5.15-7.15 1WN 3.8 Tuesday 6th
and Thursday 8th November 2007, educational enquiries, understanding
learners and learning, research methods in education and dissertation writings.
After we've caught up with each others'
news from the week and looked at any writings, quotes, books and articles you
are working with I'd like to focus on the possibility that responding to
Louise's latest writings will help us to make public the educational knowledge
we express as master and doctor educators (my own terms – not yet
legitimated in the Academy!). When
I say 'responding' to the writings
I've got in mind those four questions I've been recommending to strengthen the
validity of your own writings:
i)
Is my explanation as comprehensible as it could be?
ii)
Could I improve the evidential basis of my claims to know what I am doing?
iii)
Does my
explanation include an awareness of historical and cultural influences in
what I am doing and draw on the most advanced social theories of the
day?
iv)
Am I showing that I am committed to the values that I claim to be living by?
Louise's educational enquiry is:
How do I improve my educational
relationship with the learners I work with, both adults and children?
and you can access this at:
http://www.actionresearch.net/writings/tuesdayma/louisecrippseedr311007.htm
In the headings
Louise uses to organize her writings I felt Louise focusing on what really
matters to her in a way that resonates with my own values and insights:
Why I think
educational relationships are important;
Why I want to
improve my educational relationships;
Finding an
appropriate way of researching how to improve my educational relationships;
My 'big
educational picture';
My found and
created knowledge;
Creating a
reflective space for learning;
Found
knowledge;
The importance
of creating communities of learners;
Nurturing
educational relationships;
How do I open
a respectful space for others to learn with me?
How do see
myself modelling the learner I want my pupils to be?
So what have I
learnt about how to improve my educational relationship with the learners I
work with, both adults and children?
As we respond to
Louise's writings I'd like to include my own responses using the following
ideas and references:
Why are educational
relationships important?
In my educational
relationships I've been influenced by the ideas of the Jewish Theologian,
Martin Buber where he writes about the special humility of the education:
"If this educator should ever
believe that for the sake of education he
has to practise selection and arrangement, then he will be guided by
another criterion than that of inclination, however legitimate this may be in
its own sphere; he will be guided by the recognition of values which is in his
glance as an educator. But even then his selection remains suspended, under
constant correction by the special humility of the educator for whom the life
and particular being of all his pupils is the decisive factor to which his
'hierarchical' recognition is subordinated." (Buber,
p. 122, 1947)
I see Louise expressing
this humanity in her educational relationship and I'd like to check the
validity of my perceptions in relation to you and Louise.
I think Gert Biesta
(2006) is advocating a similar focus on the particular being of our
pupils/students when he writes about the need to develop a language that goes
beyond a language of learning into a language of education. I think Louise; as
could we all, find support in Biesta's writings for articulating our own
meanings about our own uniqueness and the uniqueness of each of our
pupils/students. I also think
Biesta's distinction between learning as a process in which we master something
that is external to us (such as a given curriculum) and learning as a response
in which we are coming into the world as unique individuals, is most
significant in distinguishing educational relationships. Biesta sees learning
as response as more educationally significant than learning as process.
"One of the central
ideas of the book is that we come into the world as unique individuals through
the ways in which we respond responsibly to what and who is other. I argue that
the responsibility of the educator not only lies in the cultivation of "worldly
spaces" in which the encounter with otherness and difference is a real
possibility, but that it extends to asking "difficult questions": questions
that summon us to respond responsively and responsibly to otherness and
difference in our own, unique ways." (p. Ix)
"What is
learning? Learning theorists of both an individualistic and a sociocultural
bent have developed a range of accounts of how learning – or more
precisely, how the process of learning – takes place. Although
they differ in their description and explanation of the process, for example,
by focusing on processes in the brain or legitimate peripheral participation,
many of such accounts assume that learning has to do with the acquisition of
something "external," something that existed before the act of learning and
that, as a result of learning, becomes the possession of the learner. This is
what many people have in mind when they say that someone has learned
something." (p. 26)
"We can, however,
also look at learning from a different angle and see it as a response.
Instead of seeing learning as an attempt to acquire, to master, to internalize,
or any other possessive metaphors we can think of, we might see learning as a
reaction to a disturbance, as an attempt to recognize and reintegrate as a
result of disintegration. We might look at learning as a response to what is
other and different, to what challenges, irritates, or even disturbs us, rather
than as the acquisition of something we want to possess. Both ways of looking
at learning- learning as acquisition and learning as responding – might
be equally valid, depending, that is, on the situation in which we raise
questions about the definition of learning. But as I will argue in more details
in subsequent chapters, the second conception of learning is educationally the
more significant, if it is conceded that education is not just about the
transmission of knowledge, skills and values, but is concerned with the
individuality, subjectivity, or personhood of the student, with their "coming
into the world" as unique, singular beings. (p. 27)."
Finding an
appropriate way of researching how to improve educational relationships
I am assuming that the
way we research questions of improving educational relationships is influenced
by our understandings of educational theories that can explain how to improve
these relationships. Here is a mistake I made about the nature of educational
theory that I would like you to avoid.
Between 1968-1972,
during my first five years teaching in secondary schools, my continuing professional
development focused on an Academic Diploma in the philosophy and psychology of
education and then a Master's Degree in the psychology of education, at the
University of London, Institute of Education. I wanted to enhance my
understandings of educational theory and research methods in education so that
I could use this knowledge in helping my pupils to improve their learning.
During these four years
CPD my tutors at the Institute focused on developing my understandings of the
conceptual frameworks and methods of validation in their disciplines of
education. There was no focus on my educational practices with my pupils. There
was no focus on improving my educational influence with my pupils. It took me a
long time – some three years – before I began to appreciate that
the way of researching how to improve my educational relationships, based on
their disciplines approach to educational theory, was mistaken. The dominant
view of what counted, as educational theory was known as the 'disciplines' approach.
It was called the 'disciplines' approach because of the explicit assumption
that educational theory was constituted by the philosophy, psychology,
sociology and history of education.
My recognition of a
mistake in this approach to educational theory developed during 1971-2. It
changed the focus of my vocation in education. It changed from teaching science
in comprehensive schools to the recognition of the need for the profession to
reconstruct its educational theory. In 1973 I was fortunate to be able to
satisfy this change of vocational commitment through moving from being Head of
a Science Department at Erkenwald Comprehensive School in Barking to becoming a
Lecturer in the School of Education of the University of Bath.
The mistake in the
'disciplines' approach was clearly acknowledged in 1983 by Paul Hirst one of
the key proponents of the approach when he wrote:
Much understanding of educational theory
will be developed:
"... in the context of immediate
practical experience and will be co-terminous with everyday understanding. In
particular, many of its operational principles, both explicit and implicit,
will be of their nature generalisations from practical experience and have as
their justification the results of individual activities and practices.
In many characterisations of educational
theory, my own included, principles justified in this way have until recently
been regarded as at best pragmatic maxims having a first crude and superficial
justification in practice that in any rationally developed theory would be
replaced by principles with more fundamental, theoretical justification. That
now seems to me to be a mistake. Rationally defensible practical principles, I
suggest, must of their nature stand up to such practical tests and without that
are necessarily inadequate."
(Hirst, 1983, p. 18)
I'd like you not only
to avoid this mistake. I'd like you to feel an educational responsibility for
generating and sharing your educational theory of improving educational
relationships.
In my own 'living'
educational theory approach to improving educational relationships I see
educational theories as constituted by the explanations that individuals
produce for their educational influences in their own learning in the learning
of others and in the learning of social formations. I believe that you already embody the educational knowledge
of master and doctor educators and that it is possible to make this knowledge
public through generating and sharing our living educational theories. These
theories include both the values-laden practical principles that you use to
make sense of your lives and include insights from a range of other theories.
These theories include the disciplines of education. I believe that Louise is
already integrating such insights into her educational enquiry and you can help
to test the validity of this belief.
In 1975-76 my
understandings of how to research educational relationships in improving
practice moved forward dramatically with the help of six teachers in the
Schools Council Mixed Ability Exercise in Science. Through our work together we
developed our understandings of our use of action reflection cycles in
questions of the kind, 'How do I improve what I am doing?' In these cycles, we
would express and clarify our concerns, based on our values of what really
mattered to us. We would imagine possible ways of improving our practice and
choose one to act on in an action plan. We would act and gather data with which
to make a judgement on our influences in the learning of pupils. We would
evaluate the influences of our actions in relation to our values, our understandings
and our own and our pupils' learning. We would modify our concerns, action plan
and actions in the light of the evaluations. We produced an explanation for our
learning and strengthened the validity of the explanation through subjecting it
to the mutual rational controls of a validation group in a process of
democratic evaluation.
I like the visual
representation of action reflection cycles in the TASC wheel (Thinking Actively
in a Social Context) produced by Belle Wallace and I have included both action
reflection cycles in the Action Planner section of http://www.actionresearch.net at: http://www.actionresearch.net/writings/jack/arplanner.htm
I offer my claims,
about the validity and usefulness of action reflection cycles in researching
improving educational relationships to you, to evaluate the validity of the
claim in relation to your own experience and understandings.
As well as being interested in the
methodologies and methods for researching educational relationships I am also
interested in researching the nature of the knowledge that we are creating.
In my own search for
appropriate ways of researching the processes of improving my educational
relationships I have focused on the importance that Donald Schon (1995) gave to
producing a new epistemology for the new scholarship of teacher knowledge when
he wrote:
I argue in this
article that if the new scholarship is to mean anything, it must imply a kind
of action research with norms of its own, which will conflict with the norms of
technical rationality--the prevailing epistemology built into the research
universities. (p.27)
The new scholarship
implies action research. The new categories of scholarly activity must take the
form of action research. What else could they be? They will not consist in
laboratory experimentation or statistical analysis of variance, nor will they
consist only or primarily in the reflective criticism and speculation familiar
to the humanities. (p.30)
The problem of
changing the universities so as to incorporate the new scholarship must
include, then, how to introduce action research as a legitimate and
appropriately rigorous way of knowing and generating knowledge. If we are not
prepared to take on this task, I don't understand what it is we are espousing
when we espouse the new scholarship. If we are prepared to take it on, then we
have to deal with what it means to introduce an epistemology of reflective
practice into institutions of higher education dominated by technical
rationality. (pp. 30-31)
And finally, this
story suggests that the problem of introducing and legitimizing in the
university the kinds of action research associated with the new scholarship is
one not only of the institution but of the scholars themselves. (p.33)
In generating our own
unique explanations of our educational influences in learning in our
educational relationships I am suggesting that we pay close attention to the
explanatory principles we use to explain why we are doing what we are doing. I
have suggested that we cannot do anything we believe to be educational, without
the recognition of a flow of life-affirming energy in our values-laden
explanatory principles. I believe
that Louise can be seen to be expressing this life-affirming energy with values
in the video-clips in her visual narrative (as can I in the second of the two
clips).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Ck_ECxcaEc
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qu_YSX7SlI0
However you chose to
express and communicate the meanings of such a flow of life-affirming energy
with values, I believe that it is related to what Tillich is drawing our
attention to when he writes about being affirmed by the power of being-itself:
It is the state of being grasped by the
power of being which transcends everything that is and in which everything that
is participates. He who is grasped by this power is able to affirm himself
because he knows that he is affirmed by the power of being-itself. In this
point mystical experience and personal encounter are identical. In both of them
faith is the basis of the courage to be. (Tillich,
1973, p. 168)
I think we will all have our own unique
constellations of values and life-affirming energies and ways of communicating
our explanatory principles. In sharing these I think that we will come to
understand each other better and enhance the flow of values that carry hope for
the future of humanity. I like the
way Erich Fromm says that
"...if a person can
face the truth without panic they will realise that there is no purpose to life
other than that which they create for themselves through their loving
relationships and productive work. " (Fromm, 1960, p. 18).
I also identify with
Bataille's writings about the energy of eroticism when he writes of assenting
to life up to the point of death:
"Eroticism, it may be said, is assenting
to life up to the point of death." (Bataille, 1987,
p. 11).
If you decide to develop a living theory
approach to researching improvements in educational relationships I think you
will be faced with a problem! I am thinking of the problem of seeking to
communicate explanations of your educational influences in your educational
relationships that are being generated in the constantly changing relational
dynamics of the relationships themselves. Yaakub Murray has expressed this
tension of seeking to stabilise explanations for the purposes of communication
while recognising their dynamic form:
"One
of the consequences of my epistemological nomadism for producing a clearly
communicable text that I have come to understand through my inquiry is that I
have this creative, excessive, or 'leaky' (Lather, 1993) tendency where my
imagination is still working out the possibilities that have moved further on
than I have been able to communicate in my text. This produces a 'gap' because
I have not stabilized either my meanings of writings before I have moved on
again in the direction of new, insightful 'oases'.
The
flow of my liquid imagination requires a solution, or moment of stability,
perhaps a stabilising process, in which the runaway liquidity of my meanings
are staunched just long enough for me to translocate them in communicable ways
into my text. This tension of exposing and opening up new ideas set against the
practical need to hold them steady and stabilise them so that I can communicate
their meanings has remained with me throughout my research inquiry as a journey
of liquid discovery, and ever-present in my writing–up process. I have not
resolved this issue. The tension remains: I imagine it will require a very
conscious effort of self-discipline on my part whenever I write. "(Murray, 2007, p. 208)
As we learn how to improve our educational
research I'd like to see if Patti Lather's idea of 'ironic validity' is useful
to bear in mind. As Editor of Educational Researcher, Robert Donmoyer was faced
with conflicting notions of validity in educational research. I had to re-read
several times Patti Lather's point about ironic validity being related to a
'failure to represent what it points toward but can never reach...' I'll check
that the following quote is comprehensible in relation to your own
understandings of validity:
First the practical problem: Today there
is as much variation among qualitative researchers as there is between
qualitative and quantitatively orientated scholars. Anyone doubting this claim
need only compare Miles and Huberman's (1994) relatively traditional conception
of validity <'The meanings emerging from the data have to be tested for
their plausibility, their sturdiness, their 'confirmability' – that is,
their validity' (p.11)> with Lather's discussion of ironic validity:
"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.)
As we think about the
nature of educational relationships and how to research their improvement, I'm
aware of how influenced I am by Alan Rayner's idea of inclusionality where he
writes about a shift in logic from absolutely fixed to relationally dynamic:
Shifting the
Logical Premise - From Orthodox Imposition to Heterodox Inclusion
At the heart
of inclusionality, then, is a simple shift in the way we frame reality, from
absolutely fixed to relationally dynamic. This shift arises from perceiving
space and boundaries as connective, reflective and co-creative, rather than
severing, in their vital role of producing heterogeneous form and local
identity within a featured rather than featureless, dynamic rather than static,
Universe.
We hence move from perceiving space as 'an absence of
presence' – an emptiness that we exclude from our focus on material
things – to appreciating space as a 'presence of absence', an
inductive 'attractor' whose ever-transforming shape provides the
coherence and creative potential for evolutionary processes of all kinds to
occur. Correspondingly, we extend beyond orthodox impositional logic based on
the notion of discrete objects transacting within pre-set limits of Cartesian
space, to the heterodox inclusional logic of distinct, ever-transforming
relational places with reciprocally coupled insides and outsides communicating
through intermediary domains. In other words, we move from the 'logic of the
excluded middle' to the 'logic of the included middle'.
To
make this shift does not depend on new scientific knowledge or conjecture about
supernatural forces, extraterrestrial life or whatever. All it requires is
awareness and assimilation into understanding of the spatial possibility that
permeates within, around and through natural features from sub-atomic to
Universal in scale. We can then see through the illusion of 'solidity' that has
made us prone to regard 'matter' as 'everything' and 'space' as 'nothing', and
hence get caught in the conceptual addiction and affliction of 'either/or'
'dualism'. An addiction that so powerfully and insidiously restricts our
philosophical horizons and undermines our compassionate human spirit and
creativity. (Rayner, 2004)
If you want to see
Alan explaining the significance of dynamic boundaries in inclusionality so
have a look at:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yVa7FUIA3W8
As you enhance your educational research
you might also like to bear in mind Marian Dadds' and Susan Hart's point about
methodological inventiveness"
" The importance of methodological
inventiveness
Perhaps the most important new insight
for both of us has been awareness that, for some practitioner researchers,
creating their own unique way through their research may be as important as
their self-chosen research focus. We had understood for many years that
substantive choice was fundamental to the motivation and effectiveness of
practitioner research (Dadds 1995); that what practitioners chose to research
was important to their sense of engagement and purpose. But we had understood
far less well that how practitioners chose to research, and their sense of
control over this, could be equally important to their motivation, their sense
of identity within the research and their research outcomes." (Dadds &
Hart, p. 166, 2001)
If our aim is to create conditions that
facilitate methodological inventiveness, we need to ensure as far as possible
that our pedagogical approaches match the message that we seek to communicate.
More important than adhering to any specific methodological approach, be it that
of traditional social science or traditional action research, may be the
willingness and courage or practitioners – and those who support them
– to create enquiry approaches that enable new, valid understandings to
develop; understandings that empower practitioners to improve their work for
the beneficiaries in their care. Practitioner research methodologies are with
us to serve professional practices. So what genuinely matters are the purposes
of practice which the research seeks to serve, and the integrity with which the
practitioner researcher makes methodological choices about ways of achieving
those purposes. No methodology is, or should, cast in stone, if we accept that
professional intention should be informing research processes, not pre-set ideas
about methods of techniques." (Dadds & Hart, p.
169, 2001)
In the exercise of your methodological
inventiveness I'm wondering if you will feel it necessary to acknowledge the
significance of love in an explanation of why you are doing what you are doing.
I know that loving what I do in education has been most significant in my
productive life. I like the way Daniel Cho focuses attention on the importance
of love in educational relationships. He points out that sexual scandals and
standardization have got in the way of acknowledging the importance of love in
educational relationships, especially in relation to our knowledge-creation. In
his response to the question, 'What's love got to do with it?' Cho responds:
From the beginning,
philosophers as different as Plato and Paulo Freire have claimed that love
plays an integral part in education and pedagogy. This role has been formulated
in many ways: love has the power to inspire students to seek after knowledge,
love can unite the teacher and student in the quest for knowledge, and the love
of learning can even empower students to challenge knowledge thereby pushing
its limits. Though love has long been viewed as a positive force in the teaching
and learning processes, two recent phenomena have called the necessity
of love into question, namely, teacher-student sexual scandal and the
standardization movement. Each phenomenon highlights a different problematic
associated with love: sexual scandal points to the vague line between love and
sex, while the standardization of knowledge and increased reliance on
standardized testing implicitly devalue love as being irrelevant and even
damaging in its potential to bias the assessment of student work. (Cho, 2005, p. 79)
In his point about acknowledging the educational influence of erotic
energy in classrooms – the energy I usually call a flow of life-affirming
enquiry - Cho writes:
"At first glance, the erotic position is very provocative, and for this
reason easy to dismiss, yet this very provocation raises the crucial question:
What is at stake when eros is not allowed in the classroom? Perhaps bell hooks
provides the best response:
''To restore passion to the classroom or to excite it in classrooms
where it
has never been, professors must find again the place of eros within
ourselves and
together allow the mind and body to feel and know desire.'' (hooks, 1994, p. 199)
Central to this notion of pedagogy is its intent to incite the student's
desire to learn and pursue knowledge, not for knowledge's sake, but because
that knowledge will be transformative for the student in terms of how the
student thinks about the world. Such an understanding of transformative
learning creates the potential for altering the structures of oppression that
are reproduced by dominant frames of knowledge: incited by eros, students
unabashedly question the ''as suchness'' of official knowledge. Furthermore, by
allowing eros to enter the classroom, the classroom is itself transformed into
a space where critical knowledge — and, for hooks, the transformation of
oppression — can be pursued.
In hooks's view, an eroticized pedagogy does not mean a sexualized
pedagogy but one that is passionate and inspiring." (Cho, 2005, p. 83)
My last point is related to the third of
the four criteria I suggest we use to enhance the validity of our accounts:
i)
Is my explanation as comprehensible as it could be?
ii)
Could I improve the evidential basis of my claims to know what I am doing?
iii)
Does my explanation include an awareness of historical and cultural influences
in what I am doing and draw on the most advanced social theories of the day?
iv)
Am I showing that I am committed to the values that I claim to be living by?
Does my explanation include an awareness of historical and cultural
influences in
what I am doing and draw on the most advanced social theories of the
day?
One of the reasons I tend to focus on an awareness and understanding of
historical and cultural influences is due to a tendency, described by Bernstein
(2000), to engage in conversations about relationships within schools, as if
they were disconnected from the socio-cultural, historical and political
relations outside the school. He refers to such conversations as mythological
discourses:
"I would like to propose that the trick
whereby the school disconnects the hierarchy of success internal to the school
from social class hierarchies external to the school is by creating a
mythological discourse and that this mythological discourse incorporates some
of the political ideology and arrangement of the society.
First of all, it is clear that conflict,
or potential conflict, between social groups may be reduced or contained by
creating a discourse which emphasises what all groups share, their communality,
their apparent interdependence.
By creating a fundamental identity, a discourse is created which generates what I shall call horizontal solidarities among their staff and students, irrespective of the political ideology and social arrangement of the society. The discourse which produces horizontal solidarities or attempts to produce such solidarities from this point of view I call a mythological discourse. This mythological discourse consists of two pairs of elements which, although having different functions, combine to reinforce each other. One pair celebrates and attempts to produce a united, integrated, apparently common national consciousness; the other pair work together to disconnect hierarchies within the school from a causal relation with social hierarchies outside the school." (Bernstein, 2000, p. xxiii)
What I believe Louise achieves in her response to her question:
How do I improve my educational
relationship with the learners I work with, both adults and children?
is the integration of her inclusional understandings of the non-local,
historical, cultural and other social and cosmological influences. I'm
wondering if you see this integration in Louise's explanation of her
educational influences in her own learning as she seeks to help her pupils and
colleagues to improve their educational influences in their learning from
within their educational relationships in their local context?
Looking forward to our conversations this
week.
References
Bataille, G. (1987) Eroticism. London, New
York; Marion Boyars.
Bernstein, B. (2000) Pedagogy, Symbolic Control and Identity: Theory, Research, Critique. Lanham, Boulder, New York, Oxford; Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
Biesta, G. J. J.
(2006) Beyond Learning; Democratic Education for a Human Future. Boulder;
Paradigm Publishers.
Buber, M. (1947) Between Man and Man.
London; Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co. Ltd.
Cho, D. (2005) Lessons Of Love: Psychoanalysis And Teacher-Student Love.
Educational Theory Vol. 55,
No 1, 79-95.
Dadds, M. & Hart, S. (2001) Doing
Practitioner Research Differently, London; RoutledgeFalmer.
Donmoyer, R. (1996) Educational Research in an Era of
Paradigm Proliferation: What's a Journal Editor to Do? Educational
Researcher,
Vol. 25, No.2, pp. 19-25.
Fromm, E. (1960) The Fear of Freedom, p. 18, London; Routledge &
Kegan Paul.
Hirst, P. (Ed.) (1983) Educational Theory
and its Foundation Disciplines. London; Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Murray, Y. P. (2007) How I
develop a cosmopolitan academic practice in moving through narcissistic injury
with educational responsibility: a contribution to an epistemology and
methodology of educational knowledge. Ph.D. submission to the University of
Bath, August, 2007.
Rayner, A. (2004)
Inclusionality: The Science, Art and Spirituality of Place, Space and
Evolution. Retrieved 2 November 2007 from http://people.bath.ac.uk/bssadmr/inclusionality/placespaceevolution.html
Schon, D. (1995) The
New Scholarship Requires a New Epistemology. Change, Nov./Dec. 1995 27 (6) pp. 27-34.
Tillich, P. (1973) The Courage To Be,
London; Fontana.