Discursivity, Heteroglossia, and Interest: Revisiting Herbert Kliebard's Dewey

This paper revisits Herbert Kliebard's figure of John Dewey in Kliebard's The Struggle for the American Curriculum. The paper argues that, while there are indeed reasons for the disembodied picture of Dewey that emerges from Struggle, such figuration ultimately has an effect that is overly reproductive: It ignores Dewey's efforts to live within and across institutional boundaries so as to reconstruct the practices and interests of the society in which he lived. Using the work of Bakhtin and Dewey, I argue that it is only by such a Deweyan engagement that our own voices will ultimately be able to "ring" or "sound" in novel and potentially radical ways.