"In the Neighbourhood of": Dialogic Uncertainties and the Rise of New Subject Positions in Environmental Education

Abstract

This article proposes that resonances exist between the curriculum vision advanced by the Panel for Education for Sustainable Development (1998) and key Bakhtinian motifs, such as dialogism, polyphony, and heteroglossia. The Panel's support for postmodern perspectives, however, makes the conjunction with Bakhtin problematic, due to anxieties that inhabit Bakhtinian scholarship concerning the assimilation of Bakhtinian notions into postmodernisms. In response to this concern, I formulate thespatial figuration of the neighborhood of as a theoretical geography that enables the ideas offered by Bakhtin and those of postmodernists to form a strategic alliance, without threatening to subsumeBakhtin or obscure the distinctiveness of his ideas. Working in the neighborhood of Bakhtin and postmodernisms creates a space to theorize dialogic uncertainties, creating both textual spaces for conversations around environmental education and new subject positions, or subjectivities, for students.