The classroom, or oldtimer-apprentice, usage seems to be
mobilizing activity-image of a conductor's orchestrating the
contributions of the players.
The Bakhtinian usage refers more nearly I think to the composer's
orchestrating the parts of different instrumental voices, as in
Dostoevsky's orchestration of different social voices in his
novels.
Transposed to the classroom, and more generally to interactional
dialogues, Bakhtin's heteroglossia is meant to include not just
the accomodation of different 'ideational' voices (e.g. student
theories vs teacher theories), but voices that also differ
_axiologically_, i.e. in their fundamental value-orientations or
agendas for action (so, student 'resistance' vs teacher control).
What 'breaks frame' here is not a domesticated diversity of
views, which can be quite 'monologic', but eruptions into the
dominant and dominating discourse of voices that would be heard
as dis-ruptive because they voice a distinct value-universe
(horizon, krugozor, 'worldview') and its accent.
This is not the orchestration of the willing and docile
apprentice, but of challenges to the fundamental groundrules of
the dominant activity. From the novelist whose characters
disagree, to the novel whose voices allow us to question the
right of any author to orchestrate them, to the text that refuses
to be a 'proper' novel at all. Musically, it's the
improvisational agenda of the jazz saxaphonist erupting in the
midst of a well-orchestrated classical concert performance.
I don't think classrooms, or dominant institutions generally, are
hospitable to the action-analogue of heteroglossia
('heteropraxia'?). They tend to put it down, forcefully. If they
can. JAY.
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JAY LEMKE.
City University of New York.
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