakhtin
• TFFT

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