Understanding creative cultural divergence: a Bakhtinian reflection from a culture-crossing scholar

I respond to Baron and Chen’s article on creative cultural divergence, which they describe as the novel pedagogy of diverging from culturally generated educational expectations. Their article provides an analysis on how an experienced Taiwanese teacher drew on different forms of creative cultural divergence to facilitate students’ critical thinking and science inquiry. To better understand the phenomenon of creative cultural divergence, I draw on Bakhtin’s concepts of outsideness, novelization, and internally persuasive discourse to analyze how these divergences are produced. These concepts not only help us to understand the phenomenon of creative cultural divergence, they also help me to reflect on my own culture-crossing experience. The implications of these concepts for culture and education are further discussed.