[1] Unfolding Meaningful Musing Within a Prologue:

I am a professional educator in British higher education. Six years ago I would not have contemplated beginning my thesis writing without a thesis plan on paper and with only this proposed title to work with,

What gives meaning to my life as a professional educator in British HE?

Last week I started writing a methodology chapter as it felt like a place for me to make a beginning (Said, 1985).

Now, in 2003, I am encouraging my postgraduate students Trevor, Tina and Pei Shuang to commit to writing their stories that seem, for them, ‘right’ to tell in the ‘just now’ of their lives, and to follow the incontrovertible logic of story to reveal its own meanings and purposes (Okri, 1996)

In reflecting on myself trying to influence the education of my students in this way, I recognise how Brian Fay (1996) has influenced the range of my thinking about story as knowledge in his construct of ‘narrativism’ as an inclusional form that breaks with the binary notion of do we live stories or just tell them, as he suggests that we do both (p. 194-197)

A beginning in respect of my intention and my method as a self-study educator making a commitment to come to terms with the writing up of my own personal inquiry. I needed a place to start as the commitment to make public my personal inquiry that began formally in 1997 and began much earlier I suspect when I recall a memoried image of my neighbour asking me when I was about 12 years what I’d like to do when I leave school, and I replied, ‘I want to be a history teacher’.

Beginning my writing in a stark chapter headed ‘methodology’, I found myself ‘actually’ writing about my methodological support of my students.

By stealth and with a viscous fluidity as one new emergent idea stuck to the traces of other, maybe, previous ideas, while over-flowing them from greasy gravity, I have begun the process of unfolding meaning as I write about how my experientialist methodology gives meaning to my educative life as I supervise my students research enquiries.

Writing myself in and out of my thesis has helped me to recognise ‘implicate order’ (Bohm, 1980) emerging from the unfolding of my meanings (Bohm, 1987).

I am beginning to appreciate how helpful it could be to playfully ‘imaginate’ my thesis as breaking waves, as rippling self-generating forms of understanding.

Yet I wouldn’t want to lose the inclusivist possibility for artistic shaping within implicate order.

Words need a careful choosing for they carry their own weight in consequences.

Here I would like to weave two forms of authority: first my own authority as the interlocutor to my own artistic creativity as an educator held within my experience of life, and the validity of my desire to fulfil my destiny to express and explore it. And I would like to honour an inclusional mystery as I move to a second form of authority. Mishler (1999) shows us the significance in craftartists’ narratives of identity, pointing to coherence, contradiction and tension in life stories (p.14). My thesis is a testimony to the universal intent conveyed in Mishler’s story of their stories. The ideas of Bohm (1980, 1987) and Fritjof Capra, (2002) show how implicate order, unfolding meanings and the hidden connections that support Capra’s assertion of a science for sustainable living, point to the creative artistry that has meaning independent of and yet embraced within an implicate order.

I like the challenge to my thesis of Singer’s (2001) wonderful notion of unbounded consciousness in terms of qualia, mind and self as I work with commitment, intent and love to manifest my intuition that Ming Singer is right when she suggests, ‘Our mind may after all be capable of unveiling its own mystery, if only w could do two things: to redesign a little our mind architecture by freeing up its boundaries, and to utilize all its equipment, experimental and interpretive, in this awe-inspiring bootstrapping task" (p.24).

Alan Rayner (2002/2003) is showing through his life affirming energies what it entails to live this ‘awe-inspiring bootstrapping task’.

Alan brings his body [to us] in exploring, explaining and extending his beautifully inclusional educative influence in the dialogue and conversations of the Bath (University) Educational Action Research community as he unfolds his epistemology of inclusivity.

By allowing myself to be influenced by Alan I am moving my thinking/feeling/body as a commitment to explore how embodied some of my behaviour and thinking can be, I enjoyed a metaphorical focus with a thesis title conjured into existence from within what I was playfully writing as I wrestled free of my embodied conservatism of fear. Writing my thesis I would have to take the risk of letting go of what I believe I know, to come to know the value of what I truly believe, in this case about myself as an educator.

I have long used the phrase imaginate to express how important imagination is for me in the enacting of my commitment (s) to frame my multiple knowings within personal inquiry, self study, living educational theory and autoethnography (Ellis and Bochner, 2000). Seemingly, it touches Althusser’s idea that occupying a place of the impossible is necessary to make [my] thought possible. Yes, I relate closely to this notion.

I recognise that I have chosen to occupy impossible places as supervisor to my students. By trailing them I enter impossible space. As I follow my student’s creative spoor, allowing for their navigation to take me on their journey, I become a deep listener to their creativity (Stein, 1994). My friends will tell you that listening deeply is something I have to consciously work hard at. So deeply listening is a problematical space for me, though not impossible.

The occupation of impossible places isn’t exactly how I feel about the nature of my reciprocity with students. I don’t think I occupy and I wouldn’t want to be in occupation of impossible places for long as they would no longer be impossible, to me.

I borrow from spaces, and move nomadically through places.

So I enjoy Althusser’s notion as metaphor, as aphorism.

It has its own limits, and I have mine too.

I limit my immersion within this metaphor by recognising that I have travelled through spaces of impossibility in my college as I find creative expression for who I want to be as an educator. Travelling through as well as fleeting occupation.

In my college (1991- present) I have cultivated a personal rhetoric about my performance as an act of rebellion, sedition of the dominant discourse, subversion of a presumed hegemony, when all the time I was doing nothing more political than simply stretching into the skin of my practice.

My only subversion was detected in my amplifying voice struggling to speak new and intricate understanding about what I seemed to be unfolding. Though I recognise within my practice how I have unfolded unauthorized methods as a kind of methodological necessity for influencing the education of my students (Kincheloe and Steinberg, 1998). By unauthorised, I mean ‘out-with’ the authorised tactics for teaching my in my college, strategies that are implicitly conservative in both pedagogic and political senses of that word. As one Dean puts it, ‘it is the task of postgraduate teaching to open the minds of students’ leaving the inference that it is not pedagogic tactic enshrined in the undergraduate curriculum. I differ from the Dean’s view. I think my life in my college has been in one dimension, a search for innovative strategies for critical thinking.

This reflection helps me to understand that I have, in my college context, been unfolding my belief in my right to make an active and educational commitment to my personal epistemology as a form of universal intent.

I wasn’t actually fighting with anyone in my College other than a kind of thrashing about with/in myself, in coming to terms with what was taking place in my consciousness as an educator. Simply put, I was actively and, at times rather awkwardly, expressing my self as educator as I manifested my intent to follow where this self-expression would take me, institutionally, as my courage to be (Tillich, 1952).

Relaxing my grip on the kind of authority in the supervision relationship that the Academy proposes and reinforces through the rule-making mythology of QAA, ESRC and HEFCE has taken me into ‘impossible places’ too. Places that my colleagues would not consider to be possible; nor yet feasible or desirable as the kind of creative dissertation that erupts out of these spaces is what Lather (1992) refers to as texts that "go too far toward disruptive excess, leaky, runaway, risky practice’. This I can see is a highly politicised activity leading to highly politicised conversations within my college according to what my colleagues tell me, and from which I am excluded. I think this is a cameo of the Academy.

When Jack suggested a thesis title I again experienced his creative synthesising accomplishment, as he juggled the thuds of his educative practice as an existential commitment, and as a commitment to a new disciplines approach to educational theory (Whitehead, 2002), Gradually, I have been able to find immense meaning in, through and out the other side of these words,

I know Jack’s focalising suggestion to be meaningful.

The first kind of meaning that it carries was the meaning of love.

That quality of love that I have experienced and tested in the crucible of relationship, the kind of relationship that men given over to a capacity for talking in love and violence can foster as a kind of sinewy, muscular maleness with tremendous moments of intimate warmth and respect. I have always trusted my intuition about my feelings for Jack. Take a look at the video clip with Jack in his garden at Bloomfield Road and you will see two blokes relishing each other’s company. There is a brotherhood that is crucial to my love of Jack. Without this unfolding relationship I would not be writing this way this morning (this is how I see it, and I leave plenty of room for AJW to see, speak and write it differently and find me mistaken)

The other kind of meaning is that I know Jack did not intend his suggestion as prescription. Jack wasn’t prescribing and I did not feel this for one moment.

Rather, I felt that Jack was fostering difference and heterogeneity (in my thinking and practice, from within his thinking and practice) as he searched for ways to support me as a doctoral supervisor in making ‘fruitful interruptions’ within the habitus that shapes my (his/your) field of practice (Bourdieu, 1979). Where I find validation for my feeling about Jack’s suggested title is that I recognise in Jack’s influence on my education the characteristics of validity that Lather (1992, p. 686) describes as paralogical, rhizomatic and voluptuous.

As I now write with earnest commitment to my thesis (what Asma, my wife refers to as an excited energy of paddling my canoe down the early courses of the river of my thesis) that is my personal epistemology of my life as an educator, an emergent title is unfolding itself. This title has incredible meaning for me. It seems to express my ‘BodyMind’ practice more authentically.

What is fascinating [to me] is that the title below has emerged from within the poiesis of what I am actually writing as I begin to trace, unpick, disclose, and unravel my personal epistemology as living educational practice with my students.

By personal epistemology, I mean my personal account of an emergent, unfolding practice that has ‘implicate order’ (Bohm, 1980) and that can be given meaningful self and relational purpose through my personal ‘I’ inquiry (Whitehead, 1989, 1993, 2003; Bohm, 1987),

Poiesis is the creative act of bringing something into existence that wasn’t there before as explained in Plato’s symposium.

Pausing for reflection and refraction as I listen deeply to what might be unfolding and emergent: There is something in my process of discovery writing that is crystalline (Richardson, 2000) and something close to Lather’s (1992) paralogical validity in my search for ‘fruitful interruptions’, and voluptuous validity as I challenge myself to create a questioning text, bounded and unbounded, closed and opened as a personal act of authority as I write about my educative practice from my engagement and self-reflexivity in personal inquiry (Marshall, 2001) that unfolds my emergent personal epistemology (McNiff, 2002).

This linkage and synthesis has only just come to me as I write and strangely, it wasn’t able to migrate from my consciousness into words before I committed to an act of personal writing on this sunny early Sunday morning.

What I have imagined is ephemeral and fleeting.

If I don’t commit to its representation here, and in this form for now, it will be gone.

This is how poiesis happens for me in my writing about practice, as distinct from what is and how one might be artistically creative with an unbounded emergent flow of possibilities in poiesis.

That said, I am always reminding my Action Masters students to frame their enquiries so that readers can understand the authors meanings carried within their claims to knowledge. In a recent email, Carrie Millson (2002/03) whose MBA I supervised-and-didn’t, considered my educative influence touched her imagination in the way I place stress on the importance of framing one’s creatively expressed ideas. So I reckon readers deserve something of a prologue to my thesis plan,

Unfolding a prologue Within a Prologue: I know as a management educator that I am right in my commitment because I have the confidence to believe in my own emergent and unfolding personal inquiry. My inquiry is nomadic and focused, open and closed, propositional and first person, en-history-ed and unfolding body/mind, and yet unique within my own incomplete understanding that my I in educative practice precedes my ‘I’ in theorising, though they are synonymous if not always simultaneous.

I know I am right in my commitment to my personal epistemology because of what I have seen, experienced, and learned from extending my commitment to my own personal epistemology to the epistemological developments of each of my students whose dissertations I have supervised. Seeing their joy, success, growth, creativity and excitement has over the years helped me to amass a ‘critical mass’ of self-belief. How could any sentient, caring, loving, humanly engaged and connected person fail to be moved by the overwhelming evidence of a person gradually coming to believe in the qualities, the extent and merit, the relatability for others (Bassey, 1995) of their own personal epistemology. I draw particularly on the reciprocal energies of excitement in discovery of Anne-Lise Riis Jensen and Carrie Millson, (MBA graduates, RAC, 2003) as I make my point about being touched and moved in ways that help me to recognise there is something universal in what we do, reaching well beyond personal epistemology, and yet that is accessed through the expression of one’s personal epistemology as an utter commitment to take risk and stand by one’s own personal knowing.

I know that my social acts of supervision of research enquiries have an individual ontological and knowledge base.

While at the same time I have found a peaceful knowing that what I do is very close to Polanyi’s (1958) idea of personal knowing, given a focused clarity by Jean McNiff (2002) where she writes, ‘He says an intellectual commitment is a responsible decision, an act of hope, which is expressed in the universal intent of personal knowledge (p. 66).

This phrase helps best to explain my own emergent understanding of my educative practice. Without self-aggrandisement, I need to be clear that I make a difference in the world as an educator, that I influence the education of my students (Whitehead, 2002), and that in my ‘I’ resides the spark of mysterious, unique difference that I am and that I make.

In turn, this gives a quality of meaning in the universal intent of my thesis as a commitment to explain the dialectical joys, tribulations and enactments of my individual educative life.

When I experienced one of my moments of [not infrequent] ontological despair, I played that game of I’m a victim, you must be rescuer with Jack Whitehead, and when he didn’t oblige my psychological neediness, Jack quickly became pasted as my persecutor. I used to use this training insight as a management and personal change facilitator at the Civil Service College, and I think it is called the Karpmann Triangle, and is related to Berne’s work in transactional analysis (TA).

I would then threaten to abandon my PhD. In the midst of these melodramatics I knew the symptom of my patterned lapses into child ego state has deeper aetiology. In respect of my thesis at least, I now have a deep insight.

I have worked as an organisation development consultant for some years. Somehow, I was effacing my work in development and change in personal, group and organisational contexts whenever I thought about my thesis.

I would imagine family, identity and my work with students and some colleagues. Yet I somehow left out my work as an OD consultant from 1987 to 2001.

What I would not imagine was my work as an OD consultant.

Living a life of meaning and worth is an ethical ambition according to Derrick Bell (2002). I would extend this to include a moral courage and an ontological confidence that I have needed to find in order to imaginate my life has having meaning and worth in my educative practice. Somehow I had to release my educative practice from the tight framing of my work as the everyday ordinariness of what it is I do (Murray, 1996, CARPP journal notes). From the inward act of ‘image(in)-ating’ my educative practice as exceptional and extraordinary, I realised that I need to enact my moral courage to outwardly locate my explanations of my educative practice as meaningful and worthwhile actions of considerable artistic, relational and organizational merit for transformation.

This step to enact my moral courage also required a very disturbing reframing of some tightly held personal boundaries about aesthetic and relational meanings.

My teaching was no longer a job in which the focus was on extending understanding of my disciplinary/subject areas of Organization Behaviour (OD and Change) and Human Resources Management.

Rather I was being challenged to re-frame my practice as a life held in productive work producing value, meaning and worth, for other with self.

I now see this as an ethical ambition, always incomplete, yet without the aching and nauseaous futility of Sisyphus.

That Bell (2002) is an African American lawyer adds a ring of authenticity to the authority of his ideas, for me.

I have often wondered when the authority for my work would come from a person of colour, with whom I can relate in so many ways through my father, sons, and my wife. So often I read of how educators find inspiration in Martin Buber, who as an architect of Zionism has made a most powerful contribution to a most dehumanising and hateful narrative of nationalism. Buber’s historical associations, ambitions and legacy for right-wing Israeli nationalism, given expression in living form in its outrageous occupation of Palestinian territories, are so repellent [for me] that I am unwilling to honour his project as theologian.

As Bell suggests, and my above paragraph seems to confirm, in giving meaning to my life there is a power in passion that has ‘ethical endeavour’ as I choose to work with my passion and integrity as a key component to living a satisfying life (p.17).

In my choice to exercise my critical judgment in respect of Buber’s life I bring my passion to life in my sense of social justice as an act of integrity that gives meaning to my life as a humanist, a secular Muslim and a multiracial person.

To honour the I and you relationship that brings meaning to my life I would prefer to locate my trust and fidelity in Biko (for inspiring Black Consciousness and for feeding life through his own death in apartheid South Africa), Bukhari the Islamic writer and philosopher for his commitment to the other in these words, ‘None of you truly believe until you love for your fellow what you love for yourself’, and in his violent realism in these words, ‘To whom will You abandon me? To an enemy whom You have given mastery over me?’; and to Brink, the professor of Afrikaner literature who has written a most powerful mythological representation of my African ancestors in his novel, The First Life of Adamastor (1993).

The joy of the loving spirit that flows from these universal intent in these meanings strengthens my resolve and will to explore my life as the unfolding masterpiece of the loving spirit (Okri, 2002) as I try to connect more fully with my embodied values of humanity, and stretch into them more fully.

This is a very simple idea to know. It feels right.

That intuitive feeling that this idea is right is my original source for knowing that I am right in my commitment to my emergent and unfolding personal epistemology as way of opening myself up to what I know about my educative practice.

What will be fascinating and enjoyable is making sense of how I know in a way that honours my students, past, present and those I imagine in the future.

Yet my desire to know that I am right in this has taken me close to ontological despair on so many occasions as I struggled to give birth to my own understanding. The politics of knowledge as Lyotard (1979/84) poignantly summarises can thwart the coming to light of one’s individual knowledge that might be seen as de-stabilizing the hegemony of the Academy. I have first—hand experience of what Lyotard knows to be true. I recount my experience as I explain the importance of my design and validation of the MSc in Management Studies by action research (1995), and my college’s attempt to terminate my contract of employment on grounds of redundancy in 1996.

The importance, I believe, of these organisational actions takes my individual epistemology from ‘I’ to you, and thus to us, a social dimension in imagined and virtual community as action researchers inside the Academy, a social formation who strive in our professional lives to extend the influence of the importance of developing personal forms of enquiry within highly politicised cultural contexts (McNiff, 2003; Noffke, 1997).

I see this as a the culmination of a moral courage to pursue my ethical ambition to explain, express and explore in open-ended and closed ways, how I live a life of meaning and worth as a management educator.

I would also like to explain how I have come to know that I am right in my commitment to emergent and unfolding forms of personal epistemology in the form of my doctoral thesis,

1. How do I find meaning in my commitment to an emergent unfolding form of personal epistemology? What are my meanings? What gives multiple forms of meaning to me in my life? What is a meaningful life for me: My life as an act of commitment to my emergent and unfolding personal epistemology is meaning-full for me.

Let me try to show you how I make sense of producing my personal epistemology of my practice as personal ethical ambition and in this sense explore how I know I am right in holding to this commitment by imagining that I can explore my unfolding personal epistemology in these sections,

2. How my experientialist methodology gives meaning to my educative life as I supervise my students research enquiry’s
3. How my personal epistemology of identity gives meaning to me as multiracial person as I live my values of humanity more fully
4. How my personal epistemology of my educative practice gives meaning to me and you as I relate to the ideas of others and show their influence on my own development
5. How my educative life seen as an organizational and political activity gives meaning to you as well as me through the universal intent of my account
6. How in accounting for the growth of my educational knowledge over time I give meaning to my personal epistemology as a form of universal intent

• AERA paper with AJW
• Personal papers written over the years
• Prolific e-mail writing as an expression of my struggle, and emergence as a personal epistemologist
• The Action Masters (Masters in Management Studies) course guide
• Abstracts of students dissertations
• College memoranda of critical incidents in my College life (From an educational conversation with Dr Felicity Wikeley following my PhD transfer seminar)

ps — At this point of writing my thesis plan, my experientialist methodology chapter (2) is close to being completed in draft and my prologue seems to be unfolding itself here, in the writing. Great!

I hope this piece gives some morsel of support to future artists of personal epistemology in action research.