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a Bakhtinian homecoming: operationalizing dialogism in the context of an early childhood education centre in Wellington, New Zealand

Abstract
Dialogic research, building on the dialogic philosophy of Mikhail Bakhtin, is fundamentally concerned with the social, discursive nature of language. This article describes an application of dialogic research methods in a pilot study conducted in an Education and Care setting in Wellington, New Zealand focusing on an 18-month-old toddler and his teacher. The purpose of this exploratory study was to ‘operationalize’ dialogic research within this early childhood education context, in preparation for a larger investigation. Approaching the field through this dialogic research method offered an alternative means of investigating the acts of a toddler through genre (as the framework of analysis) and utterance (as the unit of analysis). This article argues for dialogic research as a method which enables toddler and teacher ‘voices’ to authentically inter-animate and contribute accordingly to the research process, thus promoting hermeneutic complexity rather than scientific truth.
Type
Journal Article
Type of thesis
Series
Citation
White, E.J. (2009). a Bakhtinian homecoming: operationalizing dialogism in the context of an early childhood education centre in Wellington, New Zealand. Journal of Early Childhood Research , 7(3), 299-323.
Date
2009-10
Publisher
Sage
Degree
Supervisors
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