Living Educational Theory: an educational researcher's perspective

'Living Educational Theory'

And how I developed a more democratic practice in education.

By Moira Laidlaw,

Lifelong Professor of Educational Research

Ningxia Teachers University,

Guyuan, 756000,

Ningxia Province,

P.R.China.

Draft paper 10 September 2007

Abstract: This paper looks at the development of Living Educational Theory Action Research and provides an example of it from my own experience. I argue that Living Educational Theory is distinctly different from other forms of Action Research in terms of its structures, assumptions, representation, practices and theorising. I also suggest that any theory from this approach cannot be captured once and for all but is developmental in nature. The second part of the paper draws on my work for five years in China's rural northwest as a volunteer, where I helped set up and then became advisor for China's first Experimental Centre for Educational Action Research in Foreign Languages Teaching.

Keywords: Living Educational Theory; democratic values; educational development; inclusionality.

Purposes of this paper:

Much has been written recently about Living Educational Theory (LET), mostly in Ph.D. theses and associated work (http://people.bath.ac.uk/edsajw/living.shtml). I want to begin by being explicit that LET isn't concerned only with research in educational establishments and contexts, but can be useful in any sphere in which practitioners wish to improve learning or to live their values more fully in their actions. In this article I want to outline the main concepts and value-laden practices evolving from LET and show how LET answers some of the current problems in educational theorising and representation. I would then like to illustrate the ways in which LET has helped me to develop my own educational practice. I believe that Living Educational Theory Action Research is a powerful way of improving practice and making original contributions to the development of our subject, education.

Context:

In this paper I start from the premise, like Kilpatrick (1951), that educational research may have profound implications for the future of humanity, which therefore makes the work we are all doing in the name of education vitally important. I am assuming that you are familiar with arguments on the nature of theories of knowledge in a postmodern era, in which the work we are doing is not in principle governed by pre-established rules, but rather we work out our values or rules from what it is we create (Lyotard 1984: 81). I will try to show in this paper, however, how Living Educational Theorists evolve their own developmental standards of judgement in evaluating educational quality alongside this concept.

In the 1990s, Schon called for a new epistemology of practice (Schon, 1995) because current ones were not doing justice, he argued, with social, educational and personal-professional needs. Eisner called for new forms of representation in educational research writings (Eisner, 1993, 1997) in order to gain greater authenticity in claims to knowledge. Also in the nineties, Elliott (1998) at the University of East Anglia was concerned at the level of curriculum in schools in terms of the impracticality of much research done in the name of education. It is my belief that Living Educational Theory has offered some answers to social, theoretical and professional problems in educational research and practice. I also want to make explicit at this point the significance of acting on the differences between education research and educational research:

Geoff Whitty in his 2005 Presidential Address to the British Educational Research Association writes:

One way of handling the distinction might be to use the terms 'education research' and 'educational research' more carefully... It may be that within that field we should reserve the term educational research for work that is consciously geared towards improving policy and practice.....

Living Educational Theory holds at its centre the goals of improving learning and living out one's values more fully, which is why we qualify it as educational. In Part One I want to look at the characteristics of Living Educational Theory, from which I will then present something from my own educational development in Part Two.

Part One: What Constitutes Living Educational Theory?

1) The Action Reflection Cycle:

In 1989 Whitehead wrote the first article about Living Educational Theory, drawing on his ideas first published in 1985 in which he made claims of the educational value of placing one's 'I' (the action researcher her/himself) into the centre of the following form of logic in pursuit of educational ends:

I experience a problem when some of my educational values are negated in my practice.

I imagine a solution to my problem.

I act in the direction of my solution.

I evaluate the outcomes of my actions.

I modify my problems, ideas and actions in the light of my evaluations.

(Whitehead, 1985: 2)

2) 'I' as a Living Contradiction, and Dialectical Knowledge:

First, let's look at the idea of 'I' as a living contradiction.

In addition to placing the individual's own agency into this systematic action-reflection cycle, Whitehead incorporated the idea of the 'I' as a living contradiction (Ilyenkov, 1977).

There are two kinds of living contradiction:

1) The internal living contradiction. In other words a person may believe s/he holds certain values but doesn't always live them out. For example, in 1993 I was working at the University of Bath as a tutor in Action Research and helping my Post Graduate Certificate of Education students in their own action research enquiries on teaching practice. I spent some time with them talking about the importance of placing democratic processes at the heart of educational enquiry but when reviewing my data, I found I sometimes 'talked at them' in an autocratic way, and I wasn't giving them the space to explore their own ideas. Thus I espoused democratic values but didn't live up to them. Exposing this living contradiction helped me to improve my practice by living out my values more fully (Laidlaw, 1994).

2) The external living contradiction This means that there is a conflict between what one wants to do and what the social/instutional/hegemonic/political conditions allow. For example, when I taught Teaching Methodology in China I had a view of how it should be taught, and wanted to facilitate that with my students (see http://people.bath.ac.uk/edsajw/moira/ml120704.htm for details). However, my student-centred methodologies were constantly in contradiction to the Confucian and teacher-centred premises and political realities of Chinese classrooms and social norms. I had to bear in mind my contexts and work from within them in order to influence the educational development of my teacher-education students (more later).

Whitehead claims that the living contradiction is a universal phenomenon. In other words, everyone believes they are doing one thing, but at the same time, to however small a degree, they are incorporating the opposite values into what they are actually doing. This is why the action plan begins with the question: What am I concerned about?/What do I want to improve? Whitehead believes that the discovery of one's own living contradictions enables people to make progress in their educational development and improve learning. Researchers frame answers to the above question as questions of the kind, 'How can I improve my practice?' which could translate, for example, into: 'How can I improve my managerial skills when dealing with contentious situations?' or 'How can I improve the standard of nursing care on my ward?' In laying bare the living contradiction, Whitehead maintains, researchers improve the conditions for learning. He argues that professionals can find answers to questions of principle, which to an extent answers Pring's (2007) misgivings about the moral state of some current research carried out in the name of improving learning by living out one's values more fully.

Dialectical knowledge: Dialectical knowledge is derived from a question and answer approach to situations, deriving originally from Socrates in Ancient Greece. In other words, a headteacher might be concerned about how she can deal with an impending government inspection. She therefore asks herself: 'How can I work with my staff in managing the processes of inspection educationally?' In attempting to answer this question she will need to call on many different sources of information and feedback in order to triangulate her insights and render the resulting knowledge and possible theories educational and practical.

Because a living contradiction is at the heart of dialectical reasoning in Living Educational Theorising researchers require flexibility in their approaches to creating knowledge and theory. Like other forms of Action Research – for example the participatory approach ((eds.) Reason and Bradbury, 2001) or the collaborative approach as written about by Coghlan and Branick (2005) – the nature of knowledge and theory is problematic. We cannot make assumptions, so we ask ourselves questions like, 'How do we know what we know?' 'How can we represent what we know?' 'How can we share our understandings?' 'How can we validate them?' 'How can we use the knowledge to develop educational theories?' 'How valuable are this knowledge and theory?'

Action Researchers will be familiar with arguments about the suitability of developing different kinds of knowledge for educational research. Living Educational Theory Action Research, like the participatory and collaborative forms, deals with dialectical knowledge, which can incorporate propositional knowledge, as you can see from my bibliography. By propositional knowledge I mean knowledge formed through statements of the kind, This is a cat, or When I was a little girl I enjoyed eating ice-cream. This knowledge isn't created through dynamic interaction with the environment or other people and it is the kind of knowledge that dominated educational discourse in the sixties and seventies in England through what was then called the disciplines approach (Hirst, 1983; Peters, 1977). Essentially, this was the division of knowledge about education (as distinct from educational knowledge) into the categories of the sociology, history, philosophy and psychology of education. It implied that the theories of education could be applied to the practice of it, but without any acknowledgement that human beings are not reducible to generalisations. Whitehead (1989) and others (McNiff, 1993; Lomax, 1994) argued that applying educational theories to practice was inappropriate and that educational research needed to build its educational knowledge and theories from within the processes of development of education themselves. Thus the kind of knowledge and theory emerging from the kinds of enquiries about how to improve practice are dialectical in nature, although still drawing on insights derived from other sources.

3) Evolving developmental standards of judgement:

Another characteristic of Living Educational Theory is its supposition that values are not static, but that they develop as we develop (Laidlaw, 1996). For example, let us consider Mahatma Gandhi, who was stirred by self-determination for his people. His value about what constituted self-determination developed as his experience of British Rule grew, so his particular value of self-determination became associated with such qualities as passive resistance and simplicity of lifestyle. In a similar process, my value of democracy has grown from its naïve beginnings (Laidlaw, 1994) into something more sophisticated and living in my practice (Li & Laidlaw, 2006 - see later in this article for more details about this claim). It is in the developmental nature of values that renders much of the living nature of Living Educational Theory in ways which, I hope, will become more apparent in the second section of this paper.

4) Accounting for Educational Improvements: Introducing Inclusionality

Living Educational Theorists, like other Action Researchers, must account for the claims they make about their Action Research enquiries and submit these accounts to rigorous and public forms of validation (Winter, 1989; Stenhouse, 1983). Recently Living Educational Theorists (Naidoo, 2005; Charles, 2007) have been incorporating multi-media forms of representation * in their doctoral theses in order to come closer to the lived experience of the learners and their learning processes.

I believe the struggle for authentic representation in the nineties and now in the 21^st century is also the struggle for truth. I am not going to suggest that LET corners any market on truth. Such a concept is riddled with modernist contradictions and is not tenable in a postmodern era. I am, however, going to suggest that Living Educational Theory has found ways of reducing the distance between lived and recorded experience in its accounts of educational improvement.

A useful concept in the development of narrowing this gap in being able to ask the questions necessary to move forward, comes in the form of inclusionality (Rayner, 2003). This holds that in all our relationships there are connective, reflexive and co-creative awarenesses of space and boundaries. In other words, we are not discretely 'I' or 'we' in any given situation, but rather as in a quantum universe we are both at the same time (Zohar, 1990). This might mean, for example, that in an educational relationship between two people, one's sense of being and self may fluctuate and incorporate aspects of the other during the process, which may or may not have lasting influence on the development of the individual or the way they relate to each other as a pair. My understanding of inclusionality also embraces the idea of resolution, of coming together, of integration rather than fragmentation. I hope this will become clearer in Part Two in which I present my own Living Educational Theory.

The idea of ebbing and flowing within educative relationships is also what I mean when I talk later about educational influences. Living Educational Theorists are aware of influences rather than cause and effect (Whitehead, 2006) and that processes are rarely one thing or another, but exist simultaneously as states of in-betweenness. This also augments the living nature of Living Educational Theory as life itself is in a state of continuous flux. It explains processes of becoming, rather than achieved goals. And although you could trawl through all the literature on Living Educational Theory you would not find any two accounts the same. There will, however, be confluences and those usually constellate around developing educational values as standards of judgement about the educational quality of the work. It is through the shared values that LET gains its relatability (Bassey, 1998), or the Action Research equivalent of generalisability.

From there I would now like to present aspects of my own current Living Educational Theory. Bearing the above in mind, I hope you will see the strands described there existing to appropriate degrees within my own account.

Part Two: My own Living Educational Theory

From August 2001 until July 2006 I was in the poor northwest of China as a volunteer with Voluntary Services Overseas (VSO). I went as an Oral English teacher and my placement developed into one of Advisor for China's Experimental Centre for Educational Action Research set up in the university in December 2003. The narrative of this journey is also my Living Educational Theory because my professional development was intentional, researched and largely validated, details of which I will provide throughout this second part.

Background:

Before leaving for China I was teaching English at a girls' comprehensive (state) school in Bath. I inaugurated action research enquiries with the students and gave them a great deal of freedom of choice about how they might learn a particular Unit of Work. (See papers at http://www.actionresearch.net/moira.shtml) One unit of work on Blake's poetry led to 12 year old girls being able to present some insights about the poems to their peers with the standards of judgement by which they wanted their work to be validated. Any form of representation was acceptable as long as it showed that they had understood something about the self-chosen poems and could discuss in what ways their presentation was educational. If you have access to the internet, I would ask you to look at Hayley talking about her decision to represent her understanding pictorially: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tmM4QiXUtbU When viewing this video then I was pleased at what I saw as her educational achievement. I felt that I had clearly demonstrated democratic values in the classroom and that this had influenced the children educationally. My value of democracy was heavily weighted towards the empowerment of individuals.

And so to China. My reasons for going are examined in detail at the website above. Radical surgery on my middle age constituted one reason. Another was born out of the vague sense that I wasn't doing enough, that I could give more back and that I would regret not doing so. It wasn't particularly conscious. I felt I had to go, so I went.

Ningxia Teachers University:

Ningxia Teachers University (formerly Guyuan Teachers College until May 2006) is situated in the south of Ningxia Province, China's smallest, and one of the poorest, provinces in the country. It has sixteen departments for the training of primary and secondary school teachers. Guyuan is the smallest city in China with an internal population of 56,000 people and a total population (including all outlying villages and prefectural settlements) of 200,000.

Early days:

Shortly after my arrival I went to see Dean Tian Fengjun who ran the Foreign Languages Department to ask whether, in addition to Oral English, I might be allowed to teach 'Western' Teaching Methodology (by which I meant more student-centred teaching methods as opposed to the teacher-centred ones being employed there). VSO's main aims in China are related to sustainable development (VSO, 2004), which aims to enable indigenous people to manage themselves without relying on foreign intervention. I felt that working with colleagues and students on student-centred methodologies would be a step in the right direction. At the end of my first term I went to see Dean Tian again to suggest that Action Planning might be a helpful aid to professional development in the department. My own Action Research question was: How can I promote educational sustainable development? The question never changed throughout my five-year placement, but my understandings of sustainable development and democratic practices did, and these constitute something of my Living Educational Theory.

After several introductory meetings about Action Research, at which attendance was voluntary (in itself a step in the right direction, I felt), we saw numbers rise from five at the beginning to 24 at the end of the second term. By the time we opened the Centre for Action Research in December 2003 (later ratified by Beijing as an official centre at the university) with Professor Jean McNiff in attendance, we had nearly forty colleagues pursuing enquiries to improve practice and learning.

My Living Contradiction:

I wanted to find ways of building bridges between teacher-centred and learner-centred education. This was not plain-sailing by any means and in fact, it never was as neat as that, only I didn't understand it couldn't be at the beginning. In 2002 and 2003 I came up against passive resistance by some colleagues. They couldn't see the point of choosing and pursuing their own enquiries. Why wasn't I more directive? I could simply come into their classrooms and tell them what was wrong, as it stood to reason, I knew the answers! It was my job, wasn't it? I was the 'foreign expert', wasn't I? I know I was in a quandary! I didn't believe in pushing people towards my own solutions, when I had experienced the value of learning for myself in my own way. I had a conversation recorded in my journal with Li Peidong, an experienced colleague in the department at this difficult time:

Li Peidong: Moira, this is not England. This is China. In China we follow the leader.

Moira: But in Action Research we become our own leader.

(LP laughs)

Li Peidong: If you continue to refuse to lead us, then we will be uncomfortable and the work will not get done. You have to learn to lead us until we can do it for ourselves.

Moira: I don't know how to do that. Can you help me?

Li Peidong: Another living contradiction, eh?

(Laughter)

I was in a dilemma. As Jarvis et al (2003) wrote:

'How Chinese [people] learn is intimately linked to the nature of Chinese culture and society [which is] characterised by collectivism and filial piety.' (p.87)

My understanding of collectivism was that it was in direct contradiction to democratic values. I visited classrooms and wrote notes about how what I was seeing fitted into their own action research enquiries (see lesson notes I made for one colleague, Liu Xia, at http://people.bath.ac.uk/edsajw/moira/mlliuxia80605.htm). I tried to highlight living contradictions as a means of moving forward, yet found it difficult to promote and support collective enquiries, which were suggested by Dean Tian and Li Peidong. We held meetings, worked on a one-to-one basis, but I continually felt pressurised to give solutions. (Some of this process is outlined in Li and Laidlaw, 2006, published in this journal.) In short, I was being asked to generalise in a traditional way, teach didactically and set learning-parameters. I resisted, but instead of this 'improving' the situation (by which I meant enabling individuals to set their own goals and work towards them with a sense of what their own educational values were, by which to judge their work) I was confronted by disgruntled colleagues going through the motions. The impetus of our work was flagging.

My insights at that time could be summed up by the phrase: You WILL be democratic!

However, in 2004 Dean Tian produced his own action research enquiry (Tian, 2005), which outlined his vision for the department and the part he could play as a leader in the department in educational development. This was a huge vote of confidence in our action research approach, given the tendency in China for organisations to be hierarchical (Martin, 1999). In his paper Dean Tian wrote about his own educational development without valorising his own achievements. Putting himself into the enquiry was a major step forward for the growth of Action Research at the Centre. Instead of writing a document by which he could control the knowledge developing at the Centre, he wrote about how he was facilitating others to create their own knowledge and theories. It was, however, written from the point of view of the significance of democratic processes as a way of focusing on group, rather than individual, harmony. This emphasis on group harmony was becoming more and more integrated within my own value of democracy.

Resolving the Living Contradiction through an Inclusional form of Educational Development:

As Li Peidong and I have already written about (Li & Laidlaw, 2006) we realised that what we needed in order to promote educational sustainable development would be enquiries that enabled individuals and groups to interact in ways more conducive to Chinese ways of knowing. Our Action Research enquiries were already grouping themselves around China's New Curriculum for the Teaching of English (NC), which advocates student-centred teaching and learning approaches, together with peer-evaluation strategies. Through developing programmes of study and methodology classes, centring on the NC, colleagues began to develop enquiries in tandem in special interest groups. I stepped back from an overtly leadership position towards more of an advisory role. The many papers produced at this time (2004) - as you can see from the website and through publications of case-studies in books by Jean McNiff and Jack Whitehead, as well as an edited series of case-studies and reports from this time finally published two years later (Tian & Laidlaw, 2006) - reveal the creativity and progression of our action research centre, as well as increased ownership of the project by members and groups within the AR Centre.

In September 2004 I was awarded China's highest annual accolade for foreigners working in the country – the State Friendship Award. I mention this because it was a high status social validation of the work we were doing at the Centre. Dean Tian had to produce many documents to attest to my suitability. I was aware that it wasn't simply a personal affirmation from him and the University, but an astute political move on Dean Tian's part to raise our profile as a Centre with Beijing. Our increasing visibility was considered very important in rural China (Laidlaw, 2004).

Action Research with Chinese Characteristics: inclusional values

Throughout 2005 my colleagues and I (and there were now 42 members of the AR group) continued to support individual and group enquiries. An idea was emerging about pursuing Action Research with Chinese characteristics. My time in China had taught me the importance that people in China tend to place on integrating external ideas with a particular Chinese slant. I was aware already of the idea of具有中国特色的社会主义, (Socialism with Chinese characteristics) propounded by Deng Xiaoping's successors to denote the economic direction of the People's Republic of China. Why not Action Research with Chinese characteristics? Might not this resolve the contradictions between democratic and collective, between group and individual, between past and future? Would it not also answer the dilemmas posed by sustainable educational development? My aim was to leave the Centre self-perpetuating in its own way and for its own educational aims. Action Research with Chinese characteristics would appear to mitigate in all areas where we perceived contradictions (ed. Tian and Laidlaw, 2006).

If something were to grow in Guyuan, it had to be nurtured from the soil already there. We couldn't transplant something and expect it to flourish. I was also the least likely to be able to understand what AR with Chinese characteristics (as it came to be called) might look like, thus I couldn't facilitate the process of finding it. In a paper written shortly before I left Guyuan in July 2006, a colleague Ma Xiaoxia (2006) concludes her case-study with these words:

And the New Curriculum...shows a respect for...a dialectical form of knowledge, because it accords students as well as teachers the right to find different ways of understanding the world. [However] I think I should not deny the value of static knowledge, because no matter whether we are in the west or in China, students are taught by teachers and knowledge accelerates through history, thus pupils on the whole globally have to develop their own thinking and ability on the basis of the master-distribution. And the most important dilemma, to my mind, in matters of educational values is whether people are enlightened with, or entitled to, certain freedoms to think and behave. As for static knowledge and dynamic knowledge, they are actually not completely in contradiction to each other, and thus can collaborate... That is, students should be enlightened with manifold freedoms to develop their own thinking patterns, and given the right and the responsibility to speak and create opportunities for mutual collaboration.

We should nurture the rebirth of humanitarianism to realize our educational paradise.

In my opinion Ma's words show a blending of strengths in a culturally very Chinese desire for harmony and resolution. It may be that Action Research with Chinese characteristics may include syntheses of different traditions, rather than a concentration on polarisation and contradiction. She does not endorse one theoretical tradition or another, she sees an opportunity for a dialectical relationship between the two. I would suggest that her understanding shows an inclusional way of thinking. Ma's words also bring Murray's (2007) insight to mind about the dynamic nature of our inclusional ways of being, enquiring and knowing in expressing our freedoms to develop mutual collaborations and ourselves

"One of the consequences of my epistemological nomadism for producing a clearly communicable text that I have come to understand through my inquiry is that I have this creative...tendency where my imagination is still working out the possibilities that have moved further on than I have been able to communicate in my text. This produces a 'gap' because I have not stabilized either my meanings of writings before I have moved on again in the direction of new, insightful 'oases'...I have not resolved this issue. The tension remains." (Murray, 2007, p. 208)

Where does this leave my own Living Educational Theory?

When I was teaching in Bath, as I mentioned before, Jack Whitehead videoed some of my classroom practice (see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tmM4QiXUtbU). He visited me in China in 2005 and videoed the end of a lesson. I was saying cheerio to the ninety or so students as they left the room and without losing sight of the group, I singled out one student, Miss Tian, because I wanted to praise her for having the courage to disagree with something I'd said in class about teaching in groups. You can see the footage Jack took at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z1jEOhxDGno

When I view both videos mentioned in this paper now, I find myself dissatisfied with the one I made before I went to China. On that occasion Hayley is sitting with her learning partner, Sally, who doesn't speak at all, and indeed looks distinctly uncomfortable throughout the several minutes of Hayley's talking. I cannot believe I didn't see the implications of this before. I thought I was managing a democratic process of education with all the girls, whereas I now see that this filming was causing Sally unease, and thus by definition my actions were disempowering her. I was sacrificing the group to the individual.

In the later video made in Guyuan I see myself balancing the needs of the individual within the needs of the group. Not favouring one over the other, but showing simultaneously my respect for the individual and my respect for the group. I now perceive this balance as more educational than my previous practice with Hayley and Sally. The later video with Miss Tian seems now to be more educationally proficient in living out a more mature understanding of what it means for me to influence my students democratically. This re-evaluation is in the nature of Living Educational Theorising. My practice isn't static: it develops because the values underlying it are themselves developing and I am continuing to learn. What I mean now by democratic actions in the name of education, is about being able to empower groups and individuals at the same time, without the sense that one is in contradiction to the other. I sense in the future this value will continue to develop and help me improve the quality of my teaching and learning.

As a practitioner-researcher I also want to contribute to the professional knowledge-base of education with a story that is my living educational theory (McNiff, 2007). In particular I want to emphasise the importance of the development of living educational theories with Chinese characteristics. I am thinking here of the inclusional qualities embodied and expressed by the Chinese practitioner-researchers at Ningxia Teacher's University (http://people.bath.ac.uk/edsajw/moira.shtml ) whose own living educational theories are showing how the individual's uniqueness and creativity can be supported within the community relationships that are contributing to the education of the social formations in which we are living and working.

Conclusion:

In this paper I have tried to show what I mean by Living Educational Theory from both theoretical and practical points of view. I would like to have been able to represent my findings in more diverse ways (particularly through visual means – but do take a look at stills of my Teaching Methodology classroom at Guyuan at http://www.jackwhitehead.com/moira151004/moira151004.html ). Facilities in rural China were restricted, but I hope the insights I have been able to give have shown you some of the possibilities of this approach.

I see the importance of Living Educational Theory as having answers to some of the theoretical, moral and political issues of the day; for example, what constitutes 'good education', and 'What is education for? are widely universally-discussed topics (to which 107 articles in the Times Education Supplement over the last few years attest). If Kilpatrick (1951) was right, and educational research does have implications for the future of humanity, then undertaking Living Educational Theory enquiries, that can transform knowledge and theory in ways which can strengthen individual, group and social learning (Whitehead & McNiff, 2006 may be one approach towards the good of humanity.

Afterword:

On the day I finished the first draft of this paper, an ex-colleague from Guyuan, now working as a professor in a University in Xinjiang (in the far west of China) sent me the following words with an e-card that played music. He wrote:

9^th September, 2007.

Moira,it is Teachers Day again in China! I am sending this little card to honour your

contributions and devotions to English education in underdeveloped regions in ChinaThank you! Zhang Zuotang

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