A description of my logic.
Draft paper, Moira Laidlaw,
February 2004
China's Experimental Centre
for Educational Action Research
in Foreign Languages
Teaching,
Guyuan Teachers College,
Ningxia. 756000
Preface:
I am hoping for your indulgence. I am aware that as
busy people, you are probably making a
commitment when you come to the Action Research meetings, sometimes long
distances perhaps after work. I came to the group often this when I was a
teacher at Oldfield School in Bath (beginning in 1994) and before. Exhilarating
as these meetings were for me, they required a lot of effort, especially if I'd
had a hard day at school, so I didn't always manage it. I hope you don't mind
me taking precious time at the meeting to talk about some of the ideas I've been
struggling with over the last few months. Jack has been filling me in on some
of the issues the group is debating - which largely seem to be to do with the
forms of logic each one of us is using to inform our lives. I hope that this
short position-paper has something to say to you in your own enquiries on a
value-level. I believe that discussions of our logics and values may be linked
to an improvement in our practices.
The one thing I truly miss where I am now, is the kind
of discussion I did so appreciate when I was living in Bath. So thank you all
in advance.
Introduction:
At the outset of writing this paper I am aware of
working within the logics of a dialectical tradition that embraces question and
answer as a cornerstone of epistemological truth, and what it means to create
my own living educational theory from asking questions of the kind, How can I
improve my practice? (Laidlaw, 1996), based upon a living contradiction
(Whitehead, 1989). I am also conscious of using propositional logic within my dialectical
knowledge. So far, so good!
Recently, however, I have been struck by this phrase:
'For centuries,
rationalistic thinkers have insisted on the abstraction of content from
context' (Aburrow)
This neatly encapsulates a profound doubt I have always
had that there are divisible realities we can package called 'The Ultimate
Truth' and deliver to whichever destinations we choose. My reality isn't like
that, and I suspect that your continuing presence at the meetings and the ways
in which you account for your practices, means yours aren't either.
This short paper is personal and deals with an account
of my own logic and how it influences my life. The ideas and processes of
thinking, experience and conclusions are my own and I take responsibility for
them.
First, why am I bothering to write this? Well, I want
to express myself. At the moment I am drawing together threads of what binds my
educational influences and through accounting for them, I seek to enhance their
value. I have accounted for my values elsewhere (Laidlaw, 1994, 1996, 1998,
2000, 2001, 2002, 2003a,b; and with others - Laidlaw et al, 2004) without being
conscious of the fact that this incurs descriptions and explanations of my
logic. Reaching this conclusion, although it may be obvious for you, is one
that has taken me years of hard work, so don't knock it! Seriously, though, the
slowness in reaching this conclusion is, it seems to me, typical of the logic I
am developing and for which I am trying to account in this paper. As a school-student,
my reports constantly said: Moira is a slow learner! There are, I believe, logical
reasons for my 'slowness', which are not the focus of this paper, but render
comprehensible, the way in which my ways of thinking/feeling are developed
from, and influence, my actions. More anon.
Another reason for presenting this paper to you is the
assumption that we are all concerned with clarifying the logic of our
enquiries, and seeing how these logics influence our actions. I would be really
interested to discuss how your logics and mine overlap, or are different.
In addition, it would be lovely for me to express my
sense of personal logic without getting the response, as I so often do: ÔYou
what??' Rather like the notion:
Anyone who
deviates from the norm is regarded as dysfunctional, even if they are perfectly
content with their lot. (Aburrow)
That is not, I hasten to add, the response I have had
from this group in the past, but it is a general one in my life.
In this paper, I am asserting the conclusions in
action that Lumley (2004) calls:
'togetherness
that is inductively and purely relatively achieved [being] greater than the
calculated 'integrative' form of togetherness.'
Read on!
Background:
I am a VSO[1]
volunteer in my third year of service in the foreign languages department of
the Teachers College in Guyuan, which is in the poor northwest of China. I
originally signed up for two years, am now in my first year of extension, and
expect to continue in China until at least 2006. I was initially sent to Guyuan
as an oral English teacher, negotiated after one term with my dean to run a
course of Teaching Methodology and later started a programme of AR with my
teacher-training colleagues in my spare time. On December 10th, 2003,
Guyuan Teachers College opened 'China's Experimental Centre for Educational
Action Research in Foreign Languages Teaching'. From next term I will not be
teaching at all, but co-ordinating the activities of the AR centre with Dean Tian
Fengjun. It is China's first and only AR centre. The background to how it
was set up, and the processes of learning involved can be found at:
http://www.actionresearch.net/moira.shtml
under: Action Research in China with Dr. Moira
Laidlaw. The
paper is called: How can I promote sustainability[2]
in Guyuan Teachers College and beyond? In brief, the paper outlines how, over the last two
years, I have encouraged my colleagues to reflect on their
teaching-methodology, to evaluate it and then to seek improvements through
their practice. Furthermore, I have encouraged them to account for their
educational processes and the results of some of their enquiries can be seen at
the above address. Similar AR groups have also been set up with ten English
teachers at a Middle School (secondary) in Haiyuan (about 100 km away from
Guyuan) and with a similar number in Qinyang at the Longdong Institute (about
five hours by car in the neighbouring province of Gansu).
So, what am I going to be doing for the next two
years?
Jean's visit in December, 2003, was very helpful to
all of us in clarifying the scope of the new AR centre. From mid-February,
2004, I will be co-ordinating the Action Research Centre full time. I
anticipate helping my colleagues to build their own capacities to run the AR
centre eventually by themselves, to consolidate the work already underway Ð my
colleagues' enquiries, the work at Qingyang and Haiyuan Ð and build networks, both
with educational establishments and through the internet. Jean has also helped
me to see the necessity of writing, articles, books and newsletters. Li
Peidong, Dean Tian, Zhao Xiaohong and I are separately and together involved in
the writing of joint articles at the moment, which we are hoping will be
published in national and international journals. These are at their early
stages as yet. More in a future paper.
However, what I want to look at here, is the logic
which is driving me to attempt the above. For, as Jean pointed out, what I am
doing in China isn't really so much Action Research as changing lives, using
Action Research as a method. So, let's have a look at the logic I am using.
My logic:
I believe that my life has a purpose. It's for something. I chose education
as the principle articulation of my life's focus a long time ago, or it chose
me. The distinction doesn't matter but is symptomatic of the logic I use.
I see myself as acting in the name of education and being in the loving service
of humanity.
[3]
I never doubted that I would become an educator, but quite
what I would do never seemed cut and dried to
me because the further I got into a situation and the more I knew the people
I was working with, so the situation evolved and I was catalyst and subject/object
and negotiator in those situations. I feel, particularly since starting my
action research in 1990, that I have occupied spaces in education and changed
them as they have changed me in educational directions, ones which aimed to
emancipate, to empower, to live values of human equality of opportunity and
parity of esteem (see References-section for list of papers or access them
on the web by clicking
here).
This is partly due to circumstances and luck, and
partly due to the remarkable people I have met in my life, many of them from
this group, familiar to us all, whose names I will not mention here - otherwise
someone has to go first and life isn't linear. And there are other people too.
People like my first headteacher, Mr. Richards, a visionary educator who
managed by walking around his school and knowing each student individually. Or
Dean Tian now in Guyuan, whose management style is open and encouraging. Or
further back than all that, my German teacher at school, Rene Gill who had a
passion for equality and whose every breath it seemed to me, was drawn in on
unfairness and exhaled justice. And now, I feel a certain familiar sense of not
knowing quite what I am going to do in terms of actions, but feeling very
secure in certain developmental values.
I do care passionately about education because I
believe and have seen, that education changes lives for the better. Indeed I
believe that is its purpose. Thus to be involved in education is to be involved
in making a small part of the world a better place. Better? How? Let me
explain.
Sometimes, in Guyuan, I see things which truly disturb
me, which stay with me, which agitate me and won't let me rest. Most of those I
have realised through the years, are to do with disempowerment. People denied
food, warmth, respect, education because of their circumstances. Nothing
they've done and nothing they are, just simply geography or exploitation by
those who, it seems to me, should know better. That really gets to me. It
angers me. Draws out all my sense of injustice. Makes me want to do something about it. My life
in education has become an increasingly focused response and creative impulse
whereby I, in consultation with others, can address some of the injustices of
the world as I and others see them. What gives me a huge buzz is enabling
others to empower themselves. That both satisfies the educator and the human
being in me. It is the point of connection between the two.
I can't really describe in words the satisfaction I have
when one of my young colleagues Tao Rui, for example sends me her report on
her teaching, 'How
can I improve my students' motivation so that they can improve their learning?'
in which she is accounting to herself and others about what it is she has
done in the classroom, how she has tried to improve her practice, but more
significantly even than that, what it is she has learnt about herself and
others through the process of Action Research. This knowledge she has amassed
belongs to her. It cannot be taken away. She owns it and she is responsible
for it. This, she has told me, is quite new for her. I am glad to see the
quality of what she has done from a perspective of formal assessment, but
my heart and spirit are profoundly moved by what such a process resulting
in her report might mean for her future life and something of my own logic
is satisfied at seeing kinship reflected in the world.
Because of the work we are doing there together, lives
are changing. People's insights into their own lives and what they can do
with them, are changing. (For comments from colleagues about this, see the
reports by my colleagues Zhao
Xiaohong, Ma Jianfu, Li Peidong, Cao Yong and Wang Shuqin and
my students, Liang
Ruixui, Ma Jie, and Cao Hongmei on the website at http://www.actionresearch.net/moira.shtml
). Colleagues constantly mention to me that when they first started teaching
and during the early parts of their careers, they wanted more in their teaching,
more for their students, more of a sense of development and progression, but
they were stymied by their cultural history, by a Chinese view of knowledge
(see Laidlaw, 2001, 2002) and by their own sense of hopelessness in the changeless
situation. Action Research, they say in their own ways, has liberated them,
given them a sense of scope and possibility. Zhao Xiaohong, Li Peidong, Ma
Jianfu, Tao Rui all tell me that reflection is becoming a part of their lives,
that problem-solving, and tackling complex issues which may not be resolvable,
are part and parcel of their days, and that this is satisfying to them in
ways they marvel at. In some aspects of the logics through which they have
grown into adulthood, deriving from Confucianism, which sees knowledge as
hierarchical and subject to predetermined ends and means - finding delight
in problems which have no simple solutions is remarked on as a novel experience.
Creating formal educational enquiries through their own values is also a new
experience to my colleagues. They tell me of the degree of pleasure as well
that they and some of their students are gaining from the new methodologies
evolving from their reflective practice.
Ma Jianfu, for example, says he feels galvanised by his desire to improve the quality of education in the countryside around Guyuan for Hui (Moslem) girls. His latest AR enquiry draft finishes with the question:
How can I find out more about the educational conditions in the countryside for Hui girls so that they can have greater access to schooling?
In November, 2003, we had an impromptu two-hour conversation one morning in the teachers' office, in which he outlined his sense of the future through his ÔAR perspectives' as he called them. His eyes shone as he told me about his imagined future. Full of rich promise.[4] I was so taken with the way in which this young man was expressing his heartfelt values, freely and openly. To be able to do so strikes me as a human right.
So let's go back to my logic again. To be a part of
what I perceive to be emancipatory is both a vocation and a privilege as it is
in the service of a better world. What do I mean by that? Well, I perceive a
better world as one in which people have more power to make decisions about
things in their lives, which affect them profoundly. Better means not to be
exploited, corrupted, used, abused, and the right to be seen as worthwhile.
Better means having the freedom of choice and the means to develop both oneself and
assist in the development of others. I am able to do both of those, and that
incurs, I believe, an ontological responsibility based on the contradiction
that if I can, why can't others? And hence, what am I going to do about it?
Fairness and love:
Before going on to look more closely at fairness, I want to say something about the use of the word 'love' in this paper and elsewhere in my research. I remember in the AR group over the years, having discussions about the use of the word 'love' in our enquiries[5]. I have always been in favour of it in my own research. Even more so now, as I seek to articulate an integral part of my logic. The love I feel in my work in Guyuan arises entirely within the situation. My mind articulates the logic in ideas and words, my heart feels the love, although, of course, it is not distinctive as words might suggest.[6] Which came first? Again, it's not a question of difference, it's a question of complimentarity.
Earlier I said that I see myself living in the name of
education and in loving service of humanity. The distillation of the above in
language is fairness and in the form of my sense-making in mind and thought is
logic and in motivation and actions is love. You see, in my logic, from heart
to mind or from mind to heart, I experience contradictions because it is not fair that because people are born
in different countries, with different geographical, climatic, political and
cultural backgrounds that they are denied certain privileges of being human. I
perceive those as necessarily including staple requirements like food, or a
home, or water, and on a spiritual level, access to the respect of others and being
valued by others, and on a structural level, education. Many people are in a
position in this world, it seems, of being able to take the above for granted.
Being a volunteer is, for me, about answering questions of some of the
unfairnesses I see, and putting into action those dynamics that enhance human
rights. My actions are fuelled and augmented by love because it is love, which
enables me to clarify. As James
Finnegan (2000) so beautifully expressed in his thesis, it is love which
enables justice to see rightly. And here I want to pause a while and have a
look at what I am saying.
Just as I believe, with Jean and others, that the way to peace is peace itself, then the way to fairness is fairness itself. When Jean came to Guyuan she said it was like a post-nuclear holocaust landscape. I do agree. I say it less poetically: if the world had piles, Guyuan would be its bleeding epicentre! It is poor, the soil harsh, the climate unforgiving (top temperatures in the summer of 38 degrees, low temperature in the winter of minus 25, winds from Inner Mongolia and Siberia, and weather changes within hours). People scrape a living from the land, which yields little. The landscape is ugly and relentless. Money is scarce. Water is scarce. Education is scarce in the deep countryside, especially if you're a Moslem girl. This just isn't fair: these people are people just like you and me, (there is a sense in which they are you and I[7]) yet they were born in rural China and we weren't (I am assuming). Certain odds are stacked against some people before they are even born. Yet despite the ugliness of the place (as I perceive it), when Jean and I approached Guyuan by car from Yinchuan (capital of Ningxia Province) at the beginning of her visit there in December 2003, I had a growing feeling of excitement. I felt a sense of peace because I was coming home. I love it, Guyuan, because I love the people, because I admire them so much, because the work I am doing there is so worthwhile and I get a buzz everyday knowing that. To see what I do as a sacrifice is to miss the point, because I get to do exciting work, with hard-working, determined, clever and totally motivated people in a bid to improve lives. I can't see that it gets any better than that. Not for me. Not given my background, experiences and values.
I want to enable greater fairness, and AR Ð and love -
are ways of doing this. Jean was right when she said to me in Guyuan that AR is
only a part of what I am doing there. I think so too. I believe I am living out
my values more fully than I have ever lived them out before. That accounts for
my sense of peace and fulfilment in my voluntary role. In my first term I hated
being in Guyuan. I hated the material disadvantages, the extreme dryness which
makes my legs bleed all the year round, the rank smell of open drains, the
filthy restaurants and streets, people gobbing in the streets or indeed in
those filthy restaurants. I hated the fact that I couldn't speak the language,
or, more honestly, that the people weren't speaking English! I hated the
customs, the culture that seemed simply sexist, racist and out of the ark. Yes,
I was full of culture shock and various other unpleasant emotions. However, the
logic I describe above overrode all that. I felt dreadful and persecuted and
insecure and shocked at what I saw, but I still knew that what I was doing was
inescapable Ð for me. Even when I hated the place for myself, for what I was going through, I was
moved to tears at seeing beggar-children in the street and just knew that it was wrong, that no one
should have
to live like that. I was moved constantly by my students' and colleagues'
delighted responses to kindness, to flexible methods in the classroom, by a
simple gesture of fellow-feeling.
So this is where my logic has brought me: if it is
wrong for people to live hand-to-mouth and have to sacrifice everything else to
gain any form of education, or to do without it altogether, when I have
financially been handed my education on a plate all my life, then it's always wrong, regardless of whether
I am inconvenienced by living in Guyuan and doing without certain things,
regardless of whether it 'suits' me or not. I recognise that I may not always
feel like this, or draw the same conclusions I am drawing now, but at the
moment, I perceive what I am doing as a logical process, the result of an
increasingly self-aware life, one of, I hope, increasing 'inclusionality' (Rayner,
2003). I am also coming to see that what suits me is actually to live in
accordance with my logic. To see myself not as discrete and separate, but part
of the flow, as the flow is part of me.
My logic doesn't compromise much. It allows me neither
to give up, nor to congratulate myself for what I am doing for it simply is
what it is. There are great delights for me in Guyuan. Despite the material
disadvantages, the squalor of the physical surroundings and the lack of financial
security, I feel fulfilled by the relationships I am developing there, and
the apparently increasing liberation of thought, feeling and actions of some
of my colleagues and students. There is a sense in which I am at one with
the situation I have both created and in which I have found myself. Being
in Guyuan means I am in loving service of humanity.
And that humanity isn't divided into me and them, it is us. I don't set myself
outside that service. I also mean that my actions are in loving service of
my own humanity. In trying to live this logic, I feel happier, more useful
and more challenged than I have ever felt. I am gaining what I am giving.
It is a dialectical process!
I'd like to share one incident with you, which for me
symbolises both the compensation and the purpose of being in Guyuan. One
Saturday afternoon I was coming back to my flat after shopping at the local
supermarket. It was snowing, bitterly cold, with a wind-chill factor of about
minus ten. Two little girls approached me. Wang Yu and Ma Ling. Wang Yu is
eight and her friend is ten. They ran up to me, calling my name, which is
really nice, because often I am called Ôlaowai' (foreigner) which is, at best,
impersonal, but certainly divides me from my fellow-human beings. They stood in
front of me, and I had to stop, not that I minded. They nudged each other and
then started up a rendition of Ôrow row row your boat gently up the streamÉ' I
was absolutely transfixed by such ineffible sweetness and felt a surge of love
for them, for Guyuan, and a sense of gratitude at being able to work and live
in the way I have chosen. Those children, every child, deserves, by dint of being human, the
best chance in life. It's very simple really. Then, they giggled at each other,
looked at me with grins and dimples, and ran away.
My logic led me to Guyuan, keeps me there, and
continues to articulate my educational influence and direction. Long may it
continue!
References:
Aburrow, Y., (2003), Detachment, conflict, and the rationalistic
abstraction of the 'individual self ' (Yvonne),
Finnegan, J., (2002), How do I create my own
educational theory in my educative relations as an action researcher and as a
teacher?' Ph.D. thesis, University of Bath. Department of Education, Bath. http://www.actionresearch.net/fin.shtml
Laidlaw, M., (1994), 'The democratic potential of
dialogical focus in an Action Research enquiry, in 'Action Research: an
International Journal', vol.2, no.3, pp 221 - 242.
Laidlaw, M., (1996), 'How can I create my own living educational
theory whilst accounting to you for my own educational development?' Ph.D.
thesis at: www.actionresearch.net/moira2.shtml
Laidlaw, M., (1997), 'In Loco Parentis: a matter of fairness and
love.' See above for address.
Laidlaw, M., (1998), 'Accounting for an improvement in the quality of my provision for some
Equal Opportunities issues within my English teaching, 1997-8'.
Laidlaw, M., (2000), 'How can I continue to improve the quality of my provision of particular Equal Opportunities values in my teaching of English to a Year Eight group? '.
Laidlaw, M., (2001a) 'In the last months of my
employment at Oldfield School, how can I help 8X to enhance their sense of
community, as I assist them in improving the quality of their learning about
English? by Dr. Moira Laidlaw Draft,'.
Laidlaw, M., (2001b) 'What has the Holocaust got to do with
Education anyway?' Accounting for my value of 'responsibility' as a
developmental standard of judgement in the process of helping to improve the
quality of my educational influence with students over thirteen years
Laidlaw, M., (2002), 'How can I improve my teaching of methodology at Guyuan
Teachers College?'
Laidlaw, M., (2003), 'How can I promote sustainable development
at Guyuan Teachers College and beyond?' 2 papers.
Laidlaw, M. et al (2004), (draft), 'A Handbook of Communicative
Methodology for the New Curriculum', China's Experimental Centre for
Educational Action Research in Foreign Languages Teaching, Guyuan Teachers
College, Guyuan, 756000, Ningxia Province, P.R. China.
Lumley, T., (2004), Writings. E-mail correspondence 29 January,
2004.
Rayner. A., and Aburrow, Y., (2003) Feeling beyond the logic of conflict', paper
at:
http://www.bath.ac.uk/~bssadmr/inclusionality
[1] Voluntary Services Overseas. VSO is a 45 year-old multi-national charity organisation that sends people to different developing countries in order to 'share skills and change lives'. In China the volunteers are primarily connected to further education institutions.
[2] Sustainable development is one of the key aims of VSO. By this is meant the ability for indigenous peoples to build their own capacities without recourse to voluntary aid. Volunteers are expected to facilitate this process by inaugurating self-reflective processes with colleagues so that they can take on necessary management functions by themselves.
[4] And yes, Jack, I am well aware that had I owned a digital camera, I would have been able to show something more valuable about his excitement than through my reported words like we did in the video-clip with Haley in year 8 at http://www.actionresearch.net/moira/mlyr8stick.mov ! I'll try harder next term! Note for the reader Ð only try to download this clip with fast transfer speeds. It is over 20 Mb.
[5] There have been discussions in this group about the use
of the word 'love' in enquiries. I stick to this word because it is the right
word for me. In the group we became, to my mind, stymied by a what is sometimes
publicly perceived as the feeling operating at the level of sensation, and
self-interest. I like the word love and don't want to bow to sensationalist
'Sun'-reading opinion. Eleanor Lohr is focusing on Love in Organisations in her
doctoral enquiry. You can access Eleanor's ideas on Divine Love and
Organisation at http://www.actionresearch.net//arsup/elchap5.htm
[6] I am beginning to understand something more from Jack's research into the way in which the visual carries more of the meanings we want to communicate from our lived experiences. There isn't a dichotomy of thinking and feeling in me, clear-cut and distinct, so much as there is a collaboration which finds different kinds of expression in the world and within me - as action, as hypothesis, as epistemology, as love. I name them as distinctive in order to communicate in words. I experience them differently as interrelated and interdependent.
[7] This idea is too large and complex for me to develop here, but suffice it to say, I take this meaning from the Talmud: 'He who saves a single life, saves the world entire.' That we are all one. That our distinctions as separate human beings are based on specious premises that break down at the value and experience-levels, when in fact, the world (when I am what I would call most sane) appears to me a single organism of infinite possibilities of complexity and simplicity all at the same time. And I am a part of it. And it is a part of me. In other words, unfairnesses to children in China is unfairness to me and to all peoples.