Responding to the question: What are
some appropriate standards of judgement in our educational research?
JeKan, thanks for the question. I believe it's a fundamentally important one for an educator to be asking. I want to respond to what you and Jack have written because the question makes me ask myself, what is appropriate in the development of educational standards of judgement for the educational processes I am involved in. Here are some ideas. I hope they stimulate some debate.
First, I want to present my ideas from my position of being a
Lifelong Professor of Educational Research[1]
at Ningxia Teachers University in China, because I feel that the formulation of
what is 'educational' in the processes of
developing standards of judgement in relation to education, is crucial.
Secondly, I am writing with an understanding of Lyotard's (1984) idea that:
"The [postmodern] artist and the writer, are
working without rules in order to formulate the rules of what will have been
done," (p.81),
which I take to be a preferment of process over
outcome.
Thirdly, I am taking this opportunity to respond to
the criteria offered by Furlough and Oancea (last retrieved on 8th October from http://www.jackwhitehead.com/bera06/furoan.jpg)as indicators of quality in education by
outlining how, in my view, a linguistic list, however rigorously arrived at,
may not capture the qualities distinctly enough to be helpful in developing
educational processes. If one of the aims of evaluation is improvement I am not
sure how set criteria can fully allow for some of the processes qualifying as
educational.
First, I hold education to be open-ended and
multi-dimensional, constituting a social and personal response to the
dialectical needs of social and personal development. As a lifelong professor
of educational research, I see my task as twofold. In my professorial inaugural
lecture (Laidlaw, 2006 – see http://www.jackwhitehead.com/china/mlinaugural.htm) I outlined that as a professor, I was
responsible for professing something. Telling something. However, I also
stressed my belief that I am also responsible (because my title contains the
word 'educational') for the development of something for the good of society
and individuals and groups within that society. I believe education
distinguishes itself from training, for example, by the degree to which
individuals and groups within the process are facilitated to reach potentials
not necessarily initially conceived within the original framework, but which
will, nevertheless, contribute to personal and/or social development. The
important idea here, I think, is the necessity of education being a dynamic
between at least two people. That education occurs when the people involved in
the processes are engaged in learning something of value – for themselves
and their society. The learner connects what is being learnt with their inner
landscape in such a way that they are empowered by the knowledge and begin the process
of being able to manage that empowerment. This it would follow, for me, to perceive as most
valid, those educational standards of judgement, which are derived by the
people engaged in the processes themselves. In 2004 I gave the inaugural
lecture (Laidlaw, 2004) for China's Experimental Centre for Educational Action
Research in Foreign Languages Teaching on standards of judgement in educational
research and said this about the process of people themselves devising their
own standards of judgement in education:
Let's stop a moment and consider this. People
making their own standards of judgement about the work they are doing. How can
this be? How can we do that and still produce work, which is recognised to be
of value in the wider society? (p.8)
I believe this to be one of
the greatest challenges facing education. Facing it, finding ways of trying to
resolve what may be unresolvable can deepen the educational value of the
processes. I believe education
exists within a dialectic and series of paradoxes. On the one hand, education
is often conducted through socially-accepted and endorsed institutions, with a
particular set of desired social outcomes; the schooling system would be one
such example. Those qualifying parameters, often written down on paper as
performance indicators, or examination results, or job-appraisals, or, in
England, League Tables, hold a unit together, to enable it to prescribe its
future journey, and develop the language to describe it to interest groups and
to control its development. These linguistic renderings of experience to
document have tremendous power. Her Majesty's Inspectors (HMI) in Britain, or
in China, the Provincial or State Evaluators are the arbiters of what qualifies
a school as 'good', and their formulations are often rendered as written text
against a set of markers designated as 'correct' by those in power. However, a
tabulated list of 'qualities' in a list can look as if they describe something, but in reality, do not
capture what it is like to be in a particular classroom, or be taught by a
particular teacher, or comprehend the quality of what has been learnt to an individual student and
so on. I believe lists can confer a belief in quality, without ever coming near
to the qualities themselves as they are experienced, reflected on, understood
and used by those in the processes of education under review, and which are, by
their very nature, developmental.
I also think the listing of qualities under the headings
of criteria, standards, judgements etc. that may give rise to a tick-list
mentality, which deems everything to be reducible to preconceived ideas. The
logical outcome of that, as I see it, could be that what cannot be similarly be
measured, may, in time
be deemed insignificant and thus be overlooked. Thus I like your idea,
JeKan, of discernment, rather than standards, as this suggests a greater
dynamic involvement with the quality of the processes.
A paradox here, though, is that working towards criteria for judgement is in my experience
a very fruitful and educational process (Laidlaw, 1994, 1996) because the collaboration towards standards
of judgement which hold both linguistic and inner, ontological meanings to
those engaged in the process, opens the door to innovation, ownership of
processes and values and the development of mutually-agreed qualities. The
process itself is what I would term educational.
Let me give an example. The example I have chosen
seems to me particularly relevant to your concern, JeKan, about racial
privilege and hegemonies, which may be operating when someone from one culture
is in a leadership position in another culture, regardless of whether this is
consciously desired by the 'leader'. For
the years between 2002 and 2006, Dean Tian Fengjun and I and our colleagues at
China's Experimental Centre for Educational Action Research in Foreign
Languages Teaching at Ningxia Teachers University have been specifically
looking for what might constitute Action Research with Chinese characteristics
(see Li and Laidlaw, 2006[2];
Tian and Laidlaw 2005; ed. Tian and Laidlaw, 2006). We don't yet know precisely
what Chinese characteristics might be in our attempts to improve our practice
as we understand better how to implement China's radical New Curriculum. This
curriculum stands more traditional concepts of teaching and learning on their
head by insisting on the facilitation of critical thinking skills, and the
building of autonomous learning strategies. This is in distinct contrast to the
old curricula, which demanded rote-learning and the regurgitation of processed
material by students, and the application of 'model' methodologies by teachers
and teacher-trainers. However, in the Centre we understand that the formulation
of such a phenomenon as Chinese characteristics itself may offer us the
framework by which we will empower learning, promote sustainability in learning
and reduce the likelihood of hegemony in terms of the power-relations
surrounding conceptual criteria of quality. An extract from our article which
focuses on a conversation between the authors – myself and Li Peidong, an
experienced lecturer at the AR Centre:
Moira Laidlaw: Instead
of knowing the answers, I realized that I had to let go of certain set beliefs
about process and outcome that I had come to China with. For this process of
educational development to flourish, it had to flourish in its own image. There
is something in this new idea that doesn't at all contradict an original value
I hold, however, and that's about not exerting undue influence on the people
around me and diminishing their power to make decisions about aspects of life,
which directly concern them.
Li Peidong: So AR
might develop here in new ways. This individually oriented form might change
into more collaborative forms of AR. We might have, for example, people
researching together in pairs: one an experienced teacher, and the other a
novice. This mentoring might help us support a Chinese structure. Although the
enquiries we are conducting here are useful, I do wonder sometimes about the
emphasis on the individual. I think there are ways for us to work in which we
create a new synthesis out of our understandings.
Moira Laidlaw: In
developing Chinese characteristics in this process, we might render the process
sustainable. It seems to work all round. We want educational improvements. We
want durability. We want the process to fit. We want people to be motivated. We
want something new, to make this AR Centre distinctive.
Li Peidong: And it
will focus colleagues in working together to build something powerful for
China. Yes, this new curriculum and the work we're doing on its implementation
may be one facet of Chinese characteristics.
Moira Laidlaw: You might be right. But it seems to me that an action research with
Chinese characteristics is a synergetic and creative response to the
differences between us all. That in doing this, I am saying it is not about my
insights. Only you can do this. I can't know what makes something Chinese and
how that Chineseness can be harnessed educationally. It devolves my power in
the situation. (p.343)
And later:
Li Peidong: ... We exist, you and I, as
individuals and as members of a group within a changing society. Your personal
predisposition is from we to I. Mine from I to we. It is a kind of yin-yang
situation. Our living contradictions in some senses mirror the present
contradictions within our educational system. The new curriculum seeks personal
as well as social development, growth and potential. You want that too, I know
that. I want that. Our AR with Chinese characteristics grasps the reality of
the dialectic, knowing it can't point to both momentum and destination at the
same time.
Moira Laidlaw: A bit like a quantum
mechanical view of the universe...
Li Peidong: Or like Lao-zi's belief that
we use bricks to build a house, but it is the space within that makes it
liveable. We have to hold the two together as a unity, although they are
opposites and can never meet. That's AR with Chinese characteristics.( p.344)
This expresses my (our) belief about the paradoxical
nature of educational development, and by implication the paradoxical problem
of inaugurating educational standards of judgement to augment the processes
involved. To evaluate the processes in any form other than the original form is
itself an act of re-construction of the
experience itself as Eisner (1993) alludes to in his AERA presidential speech.
He was concerned that such a 'reconstruction' may distort it. I believe he was
right, and I would place the listing of standards of judgement as open to this
distortion. It is this distortion that worries me.
If education is a dialectical process (Whitehead,
1993; McNiff, 1993), then its standards
of judgement need to be dialectical. They need to point to what Li, in Li & Laidlaw (2006 above), expresses thus:
We have to hold the two together as a unity,
although they are opposites and can never meet (op. cit.).
The two, it seems to me, are the process and the result of the
process (if indeed they can be so divided), with the third, which is bigger
than the sum of its parts. This seems to me, therefore, to require a different
approach to the setting of standards, and why I am interested in the research
being done currently at Bath University by Jack Whitehead in his insistence on
multi-media forms of representation and with his work with Alan Rayner on
inclusionality; or the work of Branko Bognar in Croatia, whose enquiry into how
he might help to facilitate AR with colleagues working with school students
infulenced a ten-year old student, Anica, in being able to account for her own
educational processes using standards of judgement she had developed herself in
the course of her research enquiry into how she might improve her values as a
member of her own family. The multi-media forms of representation (see
Whitehead 2006 : http://www.nipissingu.ca/oar/new_issue-V821E.htm
), the organic and developmental nature of inclusionality (Rayner, 2005) and Branko Bognar's video footage and
explanation of the young student, Anica's work, are examples of the kind of
developmental standards of judgement, which might help us better to understand
– and thus improve – our processes of education. The standards they
are seeking and refining in process become the
educational power of their work. (You can find more details about this work as
well in Whitehead, 2006). See also Tian and Laidlaw's article at AR Expeditions
in which we discuss this idea.
So, let's come back to the
criteria proposed by Furlong and Oancea for applied and practice-based research
quality, by asking how the criteria listed can be applied educationally, if
this response to your question, JeKan, is a reasonable assertion of what
education might be. If education is dynamic, multidimensional and
developmental, if it is rooted in ontology and constructed formally and
informally to improve something, then how can a flat measuring-stick be used to
judge it? Let's look at the criteria in a bit more detail. Words like: 'plausibility'
under 'Capacity Development and Value for People' mean what? I know what
the semantic meanings are, but I don't understand the life-energy behind those
descriptors in any way, which would enable me to use them as guidelines for
quality. They are inert tools, not living tools. I own no part of them. They
are not the summation of shared experiences. They are words on a page.
I am not for one moment
suggesting that the people using these kinds of criteria are attempting to
create a hegemony, but they are certainly working from within one. My
understanding of a hegemony is that the rationality survives by a set of rules
which become internalized and reified, and taken for granted as correct. Anyone
challenging those rules can be subject to forms of intimidation and negative
judgements. The assumption being made by the criteria above is that (written)
criteria on their own are able to capture full meanings. This assumption
affects not only processes, but I believe also stymies people's ability to work
from within a dialectic between process and outcome, and working within this
dialectic answers the question of finding valid criteria for individuals and
society at the same time, as well as deepening the learning associated with the
process. Our job as educators, surely, is to strip away linear parameters, and
open our eyes to the potential clarities we might find, if we only seek
together, the meanings in multidimensional realities and representations we
want to create from our lives and productive work.
Bibliography:
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Video footage of accounting for levels of educational achievement at: http://www.e-lar.net/videos/AI2_0002.wmv
http://www.e-lar.net/videos/Validation.wmv
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