The Bakhtin Primer offers a truly new and innovative approach to leading and reforming schools.
It delves into some of Bakhtin's most salient concepts - chronotope polyphony and
heteroglossia dialogue and dialogism and carnival - and presents them as the basis for a
comprehensive reform agenda - one that focuses on high levels of student achievement and on
socially just and inclusive educational practice. The primer demonstrates the relevance of
theory to educational practice and presents it in clear concise language coupled with numerous
illustrative examples to make the ideas accessible to readers. It elaborates the importance of
thinking about dialogue not just as talk but as an ontological concept that informs how we
embrace the diversity inherent in our world. It explores how dialogue and carnival can disrupt
the status quo and confront inequitable practices and relationships. It argues that education
informed by Bakhtin's concepts would be more open more conscious of inquiry ambiguity
incompleteness complexity and relationships than traditional more rational approaches. It
would challenge and teach students to question authoritative views and traditions and lead
them to develop important understandings about our interconnectedness as well as how to
interact with and learn from differences across time place class and culture.
