In September 2011 in Rome at the International Society for Cultural and Activity Research conference, Eugene Matusov (USA), Kiyotaka Miyazaki (Japan), Jayne White (New Zealand), and Olga Dysthe (Norway) organized a symposium on Dialogic Pedagogy. Formally during the symposium and informally after the symposium several heated discussions started among the participants about the nature of dialogic pedagogy. The uniting theme of these discussions was a strong commitment by all four participants to apply the dialogic framework developed by Soviet-Russian philosopher and literary theoretician Bakhtin to education. In this special issue, Eugene Matusov (USA) and Kiyotaka Miyazaki (Japan) have developed only three of the heated issues discussed at the symposium in a form of dialogic exchanges (dialogue-disagreements). We invited our Dialogic Pedagogy colleagues Jayne White (New Zealand) and Olga Dysthe (Norway) to write commentaries on the dialogues. Fortunately, Jayne White kindly accepted the request and wrote her commentary. Unfortunately, Olga Dysthe could not participate due to her prior commitments to other projects. We also invited Ana Marjanovic-Shane (USA), Beth Ferholt (USA), Rupert Wegerif (UK), and Paul Sullivan (UK) to comment on Eugene-Kiyotaka dialogue-disagreement.                The first two heated issues were initiated by Eugene Matusov by providing a typology of different conceptual approaches to Dialogic Pedagogy that he had noticed in education. Specifically, the debate with Kiyotaka Miyazaki (and the other two participants) was around three types of Dialogic Pedagogy defined by Eugene Matusov: instrumental, epistemological, and ontological types of Dialogic Pedagogy. Specifically, Eugene Matusov subscribes to ontological dialogic pedagogy arguing that dialogic pedagogy should be built around students’ important existing or emergent life interests, concerns, questions, and needs. He challenged both instrumental dialogic pedagogy that is mostly interested in using dialogic interactional format of instruction to make students effectively arrive at preset curricular endpoints and epistemological dialogic pedagogy that is most interested in production of new knowledge for students. Kiyotaka Miyazaki (and other participants) found this typology not to be useful and challenged the values behind it. Kiyotaka Miyazaki introduced the third heated topic of treating students as “heroes” of the teacher’s polyphonic pedagogy similar to Dostoevsky’s polyphonic novel based on Bakhtin’s analysis. Eugene Matusov took issue with treating students as “heroes” of teacher’s polyphonic pedagogy arguing that in Dialogic Pedagogy students author their own education and their own becoming.                Originally, we wanted to present our Dialogue on Dialogic Pedagogy in the following format. An initiator of a heated topic develops his argument, the opponent provides a counter-argument, and then the initiator has an opportunity to reply with his “final word” (of course, we know that there is no “final word” in a dialogue). However, after Eugene Matusov developed two of his heated topics, Kiyotaka Miyazaki wanted to reply to both of them in one unified response, rather than two separate replies. Jayne White, Ana Marjanovic-Shane, Beth Ferholt, and Paul Sullivan wrote commentaries about the entire exchange and these commentaries should be treated as part of our Dialogue on Dialogic Pedagogy. We hope that readers, interested in Dialogic Pedagogy, will join our heated Dialogue-Disagreement and will introduce more heated topics.

In this paper, there is an attempt to construct the notion of interstijectivity as a process of a coorakztion of participants' contributions in joint activity. This notion incorporates the dynamics of bothagreement anddisagreement. Iargue thata traditionaldejbitionof intersubjectivityasastate of overlap of individual unakstandings overemphasizes agreement and&-emphasizes disagreement among the participants in joint activity. It disregards disagreement at two levels: I) byfocusing only on integrative, consensus seeking, activities, in which disagreement among participants of joint activity often is viewed as only the initial point of the joint activity that has to be resolved by the final agreement (macro-level), and2) by considering disagreements as only nuisances or obstacles while focusing on integrative activities (micro-level). To illustrate how disagreement can constitute intersubjectivity at macro-andmicro-levels, examples of children'sdevelopment of a classroom play are examined. Diversity andjlui&y of intersubjectivity will be &cussed. Epigraph I know that I am wrong but I do not know where exactly I am wrong, to what akgree, orwhy. I hope people who disagree will help me clarjfr these questions. The author.In this paper, I argue that in the traditional definition of the concept of intersubjec tivity, agreement among participants, is overemphasized while disagreement is de-emphasized. This emphasis on agreement orients researchers to focus only on particular agreement-bounded phenomena in sociocultural activities and to dismgard other aspects of the phenomena, such as non-integrative activities (macro-level) and non-integrative elements of integrative activities (micro-level). I argue that disagreement and agreement are both aspects of one process rather than separate phases of microdevelopment of sociocultural activity portrayed as progressing from disagreement (or a lack of agreement) to agreement among the participants. Each aspect ofthe process cannot be fully understood without understanding the other. In this paper, the main question discussed is not so much how understanding among people becomes possible, but what forms dynamic understanding can take.Here, I will try to develop a coherent notion of intersubjectivity that appreciatesboth agreement and disagreement among the participants in so&cultural activity. In doing so, I will consider several examples of sociocultural activities where evidence of disagreement as a characteristic of the intersubjectivity process is clear and central for the activities: straight speech durgi in Israel (Katriel, 1986). learning disability in schools (Mehan, 1993). and children's playcrafting (Baker-Sennett, Matusov, & Rogoff, 1992).

In this paper we apply a dynamic systems perspective to infant emotional development. We propose that emotions are not states but self‐organizing dynamic processes intimately tied to the flow of an individual's activity in a context. We review data on the relationship between emotional actions and the social context, in particular the development of smiling and laughter. These data are more adequately explained by our perspective than by other theories of emotional development. We provide a model for how emotional processes in early infancy become embedded into sociocultural systems, and suggest new avenues of research on emotional development.

In Western psychology and education, up until very recently, Bakhtin has often been introduced as a scholar whose approach was compatible with and an extension of Vygotsky’s cultural-historical approach. I argue that this continuity is problematic. Vygotsky’s approach to the social was heavily influenced by Hegel’s universalist, mono-logic, mono-logical, developmental (diachronic), activity-based philosophy. Bakhtin developed a pluralistic, essentially synchronic, dialogic, discourse- and genre-based approach to the social, involving the hybridity of co-existing competing and conflicting varieties of logic. Extrapolating Bakhtin’s approach in education and psychology, I argue that from Bakhtin’s dialogic framework, when a child (or any other person) is a subject of development — as in developmental psychology, or a subject of learning — as in education, development, its goals, and developmental values defining the teleology of the development, become (again) unknown for the participant (e.g., a developmental psychologist or parent).

Recently, Bakhtinian philologists have charged scholars of education with misapplying Bakhtin’s scholarship in their field. In this critical essay, Eugene Matusov reviews two recent edited collections relevant to this issue: Arnetha F. Ball and Sarah Warshauer Freedman’s Bakhtinian Perspectives on Language, Literacy, and Learning and Bonny Norton and Kelleen Toohey’s Critical Pedagogies and Language Learning. He uses these texts to consider whether Bakhtin has been misapplied in education, how and whether Bakhtin’s literary scholarship can be useful for education, and how education can inform Bakhtinian scholarship. Matusov shows that the philologists' critique of educational scholars is grounded but unjustifiably all‐encompassing. Finally, he problematizes whether Bakhtin’s notions of dialogism and internally persuasive discourse are compatible with institutionalized education.