What is
educational in what I do for myself, for others and for the education of social
formations? A contribution to a conversation on theory in action research.
The paper follows
the accepted proposal
Proposal for a
contribution to an invitational conference at the University of Limerick
5-7th
June 2003
Educational Enquiries: How
do I judge my educational influence in the education of myself, others and
social formations? Do my judgements on my educational relationships have any
significance for the generation and testing of educational theory?
Jack Whitehead, Department of Education, University
of Bath
There is no more important
educational question, however, than how we foster educational judgement in
students, teachers, and researchers. How do we learn to exercise our freedom
understood as responsibility? (Coulter, & Wiens, p. 23, 2002)
I like this point about the
importance of educational judgement and of learning to exercise our freedom
understood as responsibility. However, rather than beginning with how 'we
foster educational judgement in students, teachers, and researchers', my
preference is to begin with questions that accept a responsibility to be
accountable from the ground of my own 'I' in the above educational enquiries. I
am asking these questions as a professional educator and educational researcher
who is seeking to answer them in terms of values-based standards of judgement.
I am thinking of being accountable
to myself and others for my educational influence in my educational
relationships with myself, others and social formations.
In a multi-media presentation
I will explore the possibility of communicating the educational influence of a
loving spirit as an educational standard of judgement in the education of
myself, others and social formations:
"Šliving is the place
of secular miracles. It is where amazing things can be done in consciousness
and history. Living ought to be the unfolding masterpiece of the loving spirit.
And dying ought to set this masterpiece free. Set it free to enrich the world.
A good life is the masterwork of the magic intelligence that dwells in us.
Faced with the enormity of this thought, of the Damascene perception, failure,
despair, unhappiness, seemed a small thing, a gross missing of the point of it
all." (Okri, 2002, p.230)
I will also explore the
nature of living educational standards of judgement in the creation and testing
of shared living educational theories (Smith, 2002) while exercising my
pedagogy of the unique (Farren, 2003) in my educational relationships.
A contribution to a conversation on
theory in action research: What is educational in what I do for myself, for
others and for the education of social formations?
I started my work as a teacher on the 4th September 1967 with a life-affirming energy. I married Joan in the same week and have vivid memories of the way we expressed our life-affirming energy in our work and play. I'm hopeful that our daughter Rebecca and our son, Jonathan carry such energy.
The mystery of the source and sustaining emergence of this life-affirming energy is all the more remarkable in the face of the certainty of my own death and my desire to feed life with death rather than death with life as Alan Rayner expresses this so well in his poem Sphagnum Moss (Rayner, 2003a). My thoughts on the positive value of death have also been well expressed by Foucault:
"The
particular value of meditation on death is not only that it anticipates what
is generally considered as the
greatest misfortune, it is not only that it makes it possible to convince oneself that death is not an evil; it
offers the possibility of casting,
in anticipation so to speak, a backward glance on life. In considering oneself on the point of dying, one can
judge each of the acts that one is in the
process of committing according to its own worth. (Eribon, p. 331-332, 1989)
I also started my work in education with a passionate belief that making a contribution to the education of individuals and social formations would enable me to live a worth while life. I am hoping that you can see that I still carry the passion and the belief in this contribution to a conversation on forms of theory in action research.
I do not want to dwell on the history of my action research programme into the nature of living educational theory because I want to focus on its present generative phase into the nature of the living educational standards of judgement that can be used to test the validity of living educational theories. As I say this I recognise that others have the right to question and challenge the validity of the ideas on living educational theories that are forming my research questions. I am thinking in particular of these four ideas:
i) The experience and idea of 'I' as a living contradiction can be included in claims to educational knowledge.
ii) Individuals can create their own living educational theories as descriptions and explanations for their own learning in enquiries of the kind, 'how do I improve what I am doing?'
iii) Clarifying the meanings of the embodied values in educational practice in the course of their emergence in the practice of educational enquiry can transform the values into living and communicable educational standards of judgement.
iv) Pedagogising the generation and testing of living educational theories can contribute to the education of social formations and inclusional forms of life.
The present phase of my research programme into the nature of educational theory is focused on the clarification of embodied values and their transformation into living standards of judgement. I want to emphasise that I am not expressing, defining and communicating my living standards to 'impose' them on any of your own theories. I am seeking to clarify for myself the values I live by. In sharing these with you and inviting you to assist me in taking my enquiries forward I am hopeful that you will find something of value for yourselves. The words I am using, in a process of ostensively clarifying my values-based standards of judgement, are:
· life-affirming energy,
· loving warmth of humanity,
· living a productive life,
· responsibility,
· expressing humour in relation to living values of humanity,
· educational influence in the learning of others,
· influencing the education of a social formation.
These are not exhaustive and I am probably drawing your attention to too many values for me to communicate my meanings in this brief contribution to a conversation on theory in action research. I hope you feel moved to access the full paper from the web (Whitehead, 2003) and respond by helping me to strengthen the generativity of my research programme into educational theory or show me where it has become degenerative and should be transformed.
The emergence of a living educational theory from my
action research.
I began my work at the University of Bath in 1973 with the intention of contributing to a reconstruction of educational theory. I wanted to do this because of a recognition in 1971 that I had made two mistakes in the view of educational theory that was influencing my professional learning. The first mistake in my thinking was that educational theory was constituted by the philosophy, psychology, sociology and history of education. My mistake was well put by Paul Hirst in 1983 when he said that the practical principles in what teachers were doing were, "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." (Hirst, 1983, p. 18). My mistake was in thinking that the practical principles in what I, as a teacher, was doing in my educational practices would be replaced in any rationally developed theory by principles with more fundamental theoretical justification. I should just say that I value my mistakes, errors and failures in the sense that their recognition is related to a desire to improve what I am doing and to the experience that such improvements are related to my not persisting in error.
My second mistake was in holding to the view of educational theory that has been defined clearly by Richard Pring:
" 'Theory' would seem to have the following features. It refers to a set of propositions which are stated with sufficient generality yet precision that they explain the behaviour of a range of phenomena and predict which would happen in the future. An understanding of these propositions includes an understanding of what would refute them." (Pring, p. 127).
In saying that this view of theory is mistaken in relation to my living educational theory I do not want to be understood as saying that I am completely rejecting this view of theory. I am only rejecting the idea that this is the only view of theory. I am offering a different view of theory in my living educational theory. Let me emphasise that I value the propositional view of theory in relation to disciplines other than the disciplines of education, such as educational enquiry and educational practice. Indeed my accounts of my learning in my action research over the past 30 years contain numerous acknowledgements of insights from such theories that have extended my cognitive range and concern.
However, because I could not 'derive' a valid explanation either for my own educational development or for my educational influence in my students' learning from the interconnected sets of propositions of the above theories, either individually or in any combination, I decided to produce my own. I called the explanations I produced for my own learning, and for my educational influence with my students, my living educational theories. I did this to distinguish the explanations I produced for my own learning, in my action research, from the explanations that could be derived from the interconnected sets of propositions that constituted the traditional disciplines of education.
The numbers of other practitioner-researchers who have embraced the idea of producing their own living educational theories, together with the evidence in the living theory section of actionresearch.net, which shows the legitimation of living educational theories in the Academy, seems to indicate that a living theory research programme continues to offer a generative and transformatory potential to individuals and communities of educational action researchers.
My present interest in the nature and communicability of living educational standards of judgement in this conversation on theory in action research is connected with my desire to revivify educational standards. The language of targets and testing now dominates educational discourse in England with the disciplinary power of the state apparatus imposing conformity to externally set targets. There is some evidence that resistance to the damaging influences of these standards is having an effect on government policy in that these controls are being relaxed in relation to the SATs for 7 year olds in England. I want to contribute to this resistance and transformation by doing what I can to help to revitalise educational practices in a range of educational contexts by developing living educational standards of judgement.
Perhaps I can communicate what I am trying to do by contrasting the meanings of love communicated by John Donne's The Extasie with what Tannen refers to as the comically solemn ineptitude of a conceptual analysis of love:
"Whence, like a pillow on a bed,
A Pregnant banke swel'd up, to rest
The violets reclining head,
Sat we two, one anothers best.
Our hands were firmely cimented
With a fast balme, which thence did spring,
Our eye-beames twisted, and did thred
Our eyes, upon one double string;
So to'entergraft our hands, as yet
With all the meanes to make us one,
And pictures in our eyes to get
Was all our propagation. (Donne, p. 55)
This poem, carries meaning to me of love as a living relationship. It carries the meaning of love as a communicable standard of judgement through the poetry. In seeking to establish such educational standards, I want to avoid the crippling mutilations of meaning that can be imposed on educational values and standards through the imposition of inappropriate conceptual analyses such as the following analysis of love:
Having
defined the field of investigation, we can now sketch the concepts analytically
presupposed in our use of 'love'. An idea of these concepts can be gained by
sketching a sequence of relations, the members of which we take as relevant in
deciding whether or not some relationship between persons A and B is one of
love. These are not relevant in the sense of being evidence for some further
relation 'love' but as being, in part at least, the material of which love
consists. The sequence would include at least the following:
i)
A knows B (or at least knows something of B)
ii)
A cares (is concerned) about B
A
likes B
iii)
A respects B
A
is attracted to B
A
feels affection for B
iv)
A is committed to B
A
wishes to see B's welfare promoted.
The
connection between these relations which we will call 'love-comprising
relations' or 'LCRs' is not, except for 'knowing about' and possibly 'feels
affection for' as tight as strict entailment. (Newton-Smith, W. pp
118-119,1973)
Tannen
goes on to ask:
The
analysis continues in the same vein, prompting the question: How has
such
comically solemn ineptitude become possible? For it isn't as if this comes out
of the blue; the philosophical climate is such that if one chooses to write on
such a topic as love - more the kind of thing that Iberians are expected to do
- there are strong forces leading one to do it in the style of the quoted
passage." (Tannen, p. 459, 1980)
My aim is to see if I can revitalise educational standards of judgement by reconstituting their meanings from the ground of living educational relationships. To do this I will start in my own relationships and ask for your help in developing a shared language for communicating the meanings of living standards of educational judgement. I want to develop a shared language, not because I want you to use my language in the construction of your educational theories. You are free to create your own meanings. Yet, I do want to develop a shared language so that we can help each other to take our enquiries forward in ways that respects the originality of mind and critical judgement of the other and can share the affirmation that comes with the recognition that another has found value in our ideas in the creation of their own.
Having shared drafts of this presentation with friends and colleagues at Bath and listened to their responses I have decided not to focus on a language of love or loving spirit because the complexity of the responses. The complexity included conversations about the role of the erotic when I talked of love and a loving spirit. This complexity made it difficult to developed a shared understanding of my meanings of love and loving spirit in my educational relationships. However, what did appear to be shared was an understanding of the educational influence of a life-affirming energy others acknowledge that I bring into my educational relationships. I'd like to see if I communicate the meanings of this life-affirming energy together with some other educational standards in my educational relationships. I am unsure of the words to use to describe this energy, other than it is life-affirming. It feels to me to come from a source external to me, yet flows through me. I relate this energy to what Paul Tillich referred to in his Courage to Be as the state of being grasped by the power of being itself. I have no theistic belief, yet feel a spiritual energy that is life-affirming.
From the ground of the experience of this energy in the group at Bath, with a discussion of its shared meaning in an explanation of my educational influence in my research supervision, it was then possible to move into a communication about the meanings of my other embodied values in my educational relationships. To see if I can begin to communicate the meanings of these values to you here are some video-clips showing what I do as an educator and educational researcher. I have selected these clips because they are helpful in communicating to myself those meanings of my living educational standards mentioned above:
· life-affirming energy,
· loving warmth of humanity,
· living a productive life,
· responsibility,
· expressing humour in relation to living values of humanity,
· educational influence in the learning of others,
· influencing the education of a social formation.
Can I communicate my meanings to you as I claim:
Life-affirming energy is a living standard of educational
judgement
My life-affirming energy has been important to me in explaining why I sustain my enthusiasm and commitment to education as well being included in explanations of my educational influence with others. I want to explore the possibility that this energy, expressed in my educational relationships, is a communicable, living educational standard of judgement.
I am hopeful that you can feel my life-affirming energy in the here and now, with you. I have been looking forward to this gathering because, Jean working with her colleagues, has brought together individuals whose life-affirming energy I have felt as I have seen your presentations in other contexts, talked with you and read your writings. Here is a brief clip that communicates to me the life-affirming energy I think that I bring into my educational relationships. It is a clip in which I am reading the Abstract of a draft Ed.D thesis of Ram Punia (Appendix). I am feeling this energy through Ram's words which are the synthesis of some 6 years doctoral enquiry. Moira Laidlaw video-taped the tutorial and her responses to the experience are in the notes to this paper.
As well as a life-affirming energy I also hope and believe that I bring into my educational relationships a loving warmth of humanity.
A loving warmth of humanity is a living educational
standard of judgement.
I worked with Martin Dobson in the School of Education at Bath for some 20 years. He died from cancer last year. He brought what I experienced as a loving warmth of humanity into his relationships. I'm hopeful that I continue to carry my experience of his humanity into my own educational relationships and living standards of judgement. I connect my life-affirming energy and loving warmth of humanity to my desire to live a productive life in education. Since Martin's death I have signed my e-mails, Love Jack with the following 'signature' in recognition of my desire to express the loving warmth of humanity I experienced in my day to day relationship from and with him.
-----------------------------------------------------------------
A colleague, Martin Dobson, died last year at the age of 52 and the last
thing he said to me was 'Give my Love to the Department'. In the 20 years
I'd worked with Martin it was his loving warmth of humanity that I recall
with great life affirming pleasure and I'm hoping that in Love Jack we can
continue share this value of common humanity.
____________
Living a productive life is an educational standard of
judgement
Here
is an example of an acknowledgement in a masters dissertation from a
teacher-researcher:
"Last but not least, I want to thank my supervisor, Jack
Whitehead, who persuaded me that I had my own personally meaningful story to
tell about my journey as an educational action researcher."
What I mean by living a productive life is related to my understanding
of what it means for me to create something that is found useful by another as
they create meaning and purpose in their own lives.
In the creation and sharing of my ideas on the nature of living educational theory I hope that I have twice affirmed myself and another. Speaking directly to those I am influencing in my educational relationships as a research supervisor and tutor I say that:
In the creation of my living educational theories I have produced accounts of my learning that have objectified my individuality and its particularity In the course of this activity I have experienced the pleasure of feeling of knowing myself in living a productive life.
In your satisfaction and your use of my creation I experience the direct and conscious satisfaction that my work has satisfied your human need to know yourself and live a productive life. In my use of what you produce I hope you experience a similar affirmation.
Speaking from the ground of my educational relationships I seek to influence the learning of others as their originality and critical judgement mediate between themselves, the species and what I do. My hope is that they value my educational influence as they give a form to their own lives in their productive work. I believe that in pedagogising the creation and testing of our own living educational theories we are contributing to the education of the social formations in which we live and work.
I could not have articulated this standard of living a productive life without Richard Bernstein's references to the early writings of Karl Marx on what it means to produce something as a human being (Bernstein, p. 48, 1971).
One of the ways I seek to extend the influence of living educational theories is through my educational relationships. In these relationships I want to exercise responsibility in ensuring that I am not imposing my ideas on others. For me to recognise my relationships as educational what I do must be mediated freely through the originality of mind and critical judgement in the other's learning.
Responsibility is a living standard of educational
judgement
In these clips I see myself working with my sense of responsibility as an educator to support teacher-researchers in the successful completion of their educational enquiry and methods of educational enquiry master's units at John Bentley School in Wiltshire. These units are part of a continuing professional development masters programme of the Department of Education of the University of Bath. I want to stress that I am working for myself (as well as for others and for the education of social formations) in the sense that the meaning and purpose I give to my life is intimately connected to my belief that I am living a productive life in my vocation of education. Fulfilling my responsibility includes supporting the teacher-researchers in creatively complying with the University's standards of judgement of:
i) Made
critical use of literature, professional experience and, where appropriate,
knowledge from other sources, to inform the focus and methodology of the study
or enquiry.
ii) Made
appropriate critical use of the literature and, where appropriate, knowledge
from other sources, in the development of the study or enquiry and its
conclusions.
iii)
Demonstrated an ability to identify and categorise issues, and to undertake an
educational study or enquiry in an appropriately critical, original, and
balanced fashion.
iv)
Demonstrated an ability to analyse, interpret and critique findings and arguments
and, where appropriate, to apply these in a reflective manner to the
improvement of educational practices.
You can access the accounts of such teacher-researchers at http://www.actionresearch.net/mastermod.shtml
In the next clips I see myself working with my sense of responsibility as an educator in my supervision/support of practitioner-researchers as they work towards the successful completion of their doctoral degrees.
Fulfilling my responsibility here also includes supporting the teacher-researchers in creatively complying with the University's standards of judgement of:
i) originality of mind and critical judgement
ii) extent and merit of the work
iii) produced publishable work
I now want to re-look at the clips from the point of view of my responsibility in what I do as an educational researcher who is engaged in the action research self-study enquiry, 'How am I improving what I am doing?' What I see, is influenced by the context of my viewing and I want to explain a little about this context in my life as an educational researcher.
In my Presidential Address to BERA in 1988 (Whitehead, 1989) I argued for the development of research-based professionalism in education. What I had in mind was that professionalism in education could be enhanced through the educational enquiries of teacher-researchers that were focused on questions of improving educational practice in relation to supporting pupils and students to improve their learning. I thought that such questions would not only help to improve practice but also contribute to the professional knowledge-base of education in a way that could serve to enhance the quality of learning in our schools and higher education institutions. I still hold this belief.
In the exercise of responsibility as a standard of judgement in my life as an educational researcher, I think it important to acknowledge the influence of the ideas of others in my own. Some of you at this seminar have worked with me and been part of the development of my ideas. Some of the ideas we have created together and shared in co-enquiries. They have become our ideas (McNiff, 2003). Other ideas have come from people I have not met in person. For example, Ilyenkov (1977) focused my attention on the language of living contradictions in his book on Dialectical Logic. His language helped me to articulate an experience from 1971 of existing as a living contradiction as I watched video-tapes of my classroom practice. These showed me denying the possibilities for enquiry learning in my pupils that I thought I was encouraging! Ilyenkov asked the question, 'if an object exists as a living contradiction what must the thought be that expresses it?'
By asking, researching and answering the question, 'how do I improve my practice?' in which 'I' exists as a living contradiction, I thought that I might answer the question of how to express the life of a living contradiction. Showing that I could explain my learning as I lived through my contradictions and worked at living my values more fully in my practice, led me to the idea that every individual could create and test their own living educational theory as a description and explanation of their own learning through their educational enquiries.
Part of exercising my responsibility as an educational researcher is to present accounts of my research in public forums such as this so that the ideas can be tested for validity. In presenting such accounts I accept a responsibility for expressing, defining and communicating the standards of judgement I use to test the validity of my own claims to knowledge. The exercise of this responsibility has been accompanied by a most necessary sense of humour in the face of power relations that appear to support the truth of power rather than the power of truth as well as other conflicts of value.
Expressing humour in living values of humanity is a
living standard of educational judgement
Gregory Bateson (1980) has related humour to evolution. He says that the mere fact of humour in human relations indicates that multiple typing is essential to human communication. In the absence of logical typing he says that humour would be unnecessary and perhaps could not exist. The significance of the experience of humour I am sharing with you as a standard of educational judgement, through the video-clip, is focused on the multiple typing of white and mixed-race identities.
The expression of the embodied experience of humour through laughter does not appear on any of the recent lists of professional standards of practice for teaching. As an educator I want to emphasise its important in my educational relationships. I am thinking of the humour that erupts spontaneously. If you run the video-clip of Paulus Murray and myself backwards and forwards rapidly I think you will see our laughter. As you listen to the clip you may vicariously experience the humour.
Its significance may be understood in terms of Paulus' enquiry into the influence of his mixed race identity in his educative relations with his students. I think we are both sensitive to the pain in Paul's mixed race identity and while we enjoy each others' company and find humour in many things we have not, up to this point, laughed so spontaneously about his mixed-race identity and my white identity. It may help you to appreciate the laughter more if you have the information that Paulus' black father was called Jack, and that Paulus was given away soon after birth because his white mother could not 'pass' Paul as white to her white husband. Through his research into post-colonial theorising I have come to understand the negative connotations that many people of colour attach to their languages of 'Whiteness'. The juxtaposition of Paulus' construction of a positive mixed-race identity in the context of his background and educational relation to his supervisor Jack Whitehead, evoked the humour and laughter.
I don't want to give the impression that the expression of humour in the face of painful experiences is always an appropriate response. Yet, I know that humour has been essential to transcending adversity, especially when faced by the abuse of power in personal and organizational contexts. The expression of humour without learning would not for me be a characteristic of an educational relationship. For me, learning is a necessary condition of education.
Educational influence in the learning of others is a
living educational standard of judgement
What is educational in what I do? I am asking this question in relation to my influence on the learning of those I tutor on continuing professional development programmes or supervise in their research programmes? I think that this learning has been different with each individual and the results and acknowledgements of my influence are in the living theory section of actionresearch.net . I also learn from those I teach, tutor and supervise. One of the most intense learning experiences I can remember was with Kevin Eames towards the end of his Ph.D. programme. During a seminar with colleagues Kevin was explaining the nature of dialectics in his research, when he suddenly realised that the didactic form of his communication was denying the essential nature of dialectics as a process of enquiry. Over a period of some four days involving four taped conversation, Kevin extended and deepened his understanding of dialectics. He documented this learning in his Ph.D., in relation to our conversations and acknowledged the educational influence in what I was saying in terms of his own learning (Whitehead, 1999).
Moira Laidlaw (1996), during my supervision of her doctoral research programme, contributed dramatically to my learning when she demonstrated that my educational standards of judgement were themselves living and changing. Up to this point I had stressed the importance of clarifying the meaning of my values in the course of their emergence in my practice. What I hadn't appreciated was that their clarification was also a process of transforming the embodied values into standards of judgement which themselves were living and being changed in the course of my reflective practice. In response to a draft of this paper and from video-taping an Ed.D. supervision with Ram Punia, an international educator, Moira wrote a most affirming letter about my educational influence. I have included this in the notes to the paper to show the quality of affirmation about one's educational influence that one can also receive in our educational relationships with colleagues and friends.
Another clear example of my own learning in my supervision of a Ph.D. programme was with Pat D'arcy when she explained, with some emotional intensity, that I always gave her YES/BUT responses and didn't offer her aesthetically engaged and appreciative responses to what she had just produced. As a focus of her research programme was on how to make aesthetically engaged and appreciative responses to the stories of others, I began to see her point but much too slowly for Pat's liking! I think my responses to the narratives of the teacher-researchers I tutor and supervise now benefit from the quality of response Pat showed me how to make.
Influencing the education of individuals through their learning continues to be a focus of my educational practice as well the recognition of my own learning. I am also committed to influencing the education of social formations as an educational standard of judgement.
Educating a social formation is a living educational
standard of judgement.
Some of you will be familiar with the story of my two rejected Ph.Ds on Educational Theory in 1980 and 1982 following the recommendations of the examiners. In 1980, following the first rejection I received a written instruction that I was not permitted to question the judgements of the examiners under any circumstances. Many universities in the UK in the 1980s explicitly refused permission for any question to be raised about the competence of examiners' judgements on research degrees, under any circumstances. By 1991 there had been in movement in the regulations of universities, like Bath, to permit questions to be raised about such judgements on the grounds of bias, prejudice and inadequate assessment.
It is this kind of change in a social order, where educational values are lived more fully in the principles that regulate the order, that I am referring to as a process of educating a social formation.
Another example concerns the assessment criteria used in higher education. In 2001 new criteria were introduced for assessing continuing professional development units for the MA programme in education at the University of Bath. Before 2001 these did not include any reference to improving educational practices. The new criteria include the demonstration of:
an ability to
analyse, interpret and critique findings and arguments and, where appropriate,
to apply these in a reflective manner to the improvement of educational
practices.
It is the move from the omission before 1991 of an assessment criterion that included the improvement of educational practices to the inclusion of this criterion that I recognise as the education of a social formation. There is a change in a regulation governing a social order that embodies educational values more fully. As the new criteria were being formed, I argued both that improving educational practice should be included and that 'critical' should be balanced by an equal number of references to 'creative' or original. I think my arguments were sound but the truth of power won the day and, in my judgement, overemphasised the 'critical' at the expense of the 'creative'.
I also want to include the pedagogisation of living educational theories in the knowledge-base and curriculum of the Academy as a living educational standard of judgement in relation to the education of social formations. Maggie Farren at Dublin City University startled me recently. Not, I hasten to add by her capacity to supervise living theory research programmes. Maggie's commitment to her students and the quality of her reflective practice are inspirational. What startled me was that she negotiated some of the usual tensions around differing judgements of action research dissertations as she contributed to the legitimation of living theory texts within three years of supervising higher degrees at Dublin City University. It took me 9 years at the University of Bath! The speed of this legitimation could be due to Maggie's understanding of the importance of developing a pedagogy of the unique (Farren 2003). As I develop this aspect of the standard of influence the education of social formations I use Basil Bernstein's definition of pedagogy in the pedagogisation of living theories:
Pedagogy is a sustained process whereby somebody(s) acquires new forms or develops existing forms of conduct, knowledge, practice and criteria from somebody(s) or something deemed to be an appropriate provider and evaluator - appropriate either from the point of view of the acquirer or by some other body(s) or both (Bernstein, 2000, p. 78).
I hope that you can appreciate the reasons for my commitment to the pedagogisation of living educational theories in the Academy. As we look around the world and think about our daily experiences in our workplaces and communities, I imagine that it is impossible not to notice that some of the values you and I live by are being violated. I imagine that we also know that we could choose to do something about some of these violations. Others we may not be able to do anything about. But, in the contexts where we can do something to live our values more fully, I am suggesting that the pedagogisation of the creation and testing of our living educational theories as we learn to live our values more fully could contribute to the quality of each others' productive lives and the quality of the social formations in which we live and work. Paul Roberts has made one such contribution in his Ph.D. submission on 'Emerging Selves in Practice: How do I and others create my practice and how does my practice shape me and influence others?' (Roberts, 2003)
I experience such a contribution to my own life on reading
Colin Smith's (2002) paper on Supporting
Teacher and School Development: learning and teaching policies, shared living
theories and teacher-research partnerships. I haven't met Colin, yet felt affirmed in his engagement
with my ideas and his creative and critical transformation of these in his own
idea of 'sharing living theories'. This idea is contributing to my own
learning. I was also heartened and affirmed by Philippa Levy's ideas on Developing
'living theory' in educational informatics (Levy, 2003)
I felt a similar
affirmation with my wife Joan, a Professor of Education and Dean of the Faculty
of Education of the University of the West of England. I was delighted and felt
affirmed in my productive life, that ideas Jean and I had worked on together,
had been integrated in the methodology section of the Brislington Training
School Website (2003). This had been supported by Joan through a partnership
between Brislington school and the University of the West of England.
You can also see
the creative and critical transformations of living educational theories by
Jackie Delong in the exercise of her systems influence as a Superintendent of
Schools in the Grand Erie District School Board in Ontario and in the
publication, with Cheryl Black, of the edited collection on 'Passion in Professional
Practice' (Delong and Black, 2002). Other original contributions to living
educational theories can be accessed in the living theory section of
actionresearch.net. Because of the significance of the work of Paul Murray at
the Royal Agricultural College in Cirencester, in pedagogising living theories with
a postcolonial intent in the curriculum of a Masters programme, I want to draw
your attention to a joint presentation we made at the American Educational
Research Association on 'What and Black with White Identities in the Self-Study
of Teacher Education Practices (Murray & Whitehead, 2000)
My hope is that we will see the spread of the influence of living educational theories as part of the unfolding masterpieces of our loving spirits. The influence of one such loving spirit on the growth of my educational knowledge in the education of social formations can be appreciated by my movement/transformation towards inclusional ways of being and doing inspired by Alan Rayner (2003b), his art and his ideas. It is a pleasure to conclude this presentation by drawing your attention to Alan's ideas of inclusionality on his web-site (Rayner 2003b) and his insight that:
"I
remember vividly when I first started to do research how much I felt Jack's
urge to include an account of (i.e. to
take into account - a phrase which doesn't carry the
'testiness' of being 'accountable' to critical external
judgement/evaluation) my learning in my descriptions of what I was doing.
Because what I was doing was changing all the time (e.g. I was getting better
at identifying the organisms with which I was working), so that the data I
obtained at 'separate samplings' were not 'strictly comparable'. It is this
deliberate taking into account of and communicating ones own subjective
learning process which I feel is at the heart of the idea of 'action research'
and addresses an inescapably important issue that 'objective research
methodologies' deliberately ignore (i.e. I was required to assume that my data
from separate samplings were directly comparable even though I knew they
couldn't be). And, by the same token, this idea is vital to a transformative
co-inquiry in a co-culture. But in an
Anti-culture, it feels like feeding ones' babies to the weapons of crass
destruction wielded by critics assured of their own infallibility. Love and
respect, Alan" (Rayner, 2003c)
And, because of its potential to assist in the education of social formations I will finish with Patricia Shaw's insight from her delightful book on Changing conversations in organizations (Shaw, 2002):
I have wanted to give much more emphasis to strategic
work as the living craft of participating as an intentional sense-maker in
conversation after conversation (both public and imagined), encounter after
encounter, activity after activity. I want to help us appreciate ourselves as
fellow improvisers in ensemble work, constantly constructing the future and our
part in it as daily activity as we convene or join or unexpectedly find
ourselves in conversations. I have called this a craft because, just as we can
learn to conceptualize, to design, to communicate and persuade, we can also
learn to participate with imaginative concreteness as co-narrators, joint
authors, co-improvisers, and in so doing, locate our competence as leaders
differently. Although I have described my own work in terms of a different
account of process consultation, what I am saying is as relevant to anyone
wanting to think about their participation in organizational life.
(Shaw, 2002, pp. 172-173)
Notes & Acknowledgements
I am grateful to the responses given to my 'practise' presentations by participants in the group that meets on Monday evenings in the Department of Education of the University of Bath for educational conversation.
I have benefited from the insights that Sarah Fletcher (Fletcher and Whitehead, 2003) brings to her photography and the video-tapes she has made of my teaching, tutoring and research supervision. I am grateful to my other colleagues at Bath, Judi Marshall and Peter Reason in the Centre for Action Research and Professional Practice (CARPP), for sharing their responses to earlier drafts of this paper. I continue to reflect on ideas in Judi's paper on living life as inquiry (Marshall, 1999) and on Peter's capacity to attract people to share in co-operative inquiries (Reason & Rowan, 1999). Without Jean McNiff's unwavering support over 22 years I would not be here today to share the delights of our productive lives in education and the hopes for the future strengthening of our educational relationships. The quality of sustained support I have benefited from includes the experience of being alongside Robyn Pound. Robyn lives with great integrity the values in her epistemology of alongsideness. She developed this epistemology in her living theory doctoral enquiry into her health visiting practice (Pound, 2002). From her perspective of alongsideness, Robyn responded to a previous draft in a way that moved me to modify the text by expressing less direct aggression and anger in my experience of violations of my values of freedom, integrity, democracy and justice and enhancing the invitational quality of the way I express my ways so that readers feel invited to engage creatively with the issues rather than deal first with my powerful negative emotions. In a previous draft I had described University Research Committees asking for the personal pronoun to be removed from a title of an action research enquiry and asking for a guarantee that the subjects would be returned to their original state before the research was carried out! In my 1993 book on the growth of educational knowledge my anger and rage at such violations is directly expressed. Some of this was present in a previous draft of this paper. Robyn describes these as 'old hurt feelings' in a quality of response that communicates to me her own qualities of alongsideness:
"The only point where there was a hint of
disconnection born out of the old hurt feelings (Whitehead, 1993) was in 'a
most necessary sense of humour in the face of University Research Committees
...' I felt uncomfortable about
this although it was funny when you told us. It was as if we, in the in-crowd, can laugh at those who
don't know any better. In that it
felt 'othering' as Paulus would say, 'excluding' as Alan might say. Fine in
itself by causes a bit of a rift with your 'loving warmth of humanity' I think. It isn't that I am saying you shouldn't
name the problem but that in that sentence it didn't feel funny. I would prefer your other examples of
spontaneous eruptions of humour, such as with Paulus, where there is shared learning and coming to new
understanding amidst reciprocal affirmations of being alive. Beyond the personal affirmation of a
good laugh it is the power of connectivity (equality for a moment) that does it
for me."
Following a tutorial on 21 May 2003, with Ram Punia an international educator and Ed.D. researcher, and video-taped by Moira Laidlaw, Moira wrote the following. It is a most affirming response of what I hope to achieve in my educational relationships. The knowledge that I can, with the creative and critical responses of another, sometimes achieve this is a vital part of my sustained commitment to education.
Date: Fri, 23 May 2003 19:20:23 +0000
From: Moira Laidlaw <moiralaidlaw@hotmail.com>
To: a.j.whitehead@bath.ac.uk
Subject: integrity
Hi! I wanted to put down in writing what I said yesterday. Use it if it is ever
appropriate. The quality which really intrigues me, Jack, about you as an educator,
is your integrity. In the sense of wholeness and moral coherence. Which may, as the
Tao suggests, be the same thing. The Tao suggests that good is existential
coherence and evil is simply absorption with one's own needs, which I think is a
lovely description of both. I saw something magical with Ram and you together. And
it has to do with that quality of moral coherence and holism. He brought you his
thesis as a gift of life, it seems to me. Not a gift to YOU, but to life itself, as
a celebration of it. And he was able to express his sense of indebtedness, but
again, to the process, to the generative force that you and he had experienced
together. Its metaphor is expressed as gratitude to you. What is your genius, Jack,
and it is genius, is your capacity to nurture that form of life in others in a way
which has this moral coherence and holism. When you enter into an educative
relationship and it is a matter of conscious choice, (indeed it has to be) this
incurs you holding the other in relation, in such a way that they remain uniquely
themselves (whatever that means) and grow towards a more life-affirming place as
they try to improve learning. And yet, you don't it seems to me, judge the moral
coherence of others in the places where they are. This absence of such confining
insights, adds to the integrity you can bring to your educative relationships. It
is, (to someone like me who sees and shares something of the gift, but doesn't
contain it as you do) to be somewhat miraculous: you exercise judgement with what
appears to be uncanny prescience and then wait - for years if necessary. Look how
you treated me, how you treat Paul, how you treat Ram, how you bear with the
individual being of your students, because the 'rewards' of it are incipiently
there - and you can see them already. And this prescience is itself so educational,
because it implies such trust in the other, such belief that the other can do it.
It is the trust without coercion, which the Tao talks about as being the way
itself. The way of what? The life-force itself. And the waiting I mention isn't at
all passive. Within this waiting is heated discussion, attentive listening,
guiding, nudging here and there, letting be, siting back to enable the space to be
grown into, humour, and, dare I say it, love. But the term doesn't matter in some
senses. This 'love', Jack, is the life-force itself. You love your work. Of course.
You are an integrated expression of that life force and the form it takes in you is
education. Which explains (to me at any rate) your careful making of parameters
around what constitutes educational boundaries. All part of your moral coherence
and consistency. However, an integral part of this is that it will be often
interpreted as psychotherapeutic because this life-energy you embody and which you
encourage others to embody, resonates profoundly with the healthiest aspects of
humanity itself, and thus a damaged psyche, like mine, will be enabled to heal
itself, at least to a degree. And whereas 'we' might thank you for it, a deeper
understanding reveals that of course, through resonating with this healthy
life-energy, we lead ourselves into those areas of ourselves which heal from
within. This is not at all your aim as an educator, but it seems to me a glorious
by-product of your health.
There were moments between you and Ram where life itself seemed to be unfolding in
front of my eyes, and I glimpsed human immortality. Those moments were, quite
frankly, some of the most beautiful of my life. More glorious than a poem, more
uncanny than a Bach cantata, all the more memorable because they were the
incarnation of what makes it glorious to be human.
So to thank you, is indeed, irrelevant. You are simply doing what you do. Oh, but
Jack, you do it gloriously!
Note on Bourdieu's
idea of the habitus.
łThe habitus, a product of history, produces individual and collective practices more history in accordance with the schemes generated by history. It ensures the active presence of past experiences, which, deposited in each organism in the form of schemes of perception, thought and action, tend to guarantee the Ścorrectnessą of practices and their constancy over time, more reliably than all formal rules and explicit norms. This system of dispositions a present practice that tends to perpetuate itself into the future by reactivation in similarly structured practices, an internal law through which the law of external necessities, irreducible to immediate constraints, is constantly exerted is the principle of the continuity and regularity which objectivism sees in social practices without being able to account for it: and also of the regulated transformations that cannot be explained either by the extrinsic, instantaneous determinations of mechanical sociologism or by the purely internal but equally instantaneous determination of spontaneist subjectivism. (p. 54)
łThrough the habitus, the structure of which it is the product governs practice, not along the paths of a mechanical determinism, but within the constraints and limits initially set on its inventions. This infinite yet strictly limited generative capacity is difficult to understand only so long as one remains locked in the usual antimonies which the concept of the habitus aims to transcend of determinism and freedom, conditioning and creativity, consciousness and the unconscious, or the individual and society. Because the habitus is an infinite capacity for generating products thoughts, perceptions, expressions for actions whose limits are set by the historically and socially situated conditions of its production, the conditioned and conditional freedom it provides is as remote from creation of unpredictable novelty as it is from simple mechanical reproduction of the original conditions.˛ (p.55)
Bourdieu, P.
(1990) The Logic of Practice. Cambridge; Polity.
Appendix
Draft Abstract of Ram Punia's Ed.D. Thesis -May 2003
MY CV is my curriculum: The Making of an International Educator with SpiritualValues
To share my embodied professional self this self-study aims to develop a discursive consciousness of my lifelong experiences as an international educator with spiritual values. Lifelong learning in vocational education and training (VET) in the Further and Higher Education (FE/HE) sector includes a variety of roles and contexts including a lecturer in Singapore and Sheffield polytechnics; a teacher trainer in Hong Kong; a consultant in Fiji; Western Samoa; Mauritius and a student of EdD at the University of Bath.
The narrative inquiry to explore the nature of my professional self is based on the dialectical relation between the self/I and the external context. Thus my CV became the curriculum of my present self in a variety of roles and contexts. Stories, cases, critical incidents, documentary evidence, literature review, interactions with significant others, academic learning and personal insights are used to produce my living educational theory.
This exploratory inquiry into the nature of my present self makes three professional contributions. Firstly, it provides useful knowledge of the professional development and achievements of a technical teacher, a teacher trainer, an international consultant, a professional educator (Whitehead, 1999), a doctor of education (Boyer 1990; Thorne and Francis 2001) and an organic intellectual/transformative educator (Tickle 2001). Secondly, a new model of curriculum development of life-long learning emerges for professional educators with spiritual values. Thirdly, action research emerges as an additional strategy for the integrated development of international aid, international education and international educators.
The emergent thesis seems to be that there is no life-long learning without a discursive consciousness of one's self. Owning (taking responsibility for the task) and contextualising (developing genuine problems and solutions to benefit the context) are the essential dimensions of a living theory of life-long learning. These dimensions emerged from spiritual belief in unity in diversity in life.
The originality of the contribution of this thesis to the academic and professional knowledge base is how I integrated my spiritual values to enhance the quality of my self and other professional selves as an international educator.
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