This article offers a critical supplement to Eugene Matusov’s uniqueness model of educational justice by interrogating the very figure it presupposes: the learner capable of authorial self-evaluation. The authors argue that this self is not a natural starting point but a product of a specific cultural technique—rereading—whose genealogy they trace from August Böckh’s philological principle of “cognition of the already cognized” through Wilhelm Dilthey’s hermeneutics of the human sciences. The article demonstrates how continental philosophy, from Nietzsche through Bakhtin, transformed the book into a machine for producing critical subjectivity through aphoristic rereading, revealing Bakhtin’s central concepts as effects of this operation rather than its premises. Fredric Jameson’s theory of the novel is introduced as the democratic counterpart to this elite practice, training mass readerships in the retroactive organization of experience that manufactures the coherent bourgeois self. Through a close analysis of Matusov’s own pedagogical episodes—the index card exercise, the distinction between learning and education, retrospective re-evaluation—the authors show that his classroom practice unconsciously instantiates the very rereading structure whose history they excavate. The article contends that the uniqueness model would be strengthened by recognizing that the self-evaluating learner is a cultural achievement dependent on narrative and hermeneutic techniques that must themselves be taught and transmitted. This reframing introduces a new dimension of educational justice: equity of access not to outcomes but to the very means of self-production. The metaphor of the mask guides this inquiry, with the self that pronounces its learning educational serving as the mask, while the endless process of rereading constitutes the unseen face beneath it.
This study examines the development of dialogicity in two distinct learning modalities—face-to-face and online—during a 10-session cultural literacy intervention involving 10th-grade high school students. Dialogicity refers to the quality of dialogue in terms of the degree to which student interactions promote sustained discussion and the co-construction of meanings. We analyzed and compared four sessions in each learning modality. The results indicated no significant differences in the overall frequency of dialogic moves between the two modalities. However, there were differences in the degree of dialogicity. High-dialogicity moves were significantly more frequent in the face-to-face classroom. Furthermore, metadialogue, a critical component for guiding and reflecting on discussions, was used more frequently in the face-to-face modality. Students employed it to guide discussions toward achieving the session objectives. In the online classroom, students encountered technical difficulties that disrupted the flow of dialogue, which made metadialogue even more important to overcome these problems. The findings suggest that future dialogic teaching interventions for online classrooms should be designed specifically for this modality. The design should include a scaffolding process for dialogicity — whereby students were progressively introduced to dialogic skills across sessions — to help students navigate these challenges and foster higher-quality discussions.
This dialogic commentary critically and generatively engages with Matusov's (2026) conceptual proposal of a "uniqueness model" of educational justice as an alternative to equity-based frameworks. While affirming the author's insight that totalized paternalistic education suppresses students' authorial agency and that genuine education arises from self-direction and meaning-making, this commentary raises several substantive tensions: the underspecification of structural conditions enabling self-education, the risk of romanticizing learner autonomy in contexts marked by deep material inequality, the ambiguity of "negative liberty" as an educational foundation, and the need for a richer theory of pedagogical responsibility within the uniqueness model. Drawing on Bakhtin's dialogism, Dewey's democracy, hooks's engaged pedagogy, and post-colonial educational theory, the commentary proposes that the uniqueness model be complemented by a "dialogic accountability" framework, in which freedom and responsibility are co-constituted through relational and communal dialogue rather than treated as purely individual prerogatives.
This study investigates how dialogic pedagogy could potentially serve as a lever for equity in elementary classrooms in Indonesia with low socioeconomic status. Addressing concerns that inclusive education is often reduced to participation or classroom management, the study examines how inclusion is enacted, negotiated, and contested through everyday classroom dialogue. Drawing on a six-month ethnographic qualitative design, data were generated through prolonged classroom observations, semi-structured interviews with six teachers and twenty-one students, and detailed field notes. An inductive thematic analysis was conducted to interpret interactional practices within their social and institutional contexts. The findings identify five interrelated pedagogical strategies: dialogic learning, building personal closeness, providing personal guidance, confirming student understanding, and offering appreciation and rewards. Dialogic learning emerged as the central practice through which students’ contributions reshaped the trajectory of classroom activity, enabling moments of co-authorship, epistemic uncertainty, and ethical recognition. In these dialogic encounters, students were positioned not merely as participants but as co-authors of meaning whose lived experiences and disagreements reoriented collective inquiry. At the same time, the study reveals tensions in which some inclusive practices, particularly reward-based participation, constrained dialogic openness by reasserting evaluative authority. The study concludes that dialogic pedagogy functions not as a technical method but as an ethical and political practice through which equity is continually negotiated. It contributes to the scholarship on dialogic pedagogy by offering a context-sensitive analysis of how dialogic events emerge, fracture, and coexist with institutional demands in under-resourced classrooms.
This study explores how multimodal approaches to poetry teaching can be integrated into a dialogic pedagogical framework in English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) education under wartime conditions. Conducted as a qualitative explanatory case study in a Ukrainian upper-secondary school, the research examines how students’ interpretations of poetry evolve across a two-lesson dialogic sequence involving auditory, visual, bilingual, and contextual multimodal variation. The study argues that multimodality becomes pedagogically significant not as an illustrative supplement to poetry, but as a dialogic provocation that destabilizes fixed interpretations and generates interpretive plurality. Special attention is given to the proposed typology of ‘antitheses’, which is conceptualized not as a classificatory mechanism but as a dialogic heuristic framework supporting comparison, mediation, and reinterpretation of meanings. The findings indicate that students shifted from searching for a single authoritative interpretation toward engaging in dialogically mediated meaning-making. The study further demonstrates that uncertainty, hesitation, and disagreement function as productive dialogic resources rather than pedagogical limitations. The article contributes to research on dialogic pedagogy, multimodality, and poetry interpretation in contexts of educational disruption.
