The carnivalesque pedagogy: Jaan as a pedagogist

In this contribution, I anchor my gaze to Jaan as a teacher. Hardly anybody speaks of how crafted and a natural-born teacher Jaan is, equipped with an excellent art of elicitation and dialogic pedagogy. This is the most underrated aspect of Jaan as a cultural psychologist. His teaching is underpinned by Bakhtin, in what might be called the carnivalesque pedagogy. I will analyse the carnivalesque pedagogy as a participant observer of seminars and informal discussions that Jaan held for his students. He has developed a spirit of the irrelevant and the comic in the ongoing otherwise very tense, stifling discussions that students, or the power-less people, often see in academic seminars. Bakhtin's theory of the carnivalesque was our touchstone, which can be applied to analysing the seminar discourse. Jaan's carnivalesque pedagogy scaffolds his students to engage in critical dialogues on the authoritative knowledge of psychology.