Conference Program

In response to the question posed by the title of this panel, this contribution argues that “being political” in the context of higher education may also mean designing teaching practices that enable students to resist any act of defining themselves and the world that is produced without their own words. This argument draws on Mikhail Bakhtin (1984) writing, particularly in Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, where he shows how Dostoevskian characters resist the author’s defining act and retain the “last word” about themselves. This does not depend solely on the character of the hero, but on the author’s posture, which refrains from confining the character within a definitive description and leaves open the space of their becoming. Rather than constructing a character, the author shapes the character’s words about themselves and about the world.
In the context of teaching specifically, Bakhtin (1981) further emphasizes that only “internally persuasive discourse”, and not authoritative ones, is capable of awakening autonomous thought and enabling the generation of new responsive discourse. It is within this interaction of words, viewpoints and interpretations that Bakhtin’s concept of the “subject’s ideological becoming” takes shape: the process through which each person develops their own way of seeing the world.
From this perspective, the contribution presents and discusses some examples of teaching practices and the analysis of materials developed within university and postgraduate training programmes dedicated to special education for inclusion. The view of inclusive education as a practice that requires the development of a posture capable of questioning otherness rather than confining it within predefined definitions, and of challenging prêt-à-porter thinking in order to build autonomous thought, reinforces the relevance of a Bakhtinian perspective (Manno 2016; 2021).
The teaching practices described often begin with students’ work, such as short texts, metaphors and images, including those generated by artificial intelligence. Since these are not merely expressive elements but sites where cultural patterns that orient action sediment, they can become working materials for activating processes of thinking and critical inquiry into the representations, often implicit, through which we interpret the world, as well as into our own thinking processes.
The aim of these practices is to make possible a form of resistance to predefined definitions and stereotypes while fostering the search for new forms of thought and action. This occurs with the awareness that every new cultural form, in the absence of reflective thinking capable of re-examining it (Dewey 1997; Lipman 2003), always carries the potential to become a stereotype itself. The resistance that these practices seek to activate corresponds to a form of opposition that, in Bakhtinian terms, is dialogic rather than conflictual, insofar as it coincides with the possibility of responding on the basis of one’s own autonomous thought, questioning the representations through which we interpret the world and developing one’s own words in response to the word of others.