Practitioner Enquiry and Living Educational Theories
A Workshop with Jack Whitehead at York St. John University
20th October 2007
Drawing on resources from http://www.actionresearch.net
i)
Because I believe
that the expression of our embodied knowledges as professional educators is
highly significant in our educational influence with our pupils and students, I
want to see this embodied knowledge legitimated in the Academy as contributions
to educational knowledge in masters and doctoral degrees. Whenever I am present
with professional educators I am aware of feeling the significance of the
knowledge embodied in each one of us. I am thinking particularly of the life
affirming and energy flowing values that form explanatory principles in why we
do what we do in our educational relationship. I am hoping that you are
experiencing this life-affirming energy flowing from me at this moment because
I am loving what I do in education. Here are two video-clips to show the expression
of such a loving life-affirming energy in the recognition of the other as a
living standard of judgment in my understanding of an 'educational'
relationship. The first is of a response from Cheryl Black, a Canadian teacher,
taken in 2000, to one of who pupils. The second is of Moira Laidlaw from 2004
while on VSO at Guyuan Teachers College in China. Both clips are about a
minute. The student with Cheryl
brushes some chalk from Cheryl's jacket. Cheryl turns round and expresses her
recognition of the students with a flow of life-affirming energy and pleasure.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rvLyxLU1o3U
(this should open immediately)
http://www.bath.ac.uk/~edsajw/stand/cbs.mov (this will take several minutes to download
using broadband but has the advantage of opening in Quicktime with a smooth
cursor action that allows you to move the clip forward and backwards quickly).
The clip below is of
Moira Laidlaw and her students at the end of a lesson. I had turned the camera
off but as I saw Moira walk to the door to be with her students I turned it on
again. I have checked with Moira and we both experience her expression of a
loving, life-affirming energy towards her students as they flow past her and as
she communicates with one student at the end of the clip.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z1jEOhxDGno
I hope that the visual images are helping you to understand
my meanings of a loving, life-affirming energy in the recognition of the other.
I use such meanings as standards of judgment in my own recognition of an
educational relationship.
ii)
I now want to
affirm the value of your embodied knowledge in what you are doing, through a
conversation with a partner (some 4 minutes each) about what really matters to
you and what you would like to improve in your professional practice. I'd like
you to make the other the focus of attention in understanding what really
matters and I'll let you know when your focus of attention should change to the
other after some 4 minutes.
(Because of each
other's uniqueness and the variety of contexts in which we are living and
working, the expressions of what really matters are always mediated by our
uniqueness. As I ask for responses to what really matters, I feel inspired by
the expressions of passion for education, for the value of recognising the
value of the other, for the interest in understanding the historical, cultural
and other social influences in what we are doing, for living as fully as we can
values of freedom, justice, respect, care, love and compassion, for enhancing
the pupils' learning).
iii)
After the expression of what really
matters I like to check the validity of the action reflection cycles I use in
educational enquiries of the kind, 'How do I improve what I am doing?' These
action reflection cycles emerged for me in 1976 from working with a group of
six teachers in a local curriculum development project. My initial explanation
for what the teachers were doing was given in terms of models of change in the
teacher-learning process, of evaluation and of curriculum innovation. Because
the teachers could not see themselves in my explanation they asked me to return
to the data I had been gathering and produce a description and explanation in
which they could see themselves and their pupils. After doing this with one of
the teachers, Paul Hunt, I could see that the explanation included the action
reflection form of expressing concerns when values were not being lived as
fully as they could, of imagining ways forward and choosing one in an action
plan, of acting and gathering data with which to make a judgement on the
effectiveness of the actions, of evaluating the actions in terms of values and
understandings and of modifying the concerns, ideas and actions in the light of
the evaluations. This process also taught me the importance of producing
explanations of learning and of submitting such explanations to the mutual rational
controls of critical discussion in a validation group of peers. The report of
the local curriculum development is at http://people.bath.ac.uk/edsajw/writings/ilmagall.pdf
and takes about 1 minute to download using broadband. To check the validity of
my claim that the action reflection process is consistent with what you
recognise about your own way of enquiring into your questions of the kind, 'how
do I improve what I am doing?' By
checking the validity I mean that I am checking that you recognise this
disciplined process of improving practice as part of your common-sense approach
that you use in your daily practice. If you go into the action planning process
http://www.jackwhitehead.com/jack/arplanner.htm
you will find the action planner with the questions that form an action
reflection cycles and the Thinking Actively in a Social Context (TASC) wheel,
designed by Belle Wallace, that includes the action reflection cycles that I am
claiming you will recognise as consistent with your own responses to questions
about improving practice. Do let me know if you feel that my claim is not
valid, as it will help me to modify my understandings.
iv)
I now want you to talk with a partner
(four minutes each) about something that matters to you in your professional
practice and that you are in the process of improving or have worked on
recently to improve. I particularly want you to focus on how you evaluate your
effectiveness in relation to living your values more fully in your practice and
on what kind of data you could collect or have collected to help you to provide
an evidence-based claim to know what you are doing. If for any reason you are
reading this on your own do please reflect on what matters to you, what you are
improving, what data you collect and how you evaluate your effectiveness in
relation to your values.
v)
My next claim is that these values are
explanatory principles that allow you to answer questions about why you are
doing what you are doing. I am thinking of values as energy flowing, embodied
expressions of meanings and purposes you give to your lives. I am seeing these
values in terms of who you see yourself to be as a person and educator. When I
say that these values give meaning and purpose to your lives, I am meaning that
they are ontological in the sense that they are forming your theory of your own
being. Having focused on your values as explanatory principles in giving
reasons for why you do what you do, I now want to focus on the significance of
seeing yourself as a knowledge-creation in the generation of your living
educational theory. I am thinking of such theories as the explanations that
individuals produce for their educational influences in our own learning, in
the learning of others and in the learning of the social formations in which we
live and work. In stressing the importance of explaining educational influences
in learning I am agreeing with Biesta (2006) that we need to go beyond a
language of learning in developing a language of education. Like Biesta I see
that learning can be understood in terms of acquiring what is already known. It
can also be understood as a response to what is not known, to uncertainty, to
tension. In that such responses are an integral part of our unique development
as human beings I see such responses as educationally as significant, if not
more significant that acquiring existing knowledge through a given curriculum.
vi)
In seeing your knowledge-creation as
practitioner-enquiries in terms of living educational theories I want to draw
your attention to the resources at http://www.actionresearch.net
that might help you in the generation of your own living educational theories.
vii)
The first resource is the homepage
itself. If you have already clicked on http://www.actionresearch.net,
you should already be seeing something like:
In your browser, if you are a beginner action research, I'd like you to focus on the homepage with its access to the Action Planner and to Jean McNiff's booklet on concise advice for new action researchers. Jean's writings (and website at http://www.jeanmcniff.com) are the clearest and most inspiring I know for educational action researchers. If you are a master educator studying for an MA or similar degree do please access the Master Educators' Programme section at: http://people.bath.ac.uk/edsajw/mastermod.shtml
Browsing down the master educator's page in
the Understanding Learners and Learning section you will see Joy Mounter's
writings with her pupils on Can children carry
out action research about learning, creating their own learning theory? (You can access this directly from http://www.jackwhitehead.com/tuesdayma/joymounterull.htm )
At the beginning of this workshop I stress
the importance of using visual data as evidence in the communication of the
meanings of educational values in explanations of educational influence. To
distinguish the narratives that contain such video evidence from printed, text
based account I call these narratives, visual narratives. Appendix Two of Joy's
account with her pupils contains access to three video clips of Joy working
with pupils on an evaluation of the TASC action research process created by
Belle Wallace. The six year old pupils explain how the use the TASC wheel in
their own learning and how it needs to be modified as a valid representation of
their own learning. The six-year-old pupils are engaged in an educational
conversation in which they are expressing their talents and producing the gift
of their own model with their teacher for others to share and learn from. The
September 2007 Special Issue of the Journal Educational Action Research is on
Young People's Voices and I do urge you to read the contributions to this
Journal and to see how such writings might be moved on with explanations from
teachers and pupils of educational influences in their learning as they respond
to each other's enquiries and understandings.
I also want to draw your attention to Ros
Hurford's and Claire Formby's writings in the Educational Enquiry section of
the homepage.
I like very much the way that Ros Hurford
has engaged with issues of national policy on gifted and talented education in
relation to her personal and professional values in her educational enquiry:
How does the writing
of a new gifted and talented policy enable me to reflect upon and evaluate my
personal values about gifts and talents? In what ways am I living my values in
this area? This was submitted
for examination at University of Bath in September 2007 and can accessed at http://www.jackwhitehead.com/tuesdayma/roshurfordee2.htm
I am also inspired
by Claire Formby's educational
enquiry, How do I sustain a loving, receptively responsive educational
relationship with my pupils which will motivate them in their learning and
encourage me in my teaching? This
was submitted for examination at University of Bath in September 2007 and can
be accessed at
http://www.jackwhitehead.com/tuesdayma/formbyEE300907.htm
I feel particularly
inspired by Claire's account because of the way she uses a visual narrative to
communicate her meaning of a loving, receptively responsive standard of
judgment in her account of her educational practice.
In distinguishing the
contributions of educational researchers to explanations of educational
influences in learning in educational relationships I think that we will need
to develop such living standards of judgment. I gave my reasons for this in the
following short contribution to the 100th issue of Research
Intelligence of August 2007. I think there is a serious problem for educational
researchers in permitted education researchers to dominate what counts as
educational research. While the mistake, generously acknowledge by Paul Hirst
in 1983, of seeking to replace the practical principles of teachers by
principles from the disciplines of education, is well known, the move advocated
by Whitty in his 2005 Presidential Address to the British Educational Research
Association, to subordinate educational research within education research,
could contribute to sustaining this error.
Following my brief
response below to Whitty's advocacy of bringing educational research within
education research, I will turn to the living theory doctorates that are
accessible from http://www.actionresearch.net
to explain how you might draw insights from some of these in the generation of
your own living educational theories.
I want to focus on the living theory doctorates at http://people.bath.ac.uk/edsajw/living.shtml because of their new living standards of judgment in distinguishing claims to educational knowledge. I also want to use these living theories to emphasise the importance of integrating insights from the most advanced social theories of the day, about historical, cultural and other social influences, in the generation of one's own living educational theory.
If you click on any thesis, the abstract
appears and by browsing down the page you can access the content of each thesis. I want to draw your attention to Jacqueline Delong's 2002 doctorate on 'How can I improve my practice as a superintendent
of schools and create my own living educational theory? This is particularly significant because of the emphasis on the generation of a culture of inquiry in the
development of a systemic influence in a District School Board. You can access 6 volumes of Passion in Professional Practice edited by Jacqueline Delong and her colleagues from http://schools.gedsb.net/ar/passion/index.html
In 2004 the University of Bath made a significant change in its regulations
governing the presentation of research theses by allowing the submission of
e-media. Eden Charles graduated from the University in June 2007 with a visual
narrative that included his understandings of an Ubuntu way of being, enquiring
and knowing (see http://people.bath.ac.uk/edsajw/edenphd.shtml).
This relationally dynamic standard of judgment of an Ubuntu way of being that is expressed through the enquiry and way of knowing resonates with Nelson Mandela's expression of his Ubuntu way of being:
at:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ODQ4WiDsEBQ
I believe that Eden communicates this most clearly in his Section
Six on 'Me as a Consultant' (see http://www.jackwhitehead.com/edenphd/section6.pdf
- the pdf takes some 30 seconds to download with broadband).
Two other theses that have been accepted, under the new regulations
that allow e-media, are those of Marian Naidoo and Mary Hartog.
Marian integrates theories from the Theatre for Development within
her thesis on:
I
am because we are (A never ending story). The emergence of a living theory of
inclusional and responsive practice.
http://people.bath.ac.uk/edsajw/naidoo.shtml
(The videos in the hardcopy in the Library of the University have
yet to become accessible from a streamed server).
Mary integrates a critical evaluation of Women's Ways of Knowing
in her thesis on:
A
Self Study Of A Higher Education Tutor: How Can I Improve My Practice?
From: http://people.bath.ac.uk/edsajw/hartog.shtml
You can access Chapter Three on Women's Ways of Knowing: A Review and
Critique from http://people.bath.ac.uk/edsajw/hartogphd/mhch3.pdf
(The pdf file takes some 30 seconds to download with broadband and shows how
insights from theories presented in a traditional propositional form can be
integrated within the generation of a living educational theory.
In conclusion I want to draw your attention to the What's New
section of http: www.actionresearch.net and the 2007-8 e-seminar of the BERA
Practitioner-Researcher Special Interest Group. The three threads established
so far are:
Thread 1 Raising
issues, asking questions, and making networking available for
practitioner-researchers.
Thread 2 How do i~we
explain our educational influences in learning to improve our educational
influences as practitioner-researchers within the social and other formations
that dynamically include us?
I'll post my notes for
the workshop in Thread 1 and I do hope that you will join the e-seminar from
the What's New Section of http://www.actionresearch.net.
If you decide to join, just click on:
http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?SUBED1=bera-practitioner-researcher&A=1
put in your e-mail
address and name and click on the join BERA-Practitioner Researcher button. If
you want just to be able to access the archives and respond, rather than having
the e-mails coming into your inbox just check the mail delivery temporarily
disabled button at the bottom of this joining or leaving page.
I just want to end by
thanking Margaret, Mike and Tony, as your tutors for inviting me and I do hope
do see your own living educational theories flowing through web-space from your
practitioner enquiries for your masters programme and thank you for the
pleasure of your company. I'll be thinking of you as I miss the Rugby World
Final on the train from Paddington to Bath this evening!
Notes and References
from the Workshop
In response to
questions I mentioned the following and said that I would include them in my
notes for the session.
i)
The Catherine Snow
quote I like to use from her 2001 Presidential Address to the American
Educational Research Association, to justify a focus on bringing the embodied
knowledge of professional educators into the Academy for legitimation is:
"The .... challenge is to enhance the
value of personal knowledge and personal experience for practice. Good teachers
possess a wealth of knowledge about teaching that cannot currently be drawn
upon effectively in the preparation of novice teachers or in debates about
practice. The challenge here is not to ignore or downplay this personal
knowledge, but to elevate it. The knowledge resources of excellent teachers
constitute a rich resource, but one that is largely untapped because we have no
procedures for systematizing it. Systematizing would require procedures for
accumulating such knowledge and making it public, for connecting it to bodies
of knowledge established through other methods, and for vetting it for
correctness and consistency. If we had agreed-upon procedures for transforming
knowledge based on personal experiences of practice into 'public' knowledge,
analogous to the way a researcher's private knowledge is made public through
peer-review and publication, the advantages would be great (my emphasis). For
one, such knowledge might help us avoid drawing far-reaching conclusions about
instructional practices from experimental studies carried out in rarified
settings. Such systematized knowledge would certainly enrich the research-based
knowledge being increasingly introduced into teacher preparation programs. And
having standards for the systematization of personal knowledge would provide a
basis for rejecting personal anecdotes as a basis for either policy or
practice." (p.9)
Snow, C. E. (2001) Knowing What We Know:
Children, Teachers, Researchers. Presidential Address to AERA, 2001, in
Seattle, in Educational Researcher, Vol. 30, No.7, pp.3-9.
ii)
I thought the
point about the importance of energy was very significant and I mentioned
Vasilyuk's (1991) point about the
unfortunately weak conceptualisation of energy and values in psychological
explanations. My reason for pointing to the following quote from Vasilyuk is
that he is clear about the significance of working on appropriate
conceptualisations and forms of representation of energy and value. This is why
I think so highly of visual narratives that include video-clips of our
educational relationships in which we are expressing our energy with values.
Such visual narratives provide us with an unprecedented opportunity to
establish new living standards of judgment in the academy that are expressing
both energy and values. Hence my showing the video-clips of the expression of
life-affirming energy and my drawing attention to masters writings on loving,
receptively responsive educational relationships.
"Conceptions involving energy are very
current in psychology, but they have been very poorly worked out from the
methodological standpoint. It is not clear to what extent these (p. 63)
conceptions are merely models of our understanding and to what extent they can
be given ontological status. Equally problematic are the conceptual links
between energy and motivation, energy and meaning, energy and value, although
it is obvious that in fact there are certain links: we know how 'energetically'
a person can act when positively motivated, we know that the meaningfulness of
a project lends additional strength to the people engaged in it, but we have very
little idea of how to link up into one whole the physiological theory of
activation, the psychology of motivation, and the ideas of energy which have
been elaborated mainly in the field of physics.
Among the more specific theoretical
problems raised one should point first of all to the paradox involved in the
psychological idea of energy: on the one hand it is held that no
'non-objective' energy, mental energy as a thing-in-itself, can exist, but on
the other hand the existence of surplus energy seeking an outlet is also
admitted. This problem is linked with the opposition of the concepts of
'energy' and 'force'. Although Hoseph Nuttin (195, p.5) writes that 'in
psychology it is generally very frequent for no distinction to be made between
'force' and 'energy', we should mention that the distinction is sometimes made.
David Rapaport and Morton M. Gill, for instance, assert that both concepts are
vitally necessary in psychology, since the concept of force cannot explain such
phenomena as 'substitution' and 'transformation', while 'energies which (be
definition) are directionless quantities cannot account for directional
phenomena' (215, p. 156)".
Vasilyuk, F. (1991) The Psychology of Experiencing: the Resolution of Life's Critical Situations. Hemel Hempstead; Harvester Wheatsheaf.
iii)
In advocating the integration of
insights from the most advanced social theories of the day in the generation of
living educational theories I use four criteria on social validity from the
work of Habermas to strengthen the validity of the accounts.
"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.
iv)
In my thinking
about the nature of the life-affirming energy I express in my educational
relationships I have been influenced by the language of Paul Tillich in his
book on The Courage To Be where he says:
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)
Tillich, P. (1973) The Courage To Be, London; Fontana.
Not having a theistic faith means that I am giving different meanings to being affirmed by the power of being-itself to the words of Tillich with his theistic faith, but I have chosen to use these words because they carry for me the feeling of the life-affirming energy I express in my educational relationships.
v) I have also been influenced by the ideas of Martin Buber where he writes about the special humility of the educator:
"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)
Buber, M. (1947) Between Man and Man. London; Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner
& Co. Ltd.
vi)
I drew attention to Margaret Farren's
work at Dublin City University on e-learning and you can access Margaret's
web-site at: http://webpages.dcu.ie/~farrenm/
You can see the details of the e-life connecting people project at Dublin City
University at http://www.jackwhitehead.com/farren/eLife.htm
vii)
The reference for
the Special Issue of Educational Action Research on Young People's Voices is
EAR Vol. 15, No. 3. September 2007.
viii)
The Ontario Action
Researcher and Action Research Expeditions, as well as the Educational Journal
of Living Theories (EJOLTS) are accepting multi-media narratives. EJOLTS is
just preparing its first issue. AR
Expeditions and OAR are well established and you can see contributions to these
at:
http://www.arexpeditions.montana.edu/articleviewer.php?AID=80
for Action Research Expeditions and
http://www.nipissingu.ca/oar/new_issue-V821E.htm
for the Ontario Action Researcher.
Action Research
Expeditions has a most impressive response section and I do hope that you will
access it and respond to any paper that interests you.