5.15-7.00 1WN 3.8 Tuesday evening 13/06/06

Looking forward to seeing you tomorrow. I've been thinking over the weekend about how we might move alongside Ed in the creation of his educational enquiry to strengthen our research methods in education account.

After we've looked at anything you've brought to share, I'd like to look at this difference between 'spectator' truth and 'living truth':

Existentialists such as Gabriel Marcel (cf. Keen, 1966) distinguish between "spectator" truth and "living" truth. The former is generated by disciplines (e.g., experimental science, psychology, sociology) which rationalise reality and impose on it a framework which helps them to understand it but at the expense of oversimplifying it. Such general explanations can be achieved only by standing back from and "spectating" the human condition from a distance, as it were, and by concentrating on generalities and ignoring particularities which do not fit the picture. Whilst such a process is very valuable, it is also very limited because it is one step removed from reality. The "living" "authentic" truth of a situation can be fully understood only from within the situation though the picture that emerges will never be as clear-cut as that provided by "spectator" truth."

Burke, A.(1992, p.222).

Burke, A.(1992, p.222) Teaching: Retrospect and Prospect. Footnote 6 on p. 222, OIDEAS, Vol. 39, pp. 5-254.

What I'd like to work on with Ed is in transforming the feeling of inertia that accompanies for Ed (and I suspect the rest of us) the 'framing' of discursive talk into something acceptable for the Academy, into the flow of passionate energy and creative enquiry that characterizes our educational desire and hope in our classrooms. Ed writes:

I'm getting interested in the idea of work as art, or my professional life as a different "field of action" (as the Bhagavad Gita describes it) for my creative drives. Seeing the stone sculpture on Tuesday has helped me see parallels in the works I produce at home (for example, a cumulatively drilled and eroded stone, left to gather lichen and other patination, an artificial approximation to a "natural" piece of stone) and my approach to developing my nursery environment/curriculum (small cumulative changes and additions, left to grow their own 'culture', with the end result being as close as I can artificially achieve to being a natural place for growth and learning).......it's in the translation or framing of this discursive talk into something acceptable to what you call the academy that I feel the greatest inertia.... Anything that brings them alive, and makes them both personal and interesting to others (a definition of satisfying art?) is important.

I've updated my attempt to mediate The Given Curriculum into A Living Curriculum at

http://www.actionresearch.net/writings/tuesdayma/rmewordjw.htm

If you open this and browse through it there are two ideas I'd like to bring into our conversation to see if we are using the terms in a similar or comprehensible way (See if there is anything else that catches your fancy that you'd like to explore further). The first is the idea of paradigm and the second is Patti Lather's idea of 'ironic validity'. Do scroll down to the quote from Donmoyer and his piece on the paradigm wars where he quote Patti Lather and risks giving Ros apoplexy:

"Contrary to dominant validity practices where the rhetorical nature of scientific claims is masked with methodological assurances, a strategy of ironic validity proliferates forms, recognizing that they are rhetorical and without foundation, postepistemic, lacking in epistemological support. The text is resituated as a representation of its 'failure to represent what it points toward but can never reach.... (Lather, 1994, p. 40-41)'." (Donmoyer, 1996 p.21.)

I'd like to focus on the meaning of ironic validity in "The text is resituated as a representation of its 'failure to represent what it points towards but can never reach'...." In relation to what we are working at explaining in terms of our educational influences in our own learning, in our students learning and in the learning of the social formations in which we are living and working.

I've updated the e-journal information to include references to papers in Educational Researcher by Kathy Carter on story in educational research, Robert Donmoyer on paradigm proliferation and Jean Clandinin and Michael Connolly on story in teacher research . http://www.actionresearch.net/writings/monday/libraryejournals.htm

Looking forward to seeing you on Tuesday evening.

Love Jack.