ABSTRACT Understanding is a process that grounds educational activity and enables the development of teaching and learning. This article presents a theoretical effort to synthesize the concept of understanding in the works of Bakhtin and the Circle. This paper was based on a review of the works Marxism and the Philosophy of Language and Freudianism: a Marxist critique; and on a review of the essay The Problem of Speech Genres, in the collection BAKHTIN, M., Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, and the essay Discourse in the Novel, in BAKHTIN, M., The Dialogical Imagination: Four Essays. According to the Circle, understanding is composed of concrete, ideological, and axiological elements; it is a process that allows the representation and extension of communication.