How are we pooling flows of life-enhancing energy, values and understandings in accounting to ourselves and each other for the contributions we are making to the well-being of young people, each other and others in the work we are doing?

A contribution in the Breakfast Café Conversation in B&NES on the 29^th October 2009 in Riverside, Keynsham

Cultural Context.

We are working in a cultural context that is influencing what we do with inappropriate forms of accountability. The House of Lords Committee on the Merits of Statutory Instruments has highlight the problem:

“Able, brilliant and skilled professionals do not thrive in an environment where much of their energies are absorbed by the need to comply with a raft of detailed requirements. …. the evidence that we have seen during this inquiry has highlighted the problems that are caused to schools when too little thought is given to the systematic need to rely so heavily on regulation, and too little effort is put into managing the overall impact of statutory instruments issued, and monitoring whether the myriad requirements being imposed on schools are being taken seriously and implemented on the ground. …. We recommend that DCSF should now look to shift its primary focus away from the regulation of processes through statutory instruments, towards establishing accountability for the delivery of key outcomes.” (House of Lords, 2009, p.15)

“There are thinkers who dislike ‘the subject,’ and if this subject is characterized in terms of its ‘lived experience’ we admit to being among them. …., the ‘lived’ can only have a very minor role in the construction of cognitive structures, for these do not belong to the subject’s consciousness but to his operational behaviour, which is something quite different.” (Piaget, p. 68, 1971)

Piaget, J. (1971) Structuralism, London; Routledge andKegan Paul.

The study of human development has been struggling with how to take time into account in its methodology. In that struggle, the necessity to consider dynamic hierarchies of semiotic regulation has not been emphasized. Yet what follows from the present exposition is that semiotic regulation is precisely the work of such hierarchies (‘on line’, or in real time, so to say). Two processes can be present in regulatory hierarchies – abstracting generalization and contextualizing specification. (Valsiner, 2001, p.94)

“…. Human values are generalizations of an abstracted kind. Extremely general terms like ‘love’, ‘abuse’, ‘justice’, ‘freedom’, ‘depression’, and so on are meaningful in their overgeneralized abstractness. As such these can be brought to bear upon regulating very specific contexts ( by a process I call contextualizing specification), yet in their abstract form they are impossible to specify in their entirety). Such signs are of nebulous character – like clouds ( as those frame our everyday weather), they give overwhelming meaning framing to a person’s understanding of the ongoing experience.” (95)

Values are basic human affective guidance means that are ontogenetically internalized but their externalization can be observed in any aspect of human conduct. Yet as they have reached such a hyper-generalized way of being, they are no longer easily accessible through verbally mediated processes. We can decisively act as directed by our values – but are ill at ease telling others what these values are…… Values are not entities – but dynamic semiotic fields. In human life, affective fields of higher kind – as depicted in Figure 9 – regulate experience in its totality. Affective fields can be hyper-generalized meanings that have left their original context of emergence and flavour new experiences. Thus, a person may develop the notion “life is unfair” from a series of life events of being mistreated. (Valsiner, 2008, pp. 74-75)

Much understanding of educational theory will be developed:

"… in the context of immediate practical experience and will be co-terminous with everyday understanding. In particular, many of its operational principles, both explicit and implicit, will be of their nature generalisations from practical experience and have as their justification the results of individual activities and practices.

In many characterisations of educational theory, my own included, principles justified in this way have until recently been regarded as at best pragmatic maxims having a first crude and superficial justification in practice that in any rationally developed theory would be replaced by principles with more fundamental, theoretical justification. That now seems to me to be a mistake. Rationally defensible practical principles, I suggest, must of their nature stand up to such practical tests and without that are necessarily inadequate."

(p. 18)

Hirst, P. (Ed.) (1983) Educational Theory and its Foundation Disciplines. London;RKP

In natural inclusionality all form is understood as flow-form, an energetic configuration of space in figure and figure in space. And a simple truth underlying the form and logic of natural inclusionality is that space does not stop at boundaries. (Rayner, 2009)

Rayner, A. (2009) What is Inclusionality? Retrieved on the 23 October 2009 from http://www.inclusionality.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=1&Itemid=2

Making creative educational responses in our cultural context

House of Lords (2009) The cumulative impact of statutory instruments on schools: Report with evidence. The Stationery Office Limited: London. Retrieved 8 May 2009 from http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2009/mar/13/lords-report-dcsf .

Valsiner, J. (2001) Process Structure of Semiotic Mediation in Human Development. Human Development. Mar-Jun 2001: 44, 2/3, 84-97.

Valsiner, J. (2008) Ornamented Worlds and Textures of Feeling: The Power of Abundance. Critical Social Studies, No. 1, 67-78.