Shifting Landscapes/Shifting Langue: Qualitative Research From the In-Between

This article describes Dialogic Educational Criticism as a method for research that explicitly accounts for and values multiple perspectives and voices including the researcher’s. This method is based on Eisner’s “connoisseurship” method and incorporates a dialogic dimension through the theoretical concepts of Mikhail M. Bakhtin. Concepts from Bakhtin’s and related authors’ work include dialogism, zones of influence, refraction, and thirdness. The author contends that dialogic educational criticism is grounded in a Chicano epistemology in which shifting language and cultural codes are used in communicative discourse. This method as a way of knowing belies the structuralist notion that language’s variable parole is produced from a necessarily stable langue. Dialogic validity is added to Eisner’s structural corroboration, consensual validation, and referential adequacy as a validity criterion appropriate for the new method. Finally, the author describes the application of dialogic educational criticism to a case of North American higher education collaboration.