PhD Candidature Statement

This thesis will explore the question ‘how do I improve my practice’ in the context of helping managers’ on the two year E Learning Coached MA in Leadership Studies at Exeter University, improve their contribution to leadership in their organisations, In the process, we will jointly explore the nature, means, and value of embodying leadership as a ‘process’ phenomenon (process-as-ontology), as well as the view that leadership and its development is best approached ‘as an art’ (Grint, 2000 ).

The research will represent a sustained inquiry into the dialectic of how I and others shape and are shaped by my/our practices, and to understand what ‘embodied practice’ means and how to achieve it. Through constructing a narrative of my own learning as the students/practitioner researchers construct their own ‘reflective biographies’, I/we will attempt to realise a more relational, systemic and timely expression of my/our embodied knowing. To do this, I/we will seek to create an extended ‘relational epistemology’ to make sense of our lived experience in both the ‘teaching /researcher’ and the ‘field/practitioner’ domains.

The research will engage critically with ideas coming from a number of different fields: the systemic and social construction traditions, Foucault’s work on self and power relations, insights emerging from complexity theory, and findings from cognitive science on the pervasive influence of metaphor and tacit, embodied knowledge. These ideas will be used intuitively in response to the perceived needs of students during extended cycles of action and reflection, to help us access and critique tacit and ‘marginalised’ knowledges relevant to the issues we are inquiring into, and contribute to a ‘multi-modal’ framework of knowing. Subsidiary areas of interest will include the role of humour and improvisation in helping both the managers and myself work creatively with the dilemmas involved in this study of education for improving leadership in diverse work situations.

This work will cast light on the possibility of accelerating the development of managers to lead in more relational, and emergent ways. In jointly understanding, improving, evaluating, and explaining the learning and developmental process that influences our knowing, doing, and being, I/we will search for insights into our ‘pedagogic practice’. In this we will look at the relations between both the macro ‘conditions’ which can create contexts for learning and working, and the relational ‘micro-practices’ which help translate these into embodied practice. The living standards of judgment that emerge and that we consequently use to account for the claims we make, will indicate the efficacy of this pegagogy for the education of practitioner researchers in higher education during an age of ‘supercomplexity’ (Barnett, 2001).

Keith Kinsella August, 2005.