Why am I doing what I am doing? How am I doing what I am doing? How do I know that I am doing what I think I am doing?'
Jack Whitehead, Department of Education, University of Bath
30 March 2007
Bearing Louise Cripps' desire in mind. That is to understand me in a way that can help her to understand herself better.
Looking at the still images above and then at the moving images of the DVD I made of our session about what really matters to us, on the 27th March, I'm struck by the need to develop forms of visual narrative that can communicate the relational dynamics of our lives. I'm thinking here of explaining our educational influences in our own learning and in the learning of others with the use of our values and life-affirming energy as explanatory principles for what we are doing. I'm thinking of using the values we say matter to us in standards of judgment for evaluating the validity of any claims we make that we know what we are doing.
When I began writing a few minutes ago I put the title:
|Why do I do
what I do? How do I do what I do? How do I know that what I think I do, I do?
As I looked at the still images and the moving images I decided to change my title to reflect a moving and relational educational influence so that it became:
Why am I doing
what I am doing? How am I doing what I am doing? How do I know that I am doing
what I think I am doing?'
Here is the transcript of what I said last Tuesday. I think you will hear that I start with 'Why do I do what I do?' and that I finish with a commitment to finding a form of visual representation that helps you (and me) to create and share y/our stories of our lives as educators so that others can learn from them:
"Why do I do what I do? It is in relation to what you have just been saying I think.
I'm convinced that if I can find a way of helping you to bring your stories of
you living the values you've just been talking about more fully into the world
so that they can be shared with others then those very qualities that you have
been talking about with passionate commitment are the ones that will help the
world to become a better place to be.
You know when you first came and you were a bit anxious about the writing. Now for me it was a real delight when I saw that first assignment - the clarity of the writing – it's the feeling, - right that's what I want to get out into the world so that others can learn from it. Now one of my problems is trying to show the quality of the connections between people. So as you have been speaking now what I want to be able to do is to offer a visual representation that reflects back to us all the values being expressed but then in a dynamic way so that they move on and so that we can be seen to be living the implications of the values that we say we hold. That's what I'm committed to. Is that clear?" (Jack Whitehead, video-clip of 27/03/07)
In thinking about how I am doing what I am doing, I believe that my methodology is grounded in my ontology and you can test the validity of what I am now going to say in terms of your own experience. I believe that I communicate a faith in the value of your embodied knowledge as educators. I believe that I express this faith as a life-affirming energy and a passionate interest in helping/tutoring you in your educational enquiries. I believe that I express this faith as I focus with you on gaining academic recognition for your embodied knowledge as master educators as extend the growth of y/our educational knowledge.
I think the above images might give some indication of what I am meaning by a flow of life-affirming energy. I think the moving images on the DVD provide a clearer expression of this energy. I chose the still images from the video-clips because I felt attuned to the expression of what I experience as your own life-affirming energy as I felt your presence through the video.
So, in explaining how I am doing what I am doing I focus on the expression of my own life-affirming energy and the pleasure that is evoked in me as I experience the expression of your own energy and pleasure through your presence. What I also think I do is to invite you to talk about what really matters to you in what you are doing in education. I think the evidence for this is on the DVD.
As I listen to what you are saying and how you are saying it my intuition tunes in to the energy and values that I think are motivating you to want to improve what you are doing, in relation to what you feel and believe are in the educational interests of your pupils.
As I tune into these values, through a feeling of resonance, I ask questions about the context of your work and focus on the tensions that I describe as living contradictions in the sense that you hold together both the experience of the values that matter to you and your experience that they are not being lived as fully as you believe to be possible. In my experience, the educational imaginations of individuals generate ideas of possible ways to improve practice.
I draw on my understanding of action reflection cycles for enquiries of the kind, 'how do I improve what I am doing?' to focus on the development of the decision to act on one possibility for improvement in an action plan.
Because of my commitment to enhancing professionalism with practitioner-researcher I stress the importance of gathering data as one is acting. I focus on the importance of data that can be used to judge the educational influence of the actions in relation to pupils'/students' learning.
Because I have seen practitioner-researchers suffering from data overload if they leave it longer than 5 or 6 weeks before using their data in an account of their educational influences learning, I advocate the production of an account in which the individual evaluates the effectiveness of their actions in terms of their values, ideas and understandings.
Because of the importance of 'critical friends' in a validation group in helping an enquiry to move forward, I encourage the sharing of accounts with peers. I advocate the asking of questions that focus on enhancing the comprehensibility of the account, the quality of the evidence used to justify assertions, the explication of the normative background of the account that usually remains implicit and the modification of concerns, ideas and actions in the light of contributions from the validation group. I developed this understanding of social validity from the work of Jurgen Habermas in his 1976 book on Communication and the Evolution of Society.
I have taken to calling your living educational theories
your explanations of your educational influences in your own learning, in the
learning of others and in the learning of social formations. I have developed
the idea of living educational theories to distinguish these explanations from
the explanations derived from theories in the philosophy, sociology,
psychology, history, leadership, economics, theology and management of
education. It isn't that I don't value insights from these theories. It is just
that in my early studies of educational theory at the Institute of Education,
it was held that the practical principles I used to explain my educational
influence in enquiries of the kind, 'how do I improve my practice?' should be
replaced, in any rationally developed theory, by principles with more
theoretical justification from the 'disciplines' of education. My objection to
the dominant view of educational theory led me to change my vocation from being
a science teacher in comprehensive schools from 1967-1973 to becoming, in 1973,
an educational researcher with a focus on the generation and testing of
educational theory in a University. I hope that this adds to your understanding
of both how I am doing what I am doing and
why I am doing what I am doing.
In terms of the question How do I know that I am doing what I think I am doing? you might wonder why I think that this is a significant question on the grounds that it is obvious that we know what we are doing. In my case I was shocked in 1971 to discover that I could not assume that I knew what I was doing. I made this discovery as the Head of a Science Department in a Comprehensive School. An Inspector in the Local Authority provided me with a video camera and recorder and asked if I would explore its potential. I had no more guidance than that! The first thing I did was video-tape a lesson of my own and watch it. My greatest shock was in seeing that I wasn't doing what I thought I was doing. I thought that I had established enquiry learning in my science lessons where the questions were coming from my pupils and I was responding to them to help to take their enquiries forward. The video-tape showed that I was providing most of the questions and that the way I was structuring the learning resources in the classroom did not permit the kind of flexibility of response I thought that I was making. It wasn't that I was a hypocrite in saying that I believed in one thing while consciously doing another. As I watched the video I felt myself to be a living contradiction in holding certain values while at the same time negating them in my practice. My imagination immediately got to work producing possibilities that would enable me to live my values more fully in my practice. The desire to promote enquiry learning is still with me as I hope you are experiencing in my support for your educational enquiries.
This experience of feeling myself to be a living contradiction highlighted the importance of submitting my explanations of my educational influence to the mutual rational control of conversations with peers who would ask the above questions as part of a process of social validation. It isn't that the process of social validation determines what I believe to be the validity of my explanations. It certainly influences my belief that I know that I am doing what I think I am doing. Another part of this belief is grounded in personal knowledge with Michael Polanyi's (1958, London; Routledge) insight that a commitment to personal knowledge involves a decision to understand the world from one's own point of view as a person claiming originality and exercising judgment responsibly, with universal intent.
Just wondering if this helps with understanding why I am doing what I am doing, how I am doing what I am doing and how I know that I am doing what I think I am doing? Just say if you'd like me to focus on anything else that might help you to understand better and me to communicate better.
Love Jack.
Quotation from Habermas.
"I shall develop the thesis
that anyone acting communicatively must, in performing any speech action, raise
universal validity claims and suppose that they can be vindicated (or
redeemed). Insofar as he wants to participate in a process of reaching
understanding, he cannot avoid raising the following – and indeed
precisely the following – validity claims. He claims to be:
1. Uttering something understandably;
2. Giving (the hearer) something to understand;
3. Making himself thereby understandable. And
4. Coming to an understanding with another person.
The speaker must choose a
comprehensible expression so that speaker and hearer can understand one
another. The speaker must have the intention of communicating a true
proposition (or a propositional content, the existential presuppositions of
which are satisfied) so that the hearer can share the knowledge of the speaker.
The speaker must want to express his intentions truthfully so that the hearer
can believe the utterance of the speaker (can trust him). Finally, the speaker
must choose an utterance that is right so that the hearer can accept the utterance
and speaker and hearer can agree with on another in the utterance with respect
to a recognized normative background. Moreover, communicative action can
continue undisturbed only as long as participants suppose that the validity
claims they reciprocally raise are justified." (Habermas, 1976, pp. 2-3)
Habermas, J. (1976) Communication
and the evolution of society. London : Heinemann