Educational enquiries
into the meaning and validity of living educational theories.
Jack WhiteheadÕs
response of 10th February 2005 to Cher HendrickÕs invitation to
contribute to the March 2005 Newsletter of the AR SIG of AERA as a contribution
to the Research StudentsÕ Seminar on the 2nd March in the Department
of Education of the University of Bath.
Dear Cher, many thanks for your delightfully inclusional
invitation to contribute to the newsletter. You asked if I could say something about the way AR has
influenced my self-understandings and practices and my convictions about the
power of AR with some thoughts about the barriers and supports to AR.
The approach to AR I have been developing with others is a Living Educational
Theory approach. By this I mean that individuals account for their
educational influence in explanations for their own learning, in the learning
of others and in the education of the social formations in which they live and
work. Living Educational Theorists experience and express a flow of
life-affirming energy. We express a desire to live as fully as we can values
that carry hope for the future of humanity and for our own. We also experience
ourselves as living contradictions when we see ourselves holding together these
values with the experience of their denial in practice. This experience of
living contradiction stimulates our imaginations to create an action plan to
improve matters, to act and to gather data on which to make a judgement on the
effectiveness of our actions, to evaluate the actions and to modify our
concerns, ideas and actions in the light of the evaluations.
Living educational theorists are also committed to sharing action
research accounts (http://www.actionresearch.net/living.shtml
) of their learning as part of a process of public validation to help us not to
persist in error and to benefit from the ideas and creative and critical
discourses of others.
I felt a loving warmth of humanity, a value that carries my
hope for the future of humanity and which I associate with the power of AR,
through the words of your invitation and your picture in the January 2004 SIG newsletter:
IÕd like for you to be the first person to
contribute to this section. I have a great deal of respect for you as a
colleague and as a passionate scholar. I think you see the power of AR in a
slightly (or not so slightly!) different way than most others, and someone like
me (a person who has been moving away from my technical/practical AR focus) can
learn a lot from you and your AR experiences.
It may be that action researchers like yourself who
feel a limitation in technical/practical approaches may decide to see if a
living educational theory approach resonates more profoundly with your desire
to live a worthwhile life. If you do I think you will enjoy placing your
accounts of your educational influences alongside those of others
in the flow of the living theory web-spaces.
My most powerful AR learning experience was in 1971
on seeing myself teaching. I had been given a video-camera by an Inspector in
my School Board to explore its educational potential. I saw myself on the video
actually closing down the learning experiences I thought that I was
encouraging! I experienced my ÔIÕ as a living contradiction. I became aware of
the educational significance of exploring the implications of asking myself,
ÔHow do I improve what I am doing?Õ from the ground of my Ôliving
contradictionÕ.
I am still learning from the communicative power of
video-images. My latest learning took place in a classroom at Guyuan Teachers
College in China on the 15 October 2004. I had video-taped a lesson, thought
that it had ended and turned the camera off. I then saw the teacher, Moira
Laidlaw, go to the door as the students started to leave and I turned the
camera back on. You can see some
of the stills of the lesson and the ending at:
http://www.jackwhitehead.com/moira151004/moira151004.html
The following 9 MB video clip of the end of this
class will take several minutes to download using Broadband (10 minutes on my
system) and opens in Quicktime.
http://www.jackwhitehead.com/mlendSorenson.mov
Watching this ending contributed to my understanding
of the importance of inclusional
meanings of embodied values and living standards of educational judgement. Do
see if you share my intuition that enhancing the flow of such relationships of
mutual availability, like those between Moira and her students, will make a
fundamental contribution to the future of humanity. Guyuan TeacherÕs College is the host to ChinaÕs Experimental
Centre for Educational Action Research in Foreign Languages Teaching.
You ask about my learning about the barriers and
supports to AR. I have
analysed my educational influence in my own learning in relation to some
barriers I encountered in establishing a living theory approach to action
research in theses accepted by the University of Bath. The analysis is focused
on my embodied value of academic freedom and its transformation into a living
standard of judgement in the growth of my educational knowledge between
1973-1993.
Geoff Suderman-Gladwell
has also documented and analysed, in his masters dissertation, his learning
from responding to barriers to his AR from a University ethics committee. I
still recall a letter from a Research Committee of a British University to a
student I was jointly supervising in the early 1990s, requiring that the
personal pronoun, the ÔIÕ, was removed from the title of an AR enquiry before
the proposal could be accepted! At
such moments I can experience the strength of raw power. While I find it
difficult to resist the expression of verbal, emotional and physical aggression
and abuse
, I seek not only to consciously resist their
spontaneous expression. I seek to channel the power of these emotions into a
creative response that strengthens, rather than damages and undermines my
identity. I have analysed my own response to one such moment at my University
in a performance text you can access from Part 11 of my presentation in the October
2004 issue of Action Research Expeditions. You can access this by clicking
on the live link:
http://www.actionresearch.net//multimedia/jimenomov/JIMEW98.html
And scrolling down to ÔI now ask you to accompany me into a performance text of
a meeting with the four university colleagues who formed, in 1991, the Senate
Working Party to investigate a matter of academic freedom in relation to my own
work.Õ
I have found the greatest supports to AR to be my
own recognition and the recognition of others in the mutual affirmation that we
are doing something worth while with our lives. I think you will feel this
recognition and affirmation in the Abstracts and Acknowledgements of each of
the living theory accounts at
http://www.actionresearch.net/living.shtml
. I think you will enjoy the latest additions by Mary Hartog, Ram Punia and Madeline Church. I think Jaqueline Delong has
provided the most inspiring account of support for AR in the creation and
sustaining of a culture of inquiry in the Grand Erie District School Board in
Ontario. I am looking forward to developing our ideas together at the AR SIG meetings in AERA in April 2005 and
to continuing my most productive and pleasurable collaboration with Jean McNiff.
Love Jack.
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When Martin Dobson, a colleague, died in 2002 the last thing he said to me
was 'Give my Love to the Department'. In the 20 years I'd worked with
Martin it was his loving warmth of humanity that I recall with great life
affirming pleasure and I'm hoping that in Love Jack we can share this
value of common humanity.