Can dialogic eventness be created?

ABSTRACT Turning educational ideas into meaningful learning requires planning for uncertainty. This article presents Bakhtin’s key concept of eventness as an essential aspect of defining dialogic space. To Bakhtin an event is something happening here and now, with a degree of open-ended uncertainty tied to what will happen next. Acknowledging this uncertainty—or eventness—might help researchers and practitioners grasp and support the spirit of dialogue in activities aiming for genuine student participation, which is a core concept in recent curricular reforms in Norway. This article discusses eventness as a hub for dialogic principles, illustrated by examples from student group conversations on literature in Norwegian lower secondary school. The challenge of creating dialogic space is discussed with reference to Bakhtin’s general idea of authorship.


Introduction
Balancing theoretical depth against practical simplicity is a challenge in educational development.We have learnt over and over again that new ideas are easily adapted to existing frameworks, and thus reinterpreted to match business as usual (Barnes & Shemilt, 1974;Cuban, 1990;Gage, 2009;Matusov, 2021).This is a key challenge also in dialogic education, and more specifically when it comes to the question of dialogic space.
Dialogic space is initially linked to the gap between perspectives in a dialogue (Wegerif, 2013, p. 5).As such it seems meaningful to associate it with a social understanding of events and practices.At the same time dialogic space is not the most prominent feature of everyday life in most classrooms.It is rather an extraordinary event when it occurs.What makes it extraordinary is a particular sense of time and space (Wegerif, 2013), which seem to be connected to an experience of being present in an open-ended event.Opening dialogic space thus seems to imply making space for a certain a "spirit of dialogue" (Burbules & Bruce, 2001), or what Mikhail Bakhtin (1990) calls eventness.Eventness is the open-ended uncertainty of a moment tied to what happens next.In prior work on dialogic space, less attention has been paid to eventness as an important temporal aspect of this time-space in which different ideas can be held in creative tension.
The article explores the essential, yet quite demanding pedagogical task of creating eventness in the classroom.The teacher has a double role in the classroom, as a person inside the ongoing action and as responsible for what happens during the lesson as part of a meaningful progression over time.The responsible position I will suggest is an outside position.Creating dialogic space is also a project on different time scales.In micro time it is about staging a single event.On a larger time scale these events are the basis for transforming classroom practice, toward a trust-based dialogic space where the teacher can enter and participate without being perceived as authoritative.These notions of inside/outside and of immediate and long-term time scales begin to illustrate the complexity of opening and sustaining dialogic space in the classroom My ambition is to bring about a metaphorical framework, a model, that allows us to talk about important real-life phenomena that are far more complex than the model.The model allows seeing the teacher as author outside and as heroic participant inside live classroom events.In what follows, I elaborate and illustrate the model while stressing the challenges of creating eventness, all of which concern the opening of dialogic space.

Eventness or noise: The problem of interpretation from the outside
Let us start with a case that in my experience illustrates what I mean by eventness, and the importance of understanding and relating to it from the outside.The case is from a 1 year partnership between researchers and teachers in lower secondary school focusing on literary conversations.Toward the end of the year the researchers suggested an open approach to complex texts, as a way of generating affinity to the task and substantial engagement.The teachers were asked to find a text which could be presented to the class as an open-ended problem, and as genuinely difficult to grasp, based on the idea that this might be a way of honestly calling for student contributions.The text chosen was "The Well," a short story by the Norwegian author Roy Jacobsen.
However, when they prepared for introducing "The Well" to the students, the teachers decided to present the text as a puzzle for the students.The students were given a number of pieces and were asked to recreate the text, rather than responding to the text as an authentic whole.Three of the teachers used the task on the same day.One of the teachers, Anna, was supposed to use the task the next day, and the researchers turned to her for negotiation about playing out the original idea.
Anna (34) taught 8A at the time (students were 13 years old).She had 12-year experience as a teacher of Norwegian language and literature in lower secondary school.Anna was quite reluctant to adjust.She had put effort into preparing the lesson and was also concerned about the weakest students.She was afraid that they might be lost faced with an open-ended task.The solution was that one of the researchers acted as a guest teacher in the classroom, with a simple instruction inviting students to explore the text as an openended problem.The student worked individually (10-15 minutes), before entering groups of 4-5 students discussing their thoughts about the text (20 minutes).Finally, the groups reported back to the whole class.
Dead silence pervaded the classrooms during individual work, and when the group sessions started, the researchers felt like "the room exploded."The conversations were ignited immediately and continued as energetic exploration for 20 minutes.Here is an example from one of the groups-one of the least energetic ones: Gir1 1 (G1): OK, so this one is called "The Well."What do you think it's about?Boy 1 (B1): It's about a dead grandmother.The students immediately target key aspects of the text and continue to do so.The conversation is dominated by B1 and G1, who struggle with shifting pronouns and different storylines in this excerpt.B2 and G2 appear to be listening actively, and when they do speak, they are listened to and particularly B2 contributes substantially within few words.
From their outside position the researchers saw massive support for the assumption that tricky texts presented as authentic problems would generate student engagement.Anna agreed that there was a glowing engagement that was different from previous activities tried out in class, but also had some reservations.Walking back from the classroom she said: Yeah, it was ok, but you don't consider the weakest students, those who don't participate.And it was the same students who normally talk in whole class who was talking aloud in the groups.I knew this was going to happen.And what about assessing them based on things like this, then what would you have done?
Anna's comments about past participation patterns and future assessment point to the role of the teacher as responsible for the students learning, beyond the immediate event.From this outside position she experience the activity quite different than the researchers do. 1  Several important points can be drawn from the case.First, to me it illustrates very clearly what eventness might look like in the classroom, when teacher and students surrender themselves to the open-ended uncertainty of multiple, different perspectives held together in dialogue about a complex text.Second, it illustrates how eventness is associated with risk on different levels.The teacher took a risk leaving the class in the hands of others.The researchers took a risk when asking the class for help in the face of a complex text, since an open-ended activity like this might result in off-task behavior or other potentially negative responses from students.And, not the least, the students take risks that are both social and school-related when they engage in loud discussion about a literary text.Third, the case illustrates that the outside view of an event in action is an interpretation determined by different horizons of expectation.The researchers wanted to open dialogic space, and saw hopes confirmed.The teacher was not all that convinced and had her fears associated with relinguishing control confirmed.The point here is not to say that the analyses proved anyone right and wrong, but rather to illustrate that the outside perception and interpretation of the event is important to address and negotiate.In doing so we might shed light on a blind spot in the initial idea of dialogic space, or at least a tendency to overlook the complexity of opening dialogue.

Author and hero in dialogic space
Dialogic space is originally associated with the gap between persons engaging in dialogue, and is further conceived in 3 steps (Wegerif, 2013).Opening dialogue is the first step, followed by widening and deepening the dialogic space.Widening is about activating multiple different voices and viewpoints, whereas deepening concerns refining ideas and understandings in productive dialogue.Opening concerns providing conditions for widening and deepening, but not in a mechanical manner.Dialogues are lived and experienced from the inside, and they create "their own sense of time and space" (Wegerif, 2019, p. 21).
Wegerif's tentative description of the inside of dialogue resonates well with other attempts at grasping the evasive essence of events that are "dialogical in spirit" (Burbules & Bruce, 2001, p. 1108), where students are substantively engaged (Nystrand, 1997), and where student voices are fully realized (Segal & Lefstein, 2016), often accompanied by playful creativity and laughter (Sidorkin, 1999).To Wegerif, this internal view is opposed to "the external 'objective' view that locates things in their proper place [which, according to Wegerif] is always monologic because it assumes a fixed perspective" (Wegerif, 2013, p. 4).
This understanding of the external view as monologic, is less fortunate.It seems to dodge the key problem of the double role of the teacher as both inside and outside ongoing classroom-events.Even if it is hard to define true dialogue without losing the essence, vague concepts like the dialogical spirit and the particular sense of time and space are descriptions of the inside formulated from the outside.Wegerif's claim that the external view is necessarily monologic seems to mix 2 different aspects.The particular sense of time and space seems to refer to the experience of being immersed in the present, as opposed to relating to or reflecting on the experience from the outside.Yet, as the case above suggests, the dialogic-monologic distinction is a matter of how we relate to it from the outside.The outside reflection can span a wide range of forms.Just as a teacher or researchers outside the event might interpret it differently, so a student withdrawing from the conversation can do so for several reasons and purposes.Finally, and perhaps most importantly, teachers (and sometimes researchers) plan and design these activities from the outside, similar to how an author relates to plot and characters in the process of creating a fictive universe.
Bakhtin struggled with this challenge of outsidedness in his work on literature, starting out from the assumption that an author holds an essential surplus as the creator of the fictive universe as a whole.This is not, however, a phenomenon found only in literature.He explores the same idea in different perspectives, also in our everyday life.In his early work he writes about what he calls the excess of seeing that other people have toward me, since they can see me as a whole from the outside (Bakhtin, 1990, p. 22ff.).From the inside, it is not possible for me to fully understand myself.To do so I must put myself in the position of another.Self-reflection is possible due to the existence of the other.Following from this perspective, we author each other, and understanding ourselves is only possible through the eyes of the other.
Before further addressing the idea of authoring classroom events, it is important to acknowledge that Bakhtin is frequently referred to in educational research.Less frequently, if ever the essential difference between studying texts and social phenomena in the real world is considered, and very seldom we see references to Bakhtin's own reflections on this relationship between the represented world and the world of authors and readers.If we do relate to this overall analogy between the study of literature and the study of educational practice, we are forced to relate to the less obvious aspects of the analogy between texts and real-life events.The most pressing issue is that of authorship.Obviously, there is no real author responsible for the creation of social practice.Nevertheless, we create and relate to representations of social practice in everyday life, in education, and even more so in research, where meaningful action is textualized (see Ricoeur, 1981), or with the words of Van Leeuwen (2008), where practices are recontextualized into discourse.What Bakhtin might offer is a way of dealing with authorship, text and genre in textualized data and also in live events, provided that we accept and acknowledge that we are dealing with conceptual metaphors rather than hard core analytical categories.
The description of the case about "The Well" is authored by me as a researcher, based on my reading of what happened in the classroom.As an author I create the dialogizing background (see Bakhtin, 1981, p. 340) for specific events, which determines how the reader experience the classroom as a whole and specific foregrounded events and persons.Moving further into the metaphor we might consider the lesson observed as a text, where I as a reader sense the authorial intentions of the teacher alongside other voices past and present.Inside the classroom the teacher often performs her role heroically, in more than one sense of the word.She is part of an ongoing event face-to-face with a number of students and must make decisions on the spot.As a reader I will also sense the teacher as an author who has planned the lesson.Lack of control, even chaos, or tightly scripted events will be equally ascribed to the teacher as author.Different teachers will appear as different kinds of authors.
The case might illustrate how easily the teacher is drawn toward controlling the outcome of classroom work.The researchers wanted to see how the students responded to the text as an open-ended problem, and the teachers agreed to stage this activity.Nevertheless, they developed the didactic design into something more familiar to them, where the clearly stated assignment-or procedure-defines the activity.In retrospect it seems fair to say that the researchers were naïve to neglect that teachers have their authorial style, and also that being prepared and having control is in the backbone of teachers.
This idea of the teacher as author is not new (see Lensmire, 1997;Miyazaki, 2011;Skaftun, 2019), and it has also proven controversial (Matusov & Miyazaki, 2014).Clearly, as a model it has its limitations, but it also opens up a meaningful framework for the challenges we face concerning student participation and dialogic space in education.It emphasizes the distance between reflection and action (see Schön, 1983).It also reminds us that schools and classrooms are not open-ended social spaces.Classroom events are framed by the entire tradition of schooling similar to how a new text is determined by genre."A genre lives in the present, but always remembers its past," in Bakhtin's (1984, p. 106) words.Changing the genres of education is not easy, as we have learned over and over again for more than a hundred years (Cuban, 1990;Dewey, 1903;Freire, 2000;Gage, 2009).Considering the teacher as author is not a way of further empowering the teacher at the cost of student autonomy (Matusov, 2011)-quite the opposite.It is a realistic, yet metaphorical, way of acknowledging the asymmetric relationship between teacher and students that can serve as a starting point for exploring new authorial positions, that allows the teacher to make space for dialogue in educational practice, with an awareness of the powers of the tradition.
Educational design is a matter of creating and forming the space of interaction.Dialogic designs differ from traditional pedagogic design in that they more highly value openendedness-eventness-as a feature of the classroom.Making space for eventness is, however, difficult.It belongs to the open present where there is a minimum of uncertainty.Planning for uncertainty implies risk on the short term for the teacher and is dependent on a level of mutual trust between teacher and students.On the long term each event is partly determined by established practice, and partly a potential step toward changing it.

Dialogic practices and events-And authorial responsibility
In education particularly 2 meanings of practice are significant.It can denote specific actions, like in "teaching practices," and it can denote a social structure, consisting of specific roles played out in specific activities, that is situated in specific setting and involve specific resources (Van Leeuwen, 2008).The event concept is also ambiguous.In ethnographic approaches to literacy, for example, events are conceived as observable activities or episodes that can be associated with underlying social patterns, or practices (Barton, 1994).Žižek (2014) has a narrower understanding of the event as denoting extraordinary happenings.For Bakhtin the event is primarily a temporal category, associated with human coexistence in the flow of time, or in a continuous series of open-ended events.We live from moment to moment, and we are constantly making more or less conscious choices in events that require a response.Although many such events are governed by circumstances beyond our control, there is also always an element of openness linked to our choice.This openness is what defines the event-it is "the eventness of the event" (Morson & Emerson, 1990, p. 176).
Practice and event are both vague concepts (Blikstad Balas, 2013), but if we clarify how we choose to use them, they are useful tools to grasp and talk about vague phenomena.I prefer reserving the term practice to social structure determined not only by the teacher, but also by students, and perhaps more importantly, the roles available for both teachers and students.From this vantage point, making change in educational practice is not achieved simply by providing teachers with "best practices."The teacher has an outside position resembling that of an author, but authorship by definition does not mean total control, and neither authors nor teachers can escape the tradition.
The teacher is responsible for her classroom and what happens there in each lesson and over time, and from her outside position-reflecting over past events and planning future ones-she is an author dealing with more or less compliant or favorable elements.Resources available and school facilities and the number of students determines what activities are possible, and even more important, perhaps, is how the students relate to school and the teacher.They might even author hostile counter narratives to that of the teacher.This situation is not a matter of authorial responsibility or not.It is rather a matter of what kind of author the teacher is and wants to be, and what authorial position it is possible to achieve in the specific context.A teacher with the ambition of making space for dialogic eventness might have to deal with resistance from all elements in the fabric of school practice.
I think this aspect of dialogic space-the opening conceived of in terms of eventnessdeserves more attention as a foundation for further widening and deepening the dialogic space for many reasons.One of the reasons is the direct link to the essential time category.Eventness is about presence or immersion in the present, and as such a transient phenomenon in micro time.Through the following reflections I suggest that the creation of dialogic space also is a process in macro time; it must be opened, widened, and deepened patiently over time, so that dialogic events can be recognized and valued by both teachers and students.Let us consider a case where both timescales apply, taken from a study of student group conversation about texts presented as open-ended problems (Sønnel and & Skaftun, 2017).

First-hand experience of the inside as the basis for outside recognition
The case from 8A concerns how students respond to a complex text presented as an openended problem, framed by an open-ended instruction.The single case was supported by follow-up studies showing that most students were clearly substantively engaged in this kind of task (Sønneland, 2019), and even boundary cases displaying subversive forces can be interpreted as examples of subtle creativity on the hands of the students (Skaftun & Sønneland, 2021).These studies all concern the inside of dialogic space, as it was experienced from the outside by the researchers.But what can we learn from the more hesitant teacher interpretation of the initial case?Dewey (1903) talks about the engaging power of the first-hand experience of real problems as opposed to how traditional education provides ready-made answers.Scientific inquiry provides a model of this kind of experience, for Dewey and for later approaches to dialogic inquiry (Wells, 1999) and problem-oriented teaching (Freire, 2000;Lampert, 2001).The teachers of today are the students of yesterday, and most likely, they have been part of quite traditional practice in school as well as in their teacher education.If we want teachers to recognize and value student engagement, genuine eventness or dialogic events when they occur in the classroom, it seems fair to give them the opportunity to experience what we are talking about first hand; in order for them to recognize it from the outside, they should be allowed the experience of what it feels like on the inside.It is not unlikely that they themselves have never been exposed to educational tasks or situations designed to engage them in disciplinary inquiry or problem solving together.The interpretation gap between Anna and the researchers might simply be the result of a lack of shared experience.
In a partnership with a group of Year 6 teachers we tried to acknowledge this challenge (Jensen et al., 2022).The project was organized as monthly seminars over 3 school terms.We started out with a focus on first-hand experience of open-ended conversation about texts in the seminars, before asking the teachers to make space for student group conversations on texts as weekly activity.Further we listened to recordings of these group conversations, before shifting the focus toward the teacher role as facilitator in whole class follow-up conversations.The general idea was to provide teachers with first-hand experience similar to that of the students, as a background for recognizing this experience from the outside as teachers in the classrooms and in negotiation with researchers based on listening to transcribed student group conversations.To put it short: We wanted them to experience dialogic space both from the inside and the outside, before further expanding the dialogic space to the classroom as a whole.
In the seminars the teachers honestly reported that they were not comfortable with letting go of control associated with organizing open-ended text conversations in student groups.Yet, listening to and discussing recordings and transcriptions from these groups they identified characteristic features of explorative talk (Barnes & Todd, 1977), and also how the nature of the conversation changed if the teacher interfered.One of the most interesting discussions we ever had concerned balancing ground rules against the energy they sensed in the conversations.The idea that we might have introduced more specific ground rules was suggested by one of the teachers in the classroom immediately after the lesson where we introduced the group activity.We asked if we should have done anything differently, and this was a tentative suggestion.In the seminar where we listened to the recordings a few weeks later, he renounced this idea because, as he said, it might undermine the spontaneity of the talk.I think he might as well have said the eventness of the event.
Small group conversations are an effective way of allowing more students to talk (Barnes & Todd, 1977;Nystrand, 1997), or providing opportunities to talk as a first condition for the realization of student voice (see Segal & Lefstein, 2016).An open-ended approach to the text as a problem seems a promising way of providing students with first-hand experience of disciplinary problems as the basis for substantially engaged discussions across age groups (Sønneland, 2019), and general school motivation (Skaftun & Sønneland, 2021).The open instruction further allows spontaneous response to the problem and to fellow students, thus allowing them to work through disciplinary problem in their own language.Finally, the activity implies teacher trust in their students, and thus an important step toward a potential sense of disciplinary community-in our case an interpretive community (see Fish, 1980).
It seems fair to say that group conversations provide opportunities for opening dialogic space, and for students to experience that particular inside sense of time and place which I have called eventness.The group format is a simple way of creating a bounded yet potentially open-ended space.For the teacher, simply staying out is an essential first step, while eavesdropping in the room and listening to recordings of the conversation is a further step toward valuable insights into what and how the students understand.In doing this she is on her way to a position similar to that of the author Dostoevsky, renouncing essential surplus (Bakhtin, 1984) and acknowledging student talk and thinking as valid contributions.Getting to know and value student engagement and eventness might serve as a sound basis for teachers if they are to work on their own position-or stance (Boyd & Markarian, 2015)-in whole class conversation, and to reframe and develop (Sherry, 2018) whole class conversation on dialogic terms.

Creating dialogic space in whole class communication: Final remarks on author-ity
Whole class conversation conceived of as dialogic space is far more complicated from the perspective of the teacher than student groups.Assigning group work renders the teacher as an author and observer outside the event, whereas in whole class conversation she must balance the role of outside author and that of a hero situated in the heat of the moment.Traditional practice is rooted in scripts and predictable genres and as such imply that the teacher gives privilege to her position outside the ongoing event.What is sacrificed is the live presence of the teacher in the ongoing event, and as such the very spirit of dialogue.The other way around, the teacher might be fully immersed in the moment face to face with the students, to the point where the connection with the responsible outside position of the teacher as author is broken.This might result in a dialogic event, but it is not created as a dialogic space for educational purposes.
Traditional teacher led classroom discourse has its obvious strength in that it allows the teacher to direct the conversation where she wants it to go.It is also possible for the teacher to activate many students in a collective discourse toward understanding, and as such it is a speech genre (Bakhtin, 1986) that allows both widening and deepening the conversation.What is often missing is the opening of dialogic space, the beginning, where students experience, interest, and engagement in the problem at hand is spawned as a basis for what Dewey (1938) called the continuity of experience.This kind of progressive education involves multiple timescales, spanning from the experience of a single lesson, via establishing a position in the subject to the entire time as a student in school.For the teacher and the educational system there is an even wider time scale involving educational change.
Independent of time scale, the importance of opening dialogic space as a beginning persists.The beginning is always the most vulnerable step, and a big question for teachers and researchers is where to begin.If the point is educational change that runs beneath the surface we might need to trust and develop the human ability to recognize dialogic quality as a whole, not as a set of indicators.I think eventness is at the heart of what we experience when we are up against genuine dialogic events-be it from the inside or from the outside.The interpretation gap between researchers and Anna in 8A is not the result of her being unable to recognize eventness, but rather that she is not prepared to see it in the school setting.This is probably the result of her experiences from being a student in school and teacher training and further being socialized into the dominant practices of the professional community of teachers.
If teachers are to open dialogic space for their students, it seems wise to allow them access to the experience of being inside as a start and thus adding this experience to horizon of expectations as teachers in the classroom.Then we might expect them to recognize dialogic quality when they experience it from the outside as observers of student group conversations.Expanding the dialog space to the whole classroom is a difficult task, and it seems wise to make small steps toward improvement rather than aiming for perfection.Obviously, training is required, but so is the first-hand experience of taking the risk of entering whole class conversation conceived of as dialogic space.Deepening is a meaningful long-term goal, that might move increasingly to the foreground as the dialogic space is established and consolidated.But opening dialogic space cannot be done by declaration-it demands openended and thus also risky events, and it must be allowed to develop over time as part of a trust-based practice.
Teacher author-ity is a matter of establishing an authorial position-a dialogic stance (Boyd & Markarian, 2015)-toward the class, students, and classroom practice.From a Bakhtinian perspective it is not a matter of whether or not there is an author behind a text (and textualized data we could add), but rather what kind of author.A dialogic teacher relates to the students as valid participants in the disciplinary practice and allows authority to be a negotiated rather than demanding it.From such a position, the teacher can create and recognize dialogic space, and enter into it without losing her authorial self.Eventness as the heart of dialogic space in education is not something that simply occurs.It must be created by a teacher, and thus also must be recognized as such by the teacher from a position outside the dialogic space.