Papers by Ana Marjanovic-Shane
Alzheimer's Research & Therapy, 2015
Introduction: The goal was to identify which neurochemicals differ in professional athletes with ... more Introduction: The goal was to identify which neurochemicals differ in professional athletes with repetitive brain trauma (RBT) when compared to healthy controls using a relatively new technology, in vivo Localized COrrelated SpectroscopY (L-COSY). Methods: To achieve this, L-COSY was used to examine five former professional male athletes with 11 to 28 years of exposure to contact sports. Each athlete who had had multiple symptomatic concussions and repetitive sub concussive trauma during their career was assessed by an experienced neuropsychologist. All athletes had clinical symptoms including headaches, memory loss, confusion, impaired judgment, impulse control problems, aggression, and depression. Five healthy men, age and weight matched to the athlete cohort and with no history of brain trauma, were recruited as controls. Data were collected from the posterior cingulate gyrus using a 3 T clinical magnetic resonance scanner equipped with a 32 channel head coil. Results: The variation of the method was calculated by repeated examination of a healthy control and phantom and found to be 10% and 5%, respectively, or less. The L-COSY measured large and statistically significant differences (P ≤0.05), between healthy controls and those athletes with RBT. Men with RBT showed higher levels of glutamine/ glutamate (31%), choline (65%), fucosylated molecules (60%) and phenylalanine (46%). The results were evaluated and the sample size of five found to achieve a significance level P = 0.05 and a power of 90%. Differences in N-acetyl aspartate and myo-inositol between RBT and controls were small and were not statistically significance. Conclusions: A study of a small cohort of professional athletes, with a history of RBT and symptoms of chronic traumatic encephalopathy when compared with healthy controls using 2D L-COSY, showed elevations in brain glutamate/glutamine and choline as recorded previously for early traumatic brain injury. For the first time increases in phenylalanine and fucose are recorded in the brains of athletes with RBT. Larger studies utilizing the L-COSY method may offer an in-life method of diagnosis and personalized approach for monitoring the acute effects of mild traumatic brain injury and the chronic effects of RBT.
Dialogic Pedagogy and Polyphonic Research Art, 2019
We conclude Part III by summarizing contrasts and boundaries between positivist and dialogic rese... more We conclude Part III by summarizing contrasts and boundaries between positivist and dialogic research paradigms. We argue that positivist research aims at revealing, describing, explaining, and verifying the given, while dialogic research aims at sense making, deepening meaning, critical examining, and transcending the given. Positivist research and dialogic research both complement and contradict each other. We provide a summarizing table contrasting and comparing the two approaches.
Dialogic Pedagogy and Polyphonic Research Art, 2019
In this chapter we present tensions and struggles of Bakhtinian educators in conventional educati... more In this chapter we present tensions and struggles of Bakhtinian educators in conventional educational institutions. We have abstracted from our interviews six big themes of institutional struggles: (1) institutional survival; (2) preserving the spirit of Bakhtinian pedagogy; (3) treating opponents of Bakhtinian pedagogy dialogically; (4) involving students and colleagues in critique of conventional monologic pedagogy; (5) instrumental vs. ontological understanding of education; and (6) finding “weak spots” in educational hegemony and monopoly. In these diverse institutional struggles, Bakhtinian educators also experience internal tensions. We have found five such tensions: (a) imposing Bakhtinian pedagogy on all educational practices and institutions (monopolism) vs. education philosophy pluralism; (b) promoting Bakhtinian pedagogy by providing interesting practice measures vs. striving for transformations of the sociocultural contexts; (c) understanding of the primary ownership of ...
Knowledge Cultures, 2018
We describe an approach to teaching as a dialogic conceptual art. This is not a metaphor. Concept... more We describe an approach to teaching as a dialogic conceptual art. This is not a metaphor. Conceptual art teaching is eventful, ontological, paradoxical, unpredictable, and surprising for all participants including the teacher. Conceptualist teachers expect to be surprised by their students. The educational process is seen as not being limited by the time and space of the lesson but continues long after the lesson and outside of the classroom walls among different participants looking for their ideas and surprises, searching for confirmation and disputations, sharing excitement and disgust, engaging in never-ending dialogues where truths are tested and forever testable. The aesthetic beauty of this process is in the nerve-racking, dramatic, elusive, and captivating flip-flops of (de)constructions that open new vistas, ready to be destroyed. Genuine education is seen as carnivalesque, involving spoilsports, tricksters, upside-down flip-flops, dethroning and so on. Educational outcomes of dialogic conceptual art teaching are emergent, diverse, unpredictable, and subject to future change.
Dialogic Pedagogy and Polyphonic Research Art, 2019
We start our discussion of the limitations of our research by considering the issue of whether ou... more We start our discussion of the limitations of our research by considering the issue of whether our research in its strongest aspects was polyphonic, dialogic, both, or neither. Of course, this raises a question of what "polyphonic" and "dialogic" are. There are different approaches to both of these Bakhtinian concepts. Some Bakhtinian educational scholars equate the term "polyphony" with a plurality of independent voices not centered on the teacher's own "ideological world" (e.g., Yazdanpanah, 2015, p. 277). Any presence of independent free voices is evidence of polyphony: "A research interview will inevitably be polyphonic-replete with the use of many voices, words, and discourses that structure the conversation" (Tanggaard, 2009, p. 1499). From this definition, polyphonic research may or may not be dialogic but dialogic research is always polyphonic. Polyphonic research is dialogic when a plurality of independent voices is involved in internal dialogue. Polyphonic research is monologic when this plurality of independent voices is involved mainly in monologic relationships of either imposing their truths or relativist juxtaposition. However, from this position, dialogic research is always polyphonic because it is based on a plurality of independent, ideologically non-centered, voices. From this perspective on polyphony and dialogism, our research seems to be polyphonic because many independent voices were presented, having the freedom to define their own "ideological worlds." However, the dialogism of our research would probably be judged as rather limited because we often could not fully engage our research participants in dialogue with each other or with our analysis of their contributions. Our voices, the voices of the researchers, were the strongest in the book, probably making some other voices gravitate to our "ideological worlds" or keeping silence. Thus, from this multivoiced perspective, our research was polyphonic but rather limited in its dialogic quality. Other Bakhtinian scholars understand the Bakhtinian notion of "polyphony" as a unity of students' voices orchestrated by the teacher (e.g.
Dialogic Pedagogy and Polyphonic Research Art, 2019
In this chapter we discuss our hopes for Bakhtinian pedagogy. We hope for deepening Bakhtinian pe... more In this chapter we discuss our hopes for Bakhtinian pedagogy. We hope for deepening Bakhtinian pedagogies through critical dialogues based on disagreements and for securing the societal freedoms and rights for teachers’ authorial pedagogies and learners’ authorial education, both Bakhtinian and non-Bakhtinian, which can be highly diverse and even unique. Our hopes for deepening Bakhtinian pedagogies and freedoms are rooted in the focus of many Bakhtinian pedagogies on deepening meaning making and authorship rather than on the rhizomic survivals or viral proliferations of some patterns (Gregory, Unearthing the tubers and shoots of thought, talk, and praxis: A historiography of classroom discourse in theory and practice (PhD thesis). Columbia University, New York, 2018). We view our book as a contribution for deepening Bakhtinian pedagogy and justifying academic freedoms and rights for authorial pedagogies and education. We discuss our five big hopes for Bakhtinian pedagogy that involve issues of diversification and experimentation, creating professional reflective networks, promoting educational philosophy pluralism, considering the institutionalization of Bakhtinian pedagogy, and, finally, envisioning favorable economic conditions for Bakhtinian pedagogy.
Dialogic Pedagogy: An International Online Journal, 2022
In this article, we explain, explore, and problematize the formation, organization, leadership, a... more In this article, we explain, explore, and problematize the formation, organization, leadership, and daily educational life of the first (to our knowledge) international democratic university of students (UniS) in the 21st century. UniS is run by the students, for the students, and with the students for their diverse purposes, desires, interests, and needs. A student is anyone who freely chooses to study something for whatever reason. Everyone can become a student at any time without any high school credits, fees, bureaucracy, tests, or any other form of human suffering. But what exactly is UniS? Why students? What if…? How can one visualize UniS, which is “so vague, so bizarre, so unnecessary to me!” What are its philosophical principles? Who are we? What does the University of Students look like? In the spirit of curiosity, wonder, leisure, fun, freedom, and love for learning, we invite the reader to attend and connect with two working edu-clubs of UniS: a movie club “Schooling Ar...
Democracy in Dialogue, Dialogue in Democracy, 2016
The issue of legitimacy or illegitimacy of power is central for practices of democracy, critical ... more The issue of legitimacy or illegitimacy of power is central for practices of democracy, critical dialogue, and education. The purpose of this chapter is to explore the legitimacy of power among the participants in Democratic Dialogic Education. Although in the modern practices of political democracy and existing institutionalized education, the presence of power is not an issue—they all are heavily based on power—the question is whether and how much this power is legitimate and desired for flourishing democracy, dialogue, and education. Starting from the Age of Enlightenment, if not before in ancient Greece, the legitimacy of authority and power in general has been under suspicion. There have been philosophical efforts to delegitimize power and authority, fully eliminate them, or at least subordinate them to intellectual endeavors of a pursuit of reason, science, hard facts, laws of nature, smart democratic procedures, and rational consensus. However, some other scholars argue that this approach ironically leads to results opposite to those that have been envisioned by the Enlightenment movement: violence, intolerance, wars, illiberalism, dogmatism, corruption, fanaticism, irrationality, repressions, and suppression of dissent. Following this criticism, we will try to rehabilitate the notion of authority and power in Democratic Dialogic Education (and, in our lesser focus, in democracy) and discuss what diverse interplays between power and critical dialogue may look like as a result of this legitimacy of power. Before we start, we want to provide a few definitions of the terms we use here. In our view, “power” involves the imposition of ideas, wills, and demands on people who would not engage in these ideas, wills, and demands on their own without this imposition. We define “authority” as legitimate power recognized by the people on whom power is imposed. We view “critical dialogue” as (primarily) ontological testing of ideas similar to Mikhail M. Bakhtin’s (1991) notion of “internally persuasive discourse”, where “internal” is defined as internal to the discourse and not necessarily to an individual (Matusov and von Duyke, 2010).
Dialogic Pedagogy and Polyphonic Research Art, 2019
In this chapter we continue to compare and contrast dialogic and positivist research in the socia... more In this chapter we continue to compare and contrast dialogic and positivist research in the social sciences, and we attempt to carve legitimate territory for both the positivist and dialogic research approaches. We claim that dialogic research focuses on dialogic meaning making as an encounter of two or more consciousnesses about another dialogic encounter. Thus, in dialogic research, an encounter of two or more unique consciousnesses is both the focus of research and the way of doing research. In contrast, in conventional positivist research in social sciences where the research participants’ voices and subjectivities are finalized into statements of findings only to be verified and generalized, they become predictable and stable “things” among other things and, thus, ironically, they stop being truly voices and subjectivities—they become objective voices and objective subjectivities. We describe dialogic research stances: dialogic subjectifying, dialogic problematizing, and dialog...
Dialogic Pedagogy and Polyphonic Research Art, 2019
All Bakhtinian teaching cases reported by the self-inspired Bakhtinian educators in our interview... more All Bakhtinian teaching cases reported by the self-inspired Bakhtinian educators in our interviews with them were placed on an online discussion forum. In this chapter we present two of these teaching cases with their full online discussions. Case#11 (case numbers derive from the order in which they appeared on our discussion online forum—subsequently we started referring to these numbers in our analyses and further dialogues with our colleagues): Bakhtinian teaching as unfinalized dialogues between the consciousnesses of equal minds, by Tara Ratnam, India, and Case#9: Bakhtinian teaching as a messy chatting on a subject matter, by Dmitri Nikulin, USA. Cases#11 and #9 were chosen for this chapter based on the richness and the diversity of their online discussions. Due to the lack of space, we could not present more cases with their full online discussion.
Dialogic Pedagogy and Polyphonic Research Art, 2019
Deeply engaging the students in education is one of the strongest pedagogical desires of most edu... more Deeply engaging the students in education is one of the strongest pedagogical desires of most educators. The desire is to make all students fascinated with a targeted educational subject, so they become active and enthusiastic in studying it. Student engagement is a primary marker of the quality of education. A disengaged student learns little or not at all and often disrupts the teacher and other, engaged students. Progressive educators’ belief expressed by the American educator Jerome Bruner is that “any subject could be taught to any child at any age in some form that was honest” (Bruner, Actual minds, possible words (p. 129). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986). The question is how an educator can find this “honest” way of teaching that creates “an educational vortex” of fascination for every student, which forcefully pulls them in to any curricular topic each moment of the lesson. In other words, the task of the educational vortex is to make students like, if not eve...
Dialogic Pedagogy and Polyphonic Research Art, 2019
In this chapter we abstract and analyze diverse ways in which 14 (we analyzed the teaching Case#7... more In this chapter we abstract and analyze diverse ways in which 14 (we analyzed the teaching Case#7 by One-who-withdrew Bakhtinian educator, but excluded its analysis from our report in the book on the educator’s request) self-identified Bakhtinian educators, including Mikhail Bakhtin himself, and define Bakhtinian pedagogy and tensions among them. In abstracting the tensions, we were guided by the contextual “Grounded Theory approach” (Glaser & Strauss, 1967). We tried to make sense of emergent tensions, which attracted our attention, by using both existing and our new theoretical conceptualization by questioning, testing, deepening, and critically analyzing the meanings of our interpretations that we offer to the readers for their own dialogic analysis. We suspect that other scholars and educators would probably be attracted to different tensions relevant to them, since we always study the experiential relationship between observed teaching cases and our own experiences, struggles, ...
Dialogic Pedagogy and Polyphonic Research Art, 2019
Since the ideas of Russian philosopher and literature theoretician Mikhail M. Bakhtin (1895–1975)... more Since the ideas of Russian philosopher and literature theoretician Mikhail M. Bakhtin (1895–1975) have become hugely influential within diverse fields of the humanities and social sciences, there have been many theoretical and research attempts to study Bakhtinian pedagogical ideas and implement them in innovative education practices. However, in our project we attempt to pass the ownership of Bakhtinian pedagogy from mainly Bakhtinian educational academicians—scholars of education coming from Bakhtinian perspectives—to educational practitioners, interested in Bakhtin as their theoretical and philosophical orientation to their educational practice. Ours is a book of educational practitioners, by educational practitioners, and has been primarily written for educational practitioners. We provide a brief history of our project, research problems we encountered, and the resulting and constantly evolving transformations. We also introduce the development of a dialogic approach to the res...
Dialogic Pedagogy and Polyphonic Research Art, 2019
In this chapter we introduce our research approach as dialogic research art through comparing and... more In this chapter we introduce our research approach as dialogic research art through comparing and contrasting two paradigms of scientific research: the conventional positivist method and dialogic research art. Using Aristotle’s terminology, we claim that the idea of the predefined scientific method, a series of correct steps and procedures that would guarantee arriving at the truth, can be defined as poiesis. Poiesis is such an activity where its goal, value, form, and the definition of what constitutes its quality preexist the activity itself. Thus, poiesis focuses on the given and objective, excluding any subjectivity, that is, subjectivity itself becomes objectified. Poiesis does not know personal authorship and personal responsibility—rather it knows impersonal method/technique and person-free objectivity. In contrast, dialogic research epistemology is very different, as it rejects the notion of a research method in favor of dialogic research art. The concept of research art is ...
Recently, in one of my (the first author) classes for preservice teachers, my stu dents and I di... more Recently, in one of my (the first author) classes for preservice teachers, my stu dents and I discussed diverse approaches to arranging classroom life, which my students initially interpreted as "classroom management." Very quickly, our dis cussion started revolving around the notions of punishment and rewards. What is more effective? Pure punishment? Pure rewards? Or some kind of combination of both? What kind of punishment is more effective? What kinds of rewards are more effective? Also, manipulative and non-manipulative organizational educa tional techniques were introduced in our discussion. For example, asking students to write something it does not matter what pulls them away from activities the teacher deems undesirable, without any use of punishments or rewards. This pedagogical manipulation seems to be based on affordances of dictation. Design ing seating arrangements provides different psychological and social affordances: whether it is easier or more diffic...
Modern conventional schools remain bastions of the feudal social and political relations based on... more Modern conventional schools remain bastions of the feudal social and political relations based on highly hierarchical, nonnegotiable, authoritarianism, even in countries with liberal democracies as their political system (Sidorkin, Learning relations: Impure education, deschooled schools, & dialogue with evil. New York, NY: P. Lang, 2002). The teacher–student power relations are hierarchical and authoritarian, where the school authorities define almost all aspects of education for the students. However, authoritarian power relations create an educational paradox: they create dogmatic thinking based on authority, instead of genuine education which requires students’ free and critical thinking, where the truth can be established in dialogue, by empirical evidence, argument, reasoning, logic, testing alternative ideas, observations, experiments. Nevertheless, rather than establishing power-free relationships, the Enlightenment thinkers and their followers have tried to ameliorate or to...
Culture & Psychology, 2016
In this theoretical essay, we examine four conceptual gestalt approaches to culture and education... more In this theoretical essay, we examine four conceptual gestalt approaches to culture and education: “culture as pattern,” “culture as boundary,” “culture as authorship,” and “culture as critical dialog.” In the “culture as pattern,” education aims at socializing people into a given cultural practice. Any decline from culturally valued patterns becomes a deficit for education to eliminate. In the “culture as boundary,” encounter with other cultures highlights their arbitrariness and equality. Education focuses on celebration of diversity, tolerance, pluralism, social justice, and equal rights. The “culture as authorship” is about authorial transcendence of the given recognized by others. Education promotes dialogic creativity and authorship. Student/author is the final authority of his/her own education. “Culture as critical dialog” promotes testing ideas, opinions, beliefs, desires, and values. Critical dialog is inherently deconstructive, promoting never-ending search for truth. Edu...
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Papers by Ana Marjanovic-Shane