A Soul-searching assembly: Vignette

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In this article, I develop a dialogic analysis of a democratic school’s General Assembly meeting in the form of a vignette. As a qualitative method, a vignette is a suitable way of preparing evidence and constructing data for further analyses. It is also an ideal medium for a full-fledged dialogic analysis of the described events and dialogues that took place among the participants. I grounded this vignette on a transcript of an audio recording of a General Assembly meeting held in the first Norwegian democratic high school – the Experimental Gymnasium of Oslo (EGO) on November 2nd, 1967, shortly after it started to work in 1967. Using the students’ voices raised in this meeting, I aimed to recreate the meeting’s dramatic atmosphere. My approach follows the art of dialogic analysis (Matusov, Marjanovic-Shane, & Gradovski, 2019; Matusov, Marjanovic-Shane, Kullenberg, & Curtis, 2019), as I attempt to dialogically join the students, adding my reactions and interpretations of the meeting’s unfolding debates and dialogues. I also add my dialogic replies to the students and insert other comments judging their positions dialogically in an attempt to also create rich data for further conceptual analysis, which is published in another article in this special issue, “Paradigmatic dialogue-disagreement in a democratic school: A conceptual analysis” (see Marjanovic-Shane, 2023b).

A Soul-searching assembly: Vignette

Marjanović-Shane

2023

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From a school rebellion to a rebel school – its people and their initial struggles with democracy in education

Jørgensen¹

2023

The following text is a translation of two chapters from a Norwegian book, “From a school rebellion to a rebel school” by Mosse Jørgensen (Jørgensen, 1971). She was the first “principal,” i.e., the “school leader” and a teacher in a democratic high school, The Experimental Gymnasium of Oslo [Fosøksgymnaset i Oslo] in Norway. Although this book was translated into eight languages in the 1970s, it never was translated into English. The editors of this Special Issue decided to translate and publish two chapters of the book: Chapter III – The People and Chapter VI – Difficulties with democracy. These chapters represent a valuable addition to the special issue on Dialogic Pedagogy and Democratic Education. They illustrate, complement, and complete four other studies in this Special Issue issue, which also focus on The Experimental Gymnasium of Oslo and its Swedish sister school in Gothenburg (Marjanovic-Shane, 2023a, 2023b, 2023c; Marjanovic-Shane, Kullenberg, & Gradovski, 2023). We are publishing translations of these two chapters in honor of their author Mosse Jørgensen, who is no more.

A paradigmatic dialogue-disagreement in a democratic school: A conceptual analysis of a soul-searching assembly meeting

Marjanović-Shane

2023

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In this article, I attempt to conceptually analyze points of disagreement among the students of the first democratic high school in Norway, The Experimental Gymnasium of Oslo (EGO). The clashes and disagreements among the students started heating up immediately after the school was opened in the fall of 1967. As they were learning how to run their school, the students discovered profound differences in their views of education and its purposes. Their deep disagreements about the meaning of education and conflicts about their school practices almost broke up their school right at the very start of its existence. Their different understandings of education erupted in a passionate and dramatic general assembly meeting, which they later referred to as the Soul-Searching Assembly. This four-and-a-half hour-long meeting was recorded and its transcript was published (Hem & Remlov, 1969). In this article, I analyze the dialogues from the assembly, looking for the students’ diverse ideological and conceptual positions, views, desires, and underlying values. The tensions and clashes the students voiced echo the profound paradigmatic differences in conceptualizing education throughout the modern history of education, from the Enlightenment until now, a few decades into the 21st century. The purpose of my analysis is to examine these paradigmatically different views and the concerns behind them. These radically different paradigmatic, conceptual, and axiological positions have an effect on what we may consider being good, ethical, just, and true for human existence, human relationships, and human rights in general, and especially in education. The EGO students’ intensive and urgent ontological need to explain their very different positions to each other allowed me to take a closer look into the tensions and conflicts still existing in the larger cultural-historical public sphere of discourse on education.