EDUCATION AT THE BOUNDARY?
EDUCATION AT THE BOUNDARY?

Summary/Abstract: This paper argues for the re-conceptualization of 21st century education as a boundary encounter rather than as a kind of border-crossing experience. Drawing on the insights of Mikhail Bakhtin and members of his “circles,” boundaries are presented as opportunities to meet “other.” They are positioned as a form of ontologic exchange in the flux of time, space, and axiology. In this locale, culture reveals itself, its limits and its parameters more keenly, and might even be seen anew. By examining the chronotopic thresholds that may exist at these encounters, as pedagogical events, there are opportunities to recognize difference and diversity through experiences of jarring, fissure, wobbling, knotting encounters or “postupok” that bring the chronotopes to life. Instead of trying to cross the boundary to think and act the same as another (or vice-versa), chronotopic thresholds thus promote transgradience and, in doing so, serve as a bridge to different pedagogic territories which pay heed to valued cultural knowledge and embrace uncertainty as a legitimate, perhaps even desirable, way of learning.

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