Bakhtin's philosophy for education: Pedagogy of aesthetics and dialogism

This thesis is an attempt to analyze the philosophical ideas of Mikhail Bakhtin from the point of view of their possible implementation in educational practices. The first chapter examines the philosophy of Bakhtin's aesthetics, which postulate that the perception of the surrounding world is possible through non-rational methods of phenomenological and hermeneutic reflections. Particular attention is paid to Bakhtin's understanding of the process of cognition, where a human is presented in his/her holistic subjective being. According to Bakhtin, this idea permits the usage of subjective cognitive processes in objective reality only through an individually responsible act. The second chapter deals with the possible implementation of the Bakhtinan dialogic philosophy in the theory of knowledge. An attempt is made to trace the understanding of the essence of dialogism from the phenomenological premise that any consciousness is a text that includes the cognizer in a situation of aesthetic understanding and, as the result of such participatory thinking, triggers the mechanism of an internal dialogue. The balancing correlation between the idea of "dialogic" and the idea of "answerability" as part of the general life experience is also explored. The third chapter examines Bakhtin's architectonics as a specific strategic tool, which allows for optimizing and effectively carrying out the many interrelationships of the participating in many educational processes. Additionally, Bakhtin's concepts of chronotope and nonalibi in existence are considered as categories of theoretical cognition and phenomena that can help better comprehend the truth, especially in post-modern educational conditions. Together with Bakhtin's ideas, the ideas of cognition specific to the neo-Kantian, primarily German, philosophical schools, are explored as well as their influence on Bakhtin and his followers. I also include some memories from my own teaching experience, which I collected for over 25 years of teaching foreign languages from K-12 to the university level.