Journal of Russian and East European Psychology, vol. 49, no. 2,
March–April 2011, pp. 36–43.
© 2011 M.E. Sharpe, Inc. All rights reserved.
ISSN 1061–0405/2011 $9.50 + 0.00.
DOI 10.2753/RPO1061-0405490205
Kiyotaka Miyazaki
This article compares the idea of the School of the Dialogue of Cultures with the Japanese dialogic pedagogy called Saitou Pedagogy. Though both pedagogies relate strongly to Bakhtin’s view on the dialogue, the former focuses on the development of teaching material that stimulates children to generate different voices from the historical High Cultures, and the latter emphasizes the work of the teacher as the author of the polyphonic novel.
Some basic facts of Saitou pedagogy
First, I will describe some basic facts of Japanese Saitou pedagogy relevant to the discussion of the School of the Dialogue of Cultures (SDC). Its founder, a charismatic elementary teacher, Kihaku Saitou (1911–81), worked as a teacher in public elementary schools in a rural area of Japan from 1930 to 1969. Over the last eighteen years of his teaching career, he led educational practices as principal of three elementary schools. These schools became very famous in the Japanese educational world. After retirement, he organized the Research Group on Pedagogical Studies (Kyoujugaku kenky÷u no kai). Many practitioners followed him and developed his ideas in kindergartens, elementary schools, middle schools, and high schools. After his death in 1981, the research group lost its impetus, and their national conferences stopped taking place. However, many practitioners still follow and develop his pedagogy all over Japan.
Based entirely on practitioners’ experiences, Saitou’s concept is a system of knowledge of practice, in sharp contrast to the SDC, which has its primary theoretical basis in Bibler’s (2009) philosophy. As a system of knowledge of the teachers’ practice, Saitou focuses on practical issues useful to teachers in the classroom, such as how to organize children’s dialogic learning activity in the classroom and how to prepare for it. Though children’s learning processes themselves are not discussed theoretically as explicit issues, Saitou’s view of classroom practices provides fruitful insights about these learning processes.
As for subject matter, Saitou pedagogy has typically been done mainly in the language arts classroom, although again it is not subject specific. In this regard, Saitou pedagogy seems to have a feature in common with the one of the SDC’s important aims—that is, to develop good readers (Kurganov, 2009). The teaching of literature is important in Saitou pedagogy partly because Kihaku Saitou himself was a poet of the traditional Japanese poetic genre, waka.
Saitou pedagogy also focuses on other arts-oriented subject matter such as fine art and music. In music, many works, particularly operettas, have been used as teaching material.
1. Recently, a new method of teaching called the “fieldwork method” has been developed in Saitou pedagogy for social studies and some areas of natural sciences in elementary and middle schools (Miyazaki, 2005).
2 Most practitioners of Saitou pedagogy have been teachers in public schools with well-defined national curriculums. Often the textbooks contain texts but no questions for children or teachers, leaving it up to teachers how to teach the text to the students. This is the traditional practice of Japanese education and Saitou pedagogy has developed within this tradition.
Saitou pedagogy as dialogic pedagogy
Saitou pedagogy is a system of knowledge of the practices of teachers based on their teaching experiences. While the word “dialogue” does not appear in Saitou’s extensive writings, much less the name “Bakhtin,” I still think Saitou’s system is dialogic pedagogy in the spirit of Bakhtin. Saitou defines the classroom lesson as follows:
[A good classroom lesson] should be one in which contradiction, opposition, or tension between the teaching material, teacher, and students occur first. Then, the teacher and students should overcome the tension to discover and create something new. (Saitou, 1969, author’s translation)
There are four oppositions in the classroom lesson: (1) among the children, (2) between the children and the teaching material, (3) between the children and the teacher, and (4) between the teacher and the teaching material. Opposition among children, and between the children and the teacher involves their views of the teaching material. Using the SDC’s terms, these are oppositions between different views on the same topic (Kurganov, 2009). Unique to Saitou pedagogy is the supposition of oppositions between the teacher and the teaching material, and between children and the teaching material. In these oppositions, the teacher and children challenge and explore the teaching material to arrive at new views of it.
For Saitou, the classroom lesson starts when the teacher challenges the teaching material and the children’s ideas about it. With such activities, children challenge the teaching material with the teacher’s and the other children’s ideas of this material. From these oppositions new views on the teaching material emerge, and new oppositions are generated.
Saitou’s definition of a lesson might sound somewhat similar to Hegelian dialectic.
However, the development of a real classroom lesson in Saitou pedagogy takes not only a course in which opposing views are sublated to one integrated “advanced” view. For Saitou pedagogy, discoveries of something new by the children and the teacher never end.
More concretely, the opposition comes at points in the teaching material called “the kernel of the teaching material” (kyouzai no kaku) in Saitou pedagogy. The kernels are places where different views are generated. The teacher discovers the kernel and generates a question about it. The question provokes a discussion in the classroom among the children and between the children and the teacher.
The kernel and the question about it should be stimulating, critical, and provocative so that it can produce in the children views that differ from the commonsense opinions that children tend to have. To be stimulating to children, the question should also be stimulating and provocative to the teacher, a question to which the teacher sometimes does not know the answer. I call this type of question an “unknowninformation-seeking question,” in contrast to a “known-information question.” A “known-information question” is a term used by American educational researchers who argue that in many conventional schools there are no genuine questions because these schools focus on the transmission of knowledge from adults to children (Hicks, 1996). An “unknown-information-seeking question,” on the other hand, makes possible genuine inquiry from both the children and the teacher.
The following example illustrates an “unknown-information-seeking question” of Saitou pedagogy from a social studies lesson in an elementary school (see Sakuma [1992] for a full description). The theme of the lesson is “what is a store?”
This question is apparently simple, if not trivial, even for children, not to mention for adults. We think we know what a store is. However, in the classroom, some unknown-information questions were presented to the children. For example, one question asked “is a vending machine a store?” Even the adults were perplexed by this question. In fact, based on prior investigation by the teacher, there seems to be no single correct answer to the question academically, and even legally, at least in Japan. So, the teacher himself did not know the correct answer. In thinking about these questions, the children (and the teacher) were shaken from their commonsense view of a store. What they thought they had known became an exciting puzzle for them. They generated new thought-provoking questions such as “is a taxi a store?” or “is a hospital a store?”
As this example shows, the development of the lesson from the kernel of the teaching material, as an “unknown-information-seeking question,” does not necessarily result in the discovery of one correct answer. Rather, an inquiry about the unknown information often generates new questions. Using Bertrand Russell’s words (cited in Egan, 1986, p. 47), the inquiry for unknown information “makes the familiar seem strange.” In the process of generating questions, children examine the teaching material and gain a deeper understanding of it.
Saitou pedagogy’s concepts of the “kernel of the teaching material” and the “unknown-information-seeking question” seem very similar to the SDC’s concept of “point of wonder.” According to Kurganov, a point of wonder is a situation “where children discover that one and the same object can be understood in different ways” (2009, p. 31) as is the “kernel of the teaching material” in Saitou pedagogy. Kurganov rephrased it, using the word “puzzle.” And Berlyand wrote, “the task of dialogue is . . . primarily to puzzle, to make an object of dialogue that may at first seem plain and simple to the pupils strange, unclear, and, therefore, requiring understanding” (2009, p. 83). In formulating the learning process in the classroom as one that starts from a “puzzle,” or an “unknown-information-seeking question,” and develops into a dialogue-argument and/or a dialogue-disagreement, Saitou pedagogy and the SDC have similar views of children’s learning process in the classroom.
However, there are some differences between Saitou pedagogy’s concepts of the kernel of teaching material and the unknown-information question, and the SDC’s concept of points of wonder, although I admit that I do not yet fully understand the SDC. In the SDC, the points of wonder seem to be, in a sense, predetermined, in contrast to Saitou pedagogy. Here, I refer to the lists of points of wonder Bibler (2009) described: the puzzle of the word, puzzle of the number, puzzle of the phenomena of nature, puzzle moment of history, and so on. Berlyand (2009) wrote about some basic and foundational points, foci, and problems. In contrast, for Saito pedagogy, the kernel should be discovered in the teaching material each time the teacher and children encounter the material. And every issue, not just a Big Issue, can be the kernel when the teacher and children discover a puzzle in it. This difference might be based on the fact that the SDC has its own systems of teaching materials, while Saitou pedagogy cannot and does not.
Another difference is that, in Saitou pedagogy, the dialogue is not necessarily considered to be among the High Cultures of human history as it is in the SDC. For Saitou pedagogy, the important opposition is between shallow, commonsense views and new, deeper, unexpected views of the teaching material. In the lesson, the new views should overcome the shallow, commonsense views. This does not mean that the new view is the correct, definitive one, or that views coming from cultures are notrelevant in Saitou pedagogy. On the contrary, in the lesson cited above, the children encountered diverse professional views invited by the teacher: views of taxi drivers, views of economists, views of vending machine salespeople, and so on. Thus, the children encountered views from different cultures based on different communities of practice. And after all, “commonsense” views of the teaching material are views common to some culture. So, the views children encounter in a lesson in Saitou pedagogy come from many different cultures. The difference in comparison with the SDC is that, in Saitou pedagogy, culture is not limited to High Culture (with a capital C), involving Greek and Medieval culture in history.
Work of the teacher
In recent American educational research on so-called collaborative learning, the teacher is supposed to be a collaborative learner, or coinquirer (Wells, 1999). The teacher’s role in relation to the children is characterized as that of an orchestrator or a facilitator of inquiries initiated by the children. It seems to me that these characterizations describe a passive teacher, awaiting the children’s initiative. Contrary to these trends in American research, in Saitou pedagogy, the teacher leads the classroom lesson. The teacher’s active intervention makes children active learners.
I compare the teacher in Saitou pedagogy to the author of polyphonic novels, as Bakhtin described in his essay on Dostoevsky (Bakhtin, 1984; Miyazaki, 2009). Children in the Saitou classroom can be compared to the heroes of a polyphonic novel. Contrary to heroes in a monologic novel, in the polyphonic novel, heroes generate voices new even for their author, and can oppose the author. However, it is the author who controls the heroes’ behavior. This is similar for the Saitou teacher. Children become dialogic learners only via the teacher’s interaction with them. Baktin’s polyphonic author has two ways to make his/her heroes dialogic (Morson and Emerson, 1990). One way is for the author to set a scene in which heroes can behave dialogically. The other is for the author to present his/her own voices to the heroes and oppose them. The teacher of Saitou pedagogy has similar means to use in the classroom lesson. The teacher can present “puzzles” to the children, that is, the teacher discovers the kernel in the teaching material and produces a stimulating question about it, which is called yusaburi, and literally means “shaking up.” When children maintain certain views of the teaching material, especially commonsense views, the teacher intentionally presents different views, if not his/her own voice, then in contrast to the children’s view to make them rethink their fixed views. So in Saitou pedagogy, the teacher sometimes intentionally opposes the children. In this regard, the Saitou teacher is completely different from “the teacher as a facilitator of student-initiated inquiries”—the view common to some American educational researchers.
There are other methods of teachers’ work besides these two that correspond to Bakhtin’s polyphonic author. Most important among them is listening to the children’s statements, which is not a passive act that accepts whatever children say. For Saitou pedagogy, “listening to children” means finding and extracting the important aspects of children’s utterances that apparently have no important implications for the children. Although there may be many errors and mistakes in children’s responses to the teaching material, Saitou pedagogy believes that there is often some “truth” in these errors, of which the children themselves may not be aware. The teacher should discover this “truth,” extract it from the children’s statements, and return it to the children by “revoicing” it,3 so that the child who made the error can see the real voice in his/her error and other children can learn from voices other than their own.
All of these teacher interventions require more work from the teacher, which is considered the most important aspect of Saitou pedagogy in order for the teacher to develop productive lessons. This work is called “kyouzai–kaishaku,” or “interpreting the teaching material.” “Kyouzai–kaishaku” is the endless exploration of the teaching material to discover in it new voices and exciting puzzles.
Dialogic learning kyouzai–kaishaku has no endpoint and does not aim at one correct, final answer. New, different views are continually being sought. This makes it possible for the teacher to “shake up” children’s commonsense views, by presenting new, different views, and to “listen to children” to discover meaningful voices in their apparently erroneous responses. The Saitou teacher produces children as dialogic learners by producing him/herself as a dialogic learner. I call such a teacher as a “proto-learner,” in the sense that the teacher’s dialogic learning becomes the prototype of children’s dialogic learning (Miyazaki, 2010). In Saitou pedagogy, the teacher’s learning and children’s learning becomes isomorphic. This view of the relation between the teacher’s learning and children’s learning is, as far as I know, the most unique characteristic of Saitou pedagogy.
Final remarks
Matusov (2009a) distinguishes four types of “notion of dialogue” and characterizes the SDC as an “epistemological” one. It seems to me that Saitou pedagogy can also be classified within the “notion of epistemological dialogue.” The difference between Saitou pedagogy and the SDC is that, in Saitou pedagogy, dialogue is not necessarily thought to be one between “universal views of a particular subject” or historical cultures. For Saitou pedagogy, the dialogue is between each, concrete person, though they sometimes reflect given cultures. This difference can cause other differences between Saitou pedagogy and the SDC. For SDC teachers, it might be important to learn about different views from different historical cultures on many topics. For Saitou teachers, it is more important to listen for new and unexpected voices in each child at every lesson. This means that Saitou pedagogy focuses on the teacher’s methods to organize dialogue in each lesson, though I did not describe them in depth in this commentary. In contrast to the SDC, in Saitou pedagogy, the learning of the teaching material is focused on discovering “something new,” not necessarily on learning about views from historical cultures. This means the teacher’s learning becomes more nonsystematic in Saitou pedagogy, so that the focus is more on how each teacher can develop the ability of kyouzai–kaishaku.
Finally, let me comment on Matusov’s critique of the SDC, concerning the issue of the lack of “ontological notion of dialogue” (Matusov, 2009b). My view is similar to that of Berlyand in her rejoinder to Matusov’s comment. School is the place where the problems of real society can be temporarily suspended. It is the place that is "off-lined" from the activities of the real world. It is the place where children can conduct free experimentation (Wartofsky, 1979). I am not saying that all schools are really such places of free experimentations for children. Still, schools should be such places. Ontological questions should be suspended temporarily for children in school, who should be epistemological beings.
Notes
1. The term “teaching material,” curriculum, in Japanese is “kyouzai.” This is the common word in the Japanese educational world to designate the material children learn in the classroom.
2. In the past ten years, a new educational activity called “Sogo Gakushu,” or comprehensive learning, has been introduced into the curriculum from elementary to high school. The idea behind it is that children should take part in learning activities not limited to any one subject matter. The “fieldwork method” is used successfully in Sogo Gakushu today.
3. The term “revoicing” is used in American educational research to indicate the teacher’s rephrasing of children’s utterances to clarify their meanings (Wells, 1993). Here the meaning of the term is extended to mean discover and extract possible voices from children’s utterances.
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Kiyotaka Miyazaki is a professor in the Faculty of Human Sciences at Waseda University, Japan. He is a cognitive psychologist studying teaching and learning processes and art education, interested in organizing a dialogue between Japanese educational practitioners’ wisdom and the dialogic philosophy of Mikhail Bakhtin to explicate the structure of dialogue in education.
E-mail: miyasan@waseda.jp.
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