A New Epistemology For Educational Knowledge With Living Logics And Values-based Standards Of Judgment
Jack Whitehead
Department of Education
University of Bath
DRAFT 22 March 2007
Whilst puzzling away at how best to captivate your imaginations with the meanings I want to communicate the following letter came through my e-mail. It captivated my own imagination through the quality of the questions I was being asked. The question 'How do you understanding what happens?' connected closely to what I want to say about living logics and the values we use to give life meaning and purpose. It connected closely to my understandings of the ways in which our values can be formed into the values-based standards of judgment we use to evaluate the quality of the lives we are living.
The letter arrived the morning after a masters degree session on the 20th March 2007 for a unit I'm tutoring on educational enquiry and said:
Dear
Jack, thanks very much indeed for another inspirational and energising evening.
Where does the energy come from, and how does that dynamic work. What is it
that builds the connections between people, and why is that such an energising
thing to happen. Is it to do with the affirmation and understanding of, and
between people? What is it to do with the way you lead the group, or is because of the way you are, regardless
of what we do?? Does it have to do with the way you 'be' with people, do you
think, and how does that transmit? Is it to do with your integrity? How do you
understand what happens? I'm sure I've asked you this question before, but I'm
working on my understanding of what happens because I think it is crucial for
me that I develop an understanding of it. Thanks for being
committed to what you believe in. (e-mail 21/03/07)
I know that many people's eyes
glaze over when I use the word 'epistemology'! My own enthusiasm for sharing ideas about our epistemologies
is that I see our theories of knowledge as being intimately connected to the
ways in which we make sense of ourselves, each other and the world we live in.
I enjoy, as a privilege, the stories that people share with me that give
insights into the values they use to give meaning and purpose to their lives. I
am fascinated the logics of people's stories that help me to make sense of
their lives. I'm thinking here of a logic as a mode of thought that is
appropriate for comprehending the real as rational (Marcuse, 1964, p.105). I feel energized as people share their
stories of their learning as they seek to live more fully the values they
recognize as carrying hope for the future of humanity and their own. Given the
daily stories of killings, violence, abuse, corruption and dishonesty in the
media, from around our world, I feel hope in the stories of individuals who are
seeking to live lives that are characterized by hope, love, care, justice,
compassion, pleasure, passion, enquiry, learning and knowledge-creation. In the letter above I am being asked to
share my understandings with another because 'I think it is crucial for me that
I develop an understanding of it.' Hence I am going to focus on sharing the
logics and values that help me to make sense of my life and my educational
influences in my own learning and the learning of others. I have focused for
most of my working life on enhancing educational influences in learning,
because of my passion and vocational belief that in enhancing learning, through
education, I will be living a loving and productive life.
What I want to point towards is a
living logic and the living, values-based standards of judgment, that might
help us to amplify the educational influences the stories of our lives in
contributing to the creation of a world of educational quality. I am taking
such a world to be characterized by the transformatory influences, in the world
as it is, of hope, love, care and the other values and understandings that
carry hope for the future of humanity.
To communicate my meanings I
want to focus on the expression of embodied meanings of energy and values
through moving images. In the video-clip below an individual is responding to a
question about the values that give meaning and purpose to her life and to
which she holds herself accountable in her work in Children's Services in the
UK. The context is a meeting on Improving Practice I attend each week in our
Local Authority to support the development of an action research approach to
improving practice. I asked if each individual would say something about the
values at the heart of what they are doing and I video-taped the responses with
the intention of showing that visual narratives can be useful in communicating the meanings of embodied
values and some highly significant non-verbal communications connected with the
expression of feelings and responses to others in the act of communication.
My choice of clip is entirely due to the feeling of pleasure and life-affirming energy it evoked as I felt that in one sentence the individual was sharing a value that gave meaning and purpose to her life and to which she holds herself accountable. The sentence was taken from a book by Donna Leon. It is used to express the values she hopes to live in her work in Children's Services as she engages with children who need support in benefiting from the educational opportunities in the schools in the Authority :
"He seemed a man who gazed on all he saw with approval
and affection who began every interchange with deep and abiding regard for the
person in front of him."
As I watch the clip I feel that
I am seeing and responding with pleasurable affirmation to the authentic expression of values that
matter to the individual and to which she is saying she holds herself
accountable to. I am claiming that the visual images communicate much more that
a transcript of what is said could do or a prose description could offer. I am claiming that the images enable a
better connection to be made than text alone, with the expressions of a life-affirming energy with values. It is such expressions of
approval, affection and deep and abiding regard for children (and others) that
I am claiming can be communicated through visual narratives with greater
validity than they can through text alone. My belief that such narratives are
providing the living standards of judgment for a new epistemology for
educational knowledge is of course open to your questioning.
I want to see if my
understandings of the flows of a supra-individual energy that seems to flow with
the cosmos help to answer the questions:
"...thanks very much indeed for
another inspirational and energising evening. Where does the energy come from,
and how does that dynamic work. What is it that builds the connections between
people, and why is that such an energising thing to happen. Is it to do with
the affirmation and understanding of, and between people?"
In answering these questions I
want to show you where I think my energy comes from. I feel two sources, one
cosmological the other personal and social. Tillich (1973, p. 168) writes about
the state of being grasped by the power of being itself. I use this language
without Tillich's theistic faith, to acknowledge a mystery at the heart of my
understanding of the source of my life-affirming energy. I know that I continue
to feel a life-affirming energy that connects with the Sun, with Light and with
the Cosmos. I identify with Erich Fromm's (1960, p.18) insights that if a
person can face the truth without panic they will realise that there is no purpose
to life other than the one they give to their own life through their loving
relationships and productive work. I wonder whether the integrity I feel about
myself is communicated through my recognition and expression of belief that the
certainty of my death flows with the life-affirming energy of the power of
being itself?
I do not know the source of
this life-affirming energy, but I recognise its flow with energising pleasure.
I think I know more about the source of the flow of personal and social energy
in relation to others.
The collage of video-clips blow connects me with the energy and values of other educators and practitioner-researchers as I focus on the questions:
Where does the energy come from,
and how does that dynamic work. What is it that builds the connections between
people, and why is that such an energising thing to happen. Is it to do with
the affirmation and understanding of, and between people?"
For me, when I leave gatherings such as the Tuesday evening masters conversation, I feel an energising dynamic of the life-affirming energy of others flowing with my own. I think this energising dynamic has been 'built' through being receptively responsive to the values, energy and understandings of others. I think it is energising because in the sharing and recognition of our values, energy and understandings, our boundaries and channels of communication are open to their amplification with those of others.
You can also access the collage of video-clips with the addition of a visual narrative at http://www.jackwhitehead.com/jack/jwyoutubeimages3.htm
You can stream the video-clips to your browser by clicking on any of the clips below. Most of the clips are some 5 minutes long. Because of their number I am not expecting you to access them all for this presentation. What I believe is that any one of the clips will serve to communicate the importance of a flow of energy with values and understanding within and between our boundaries and channels of communication. The clips are from contexts in the UK, South Africa, Canada, Japan, Ireland and China.
Probably because I know the majority of individuals in the clips I feel a strong resonance with the values and understandings being expressed in each others' living space and through the relational boundaries of each clip. I am suggesting that such flows of energy, values and understandings within and between our boundaries are both vital and necessary in explanations of educational influences in learning. I am also suggesting that there is much work to be done in developing and legitimating appropriate living logics and standards of judgment for evaluating the validity of these explanations.
When I am asked whether the
building of connections is to do with the affirmation and understanding of,
and between people, I answer that I think it is. Like Fukuyama, I believe that:
Human beings seek recognition of their own worth, or of the people, things, or principles that they invest with worth. The desire for recognition, and the accompanying emotions of anger, shame and pride, are parts of the human personality critical to political life. According to Hegel, they are what drives the whole historical process. (Fukuyama, 1992, p. xvii)
As well as such qualities of recognition and affirming I believe that the logics we use to make sense of our lives are also vital for living our lives with the best of intent. I think our logics are so important because they help to form the way we make sense of our lives.
The first logic I learnt to use in my studies of educational theory was a logic with a 2,500 history in the Western Academy. It is the Aristotelean Logic that eliminates, through the Law of Contradiction, the possibility that two mutually exclusive statements like I am free/I am not free can be true simultaneously. The Aristotelean Law of Excluded Middle states that everything is either A or Not-A. In my engagement with theories in the philosophy, psychology, sociology, history, economics, theology, politics, management and leadership of education, I can see that they all abide by these Laws.
The second logic I learnt to use was a dialectical logic, again with a 2,500 year history from the ideas of Socrates expressed through the writings of Plato. In the Phaedrus, a dialogue on love, Socrates explains the art of the dialectician in holding both the One and the Many together. Socrates explains to Phaedrus that human beings have two ways of coming to know, they can break things down into separate components as nature directs (and not after the manner of a bungling carver!) and we can hold things together in a general idea. Socrates holds in high esteem the art of the dialectician in holding both together these apparently contradictory perspectives of holding something as both One and Many. I draw my present understandings of dialectics from the work of Ilyenkov (1977) on dialectical logic.
The 2,500 battle between formal and dialectical logicians in which they deny the rationality of each other's logic can be appreciated in the work of Popper (1963, pp. 314-317) who explains, using Aristotelean logic, why dialectical theories are entirely useful as theories, because they contain contradictions. He does this by showing how, using Aristotelean Logic, it can be demonstrated that if contradictions between statements are accepted in theories, then any statement whatsoever can be demonstrated as true. Hence his conclusion that dialectics are based on nothing better than a loose and woolly way of speaking. On the other hand Marcuse (1964) explains why those who eliminate contradictions from correct thought are masking the dialectical nature of reality. This reality, according to dialecticians, is grounded in contradiction.
The third logic I am learning to use is a living logic of inclusionality. This living logic is emerging in the course of creating my own form of life with responses to the possibilities that life itself permits. I am thinking here of life-affirming responses to the certainty of death and to particular environmental, global, social and cultural contexts. Following Rayner (2005) I see inclusionality as a form of awareness. It is a relationally dynamic awareness of space and boundaries as connective, reflexive and co-creative. Living logics of inclusionality, in the sense of modes of thought that are appropriate for comprehending the real as rational, emerge in the course of giving form to life itself.
So,
in answering the question How do you understand what happens?, I answer that the way I
understand what happens is intimately related to the logics I use. In
developing my understandings I draw insights from propositional and dialectical
theories. My understandings are continuing to evolve as I focus on developing
values-based and relationally dynamic standards of judgement for my theory of
educational knowledge. What I am
hoping to do, with the permission of the Tuesday evening group, is to research
my educational influence in my own learning as I work to support their
enquiries into enhancing their educational influences in their own learning and
in the learning of colleagues and pupils.
The
above letter draws attention to the importance of energy in understanding any
explanation that is dynamic or living. My intellectual excitement, about the
present phase of my life's journey as an educational researcher, is connected
to my feeling that I might be able to make an original contribution to
understandings of relationships between energy and values in explanations of
educational influences in learning.
Vasilyuk is a psychologist who
has drawn attention to the poor conceptualizations of the links between energy
and meaning, energy and values and energy and motivation:
Conceptions involving energy are very current in psychology, but they have been very poorly worked out from the methodological standpoint. It is not clear to what extent these conceptions are merely models of our understanding and to what extent they can be given ontological status. Equally problematic are the conceptual links between energy and motivation, energy and meaning, energy and value, although it is obvious that in fact there are certain links: we know how 'energetically' a person can act when positively motivated, we know that the meaningfulness of a project lends additional strength to the people engaged in it, but we have very little idea of how to link up into one whole the physiological theory of activation, the psychology of motivation, and the ideas of energy which have been elaborated mainly in the field of physics. (Vasilyuk, 1991, pp. 63-64)
Because of the vital connections between energy and values
in living standards of judgment I want to be clear that I using Vasilyuk's
insights into the following relationship between energy and values.
Although a value as a content of consciousness does not initially possess any energy, as the inner development of the personality proceeds the value can borrow energy from motives operative in reality, so that eventually the value develops from a content of consciousness into a content of life, and itself acquires the force of a real motive...This transformation of a value from a primary motive into a real, perceptible motivational force is accompanied by an energy metamorphosis which is hard to explain. Having once become a real motive, a value suddenly proves to possess a mighty charge of energy, a potential, which cannot be accounted for by all the borrowings it may have made in the course of its evolution. One supposition that may be advanced to explain this is that when a value become truly part of life it is 'switched in' to the energies of the supra-individual entity to which that value links the individual. (p. 120)
Three issues continue to fascinate me as I continue to respond to the questions in the letter that 'frames' this response.
The
first concerns developing explanatory principles that show how the values of
individuals can be 'switched in' to supra-individual energies that connect
individuals in sustaining their own motivations and that contribute to
educating social formations in creating a world of educational quality. This
issue relates directly to the question, What is it that builds the
connections between people, and why is that such an energising thing to happen.
The
second is the possibility that my understandings might have an educational
influence in the development of the understandings of another. I think we will
come to understand this educational influence through the stories of others if
they include and acknowledge the usefulness of insights from this new
epistemology for educational knowledge. Because of my desire to enhance the
quality of my educational influence in the world I want to share the following
quotation about the importance of 'influence' from the work of Edward Said.
"As a poet indebted to and friendly with Mallarme, Valery was compelled to assess originality and derivation in a way that said something about a relationship between two poets that could not be reduced to a simple formula. As the actual circumstances were rich, so too had to be the attitude. Here is an example from the "Letter About Mallarme".
No word comes easier of oftener to the critic's pen than
the word influence, and no vaguer notion can be found among all the vague
notions that compose the phantom armory of aesthetics. Yet there is nothing in the critical
field that should be of greater philosophical interest or prove more rewarding
to analysis than the progressive modification of one mind by the work of
another.
It often happens that the work acquires a singular value
in the other mind, leading to active consequences that are impossible to
foresee and in many cases will never be possible to ascertain. What we do know
is that this derived activity is essential to intellectual production of all
types. Whether in science or in the arts, if we look for the source of an
achievement we can observe that what a man does either repeats or refutes what
someone else has done – repeats it in other tones, refines or amplifies
or simplifies it, loads or overloads it with meaning; or else rebuts,
overturns, destroys and denies it, but thereby assumes it and has invisibly
used it. Opposites are born from opposites.
We say that an author is original when we cannot trace the
hidden transformations that others underwent in his mind; we mean to say that
the dependence on what he does on what others have done is excessively complex
and irregular. There are works in the likeness of others, and works that are
the reverse of others, but there are also works of which the relation with
earlier productions is so intricate that we become confused and attribute them
to the direct intervention of the gods. (Paul
Valery, 'Letter about Mallarme', in Leonardo, Poe, Mallarme, trans. Malcolm
Cowley and James R. Lawler (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), p.
241.
Valery converts 'influence' from a crude idea of the weight of one writer coming down in the work of another into a universal principle of what he calls 'derived achievement'. He then connects this concept with a complex process of repetition that illustrates it by multiplying instances; this has the effect of providing a sort of wide intellectual space, a type of discursiveness in which to examine influence. Repetition, refinement, amplification, loading, overloading, rebuttal, overturning, destruction, denial, invisible use – such concepts completely modify a linear (vulgar) idea of 'influence' into an open field of possibility. Valery is careful to admit that chance and ignorance play important roles in this field; what we cannot see or find, as well as what we cannot predict, he says, produce excessive irregularity and complexity. Thus the limits of the field of investigation are set by examples whose nonconforming, overflowing energy begins to carry them out of the field. This is an extremely important refinement in Valery's writing. For even as his writing holds in the wide system of variously dispersed relationships connecting writers with one another, he also shows how at its limits the field gives forth other relations that are hard to describe from within the field." (Said, 1997, p.15)
The third issue that continues to fascinate me is that of mutual influence in educational relationships. Consider the following point from the letter in terms of mutual influence:
How
do you understand what happens? I'm sure I've asked you this question before,
but I'm working on my understanding of what happens because I think it is crucial
for me that I develop an understanding of it.
As
I am seeking to enhance the quality of my educational influence I am sharing my
responses to the questions I have been asked. In working out my answers to the
questions I have come to understand better both myself and what I am doing. I
am curious to know if sharing my understandings has some educational influence
in the learning of others and eager to continue the conversations.
References
Fukuyama, F. (1992) The End of History and the Last Man, London; Penguin.
Fromm, E. (1960) The Fear of Freedom, London;
Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Ilyenkov, E. (1977) Dialectical Logic, Moscow; Progress Publishers.
Marcuse, H. (1964) One Dimensional Man, London; Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Popper, K. (1963) Conjectures and
Refutations, Oxford: O.U.P.
Rayner,
A. (2005) Space, Dust and the Co-evolutionary Context of 'His Dark
Materials'. Retrieved 2 August 2006 from
http://people.bath.ac.uk/bssadmr/inclusionality/HisDarkMaterials.htm
Said, E. W. (1997) Beginnings: Intention and Method, London; Granta.
Tillich, P. (1973) The Courage To Be, London; Fontana.
Vasilyuk, F. (1991) The Psychology of Experiencing: the Resolution of Life's Critical Situations. Hemel Hempstead; Harvester Wheatsheaf.