BERA SIG e-seminar – principles for review of contributions
Jack's main suggestion for the focus of the Monday group meeting on 16 May is for
". . . a discussion on the contributions of our living educational theories and of our evidence of our educational influences in our own learning and to the future of educational research . . . " as an opening to our contributions to the BERA SIG e-seminar that runs from 16 May to 23 July 2005. Jack and I have subsequently discussed the idea of working together to firstly identify the principles of judgement laid out in my earlier BERA Review (Mellett, 2000. Educational Action Research within Teaching as a Research-based Profession) and then to engage those principles with contributors putting forward evidence to support the claim given above. Our intention is for the principles to be modified through dialogue as the e-seminar proceeds, so that comprehensible, if not agreed, standards of judgement evolve and that the process of their evolution becomes a living document/commentary in its own right.
Thus, the starting point is for me to extract from the 2000 Review an initial set of standards of review i.e. standards of judgement that are to inform the process by which contributions are to be approached and appraised. A number of headings emerge, as follows:
• Respect for evidence
• The nature of evidence
• The logic of question and answer
• An aesthetically engaged and appreciative response
• Taste
• Megalothymia
• Principles into practice
The intention is to attempt to 'set the scene' rather than lay down 'hard and fast' criteria.
Respect for evidence
“Respect for evidence is the corner stone of evidence based professionalism, but evidence does not necessarily imply an absolutist position. ... In the past, there has been a tendency to accept scientific evidence which appeals to rational criteria rather than other evidence that might appeal to moral, spiritual, political, aesthetic, emotional or affective criteria, or to the practical criteria that practitioners might employ. ... the most challenging aspect of a new evidence-based professionalism based on a value of respect for the integrity of our acts. ... A new discipline of educational enquiry.” (Pam Lomax (1999) The significance of action research and self-study for evidence-based professionalism and the development of community BERA Research Intelligence, p.13)
Robert Donmoyer (1996 Educational Research in an Era of Paradigm Proliferation: what's an editor to do? Educational Researcher AERA 25 pp. 19-25) speaks as the editor of a journal and suggests how best to:
“... figure out how to play the gatekeeper role at a time when there is little consensus in the field about what research is and what scholarly discourse should look like.” (p. 20)
He describes the two approaches to gate keeping that have worked against the encouragement of a humane and open-minded approach to educational research: the Traditional Response (we talk sense; ‘they’ talk rubbish) and the Balkanization Response (leave ‘them’ to get on with their business while we get on with ours). Donmoyer then describes a third way, quoting from the conclusions Richard Bernstein (1993 The New Constellation. Oxford: Polity Press/Basil Blackwell, p.22) suggests should be drawn from the debates about incommensurability:
“ ... to listen carefully, to use ... linguistic, emotional, and cognitive imagination to grasp what is being expressed and said in ‘alien’ traditions ... [without] either facilely assimilating what others are saying to our own categories and language ... or dismissing ... [it] as incoherent nonsense.”
The words of this ‘ethical imperative’ turn me back to revisit Pam Lomax’s contention that respect is the cornerstone of evidence-based professionalism - respect as understood by Jean Rudduck (1995 Enlarging the Democratic Promise of Education (presidential address) British Educational Research Journal 21, 1) to inform the general principles that underpin good research i.e. respect for democratic values, respect for persons, respect for the integrity of our acts at every level of the professional enterprise, and respect for evidence.
The Nature of Evidence
“Perhaps there is an epistemology of practice that takes fuller account of the competencies practitioners sometimes display in situations of uncertainty, complexity, uniqueness and conflict. Perhaps there is a way of looking at problem setting and intuitive artistry that presents these activities as described and as susceptible to a kind of rigor that falls outside the boundaries of technical rationality. ... It seems right to say that our knowledge is in our action.” (Donald Schon (1995) Knowing in Action: the new scholarship requires a new epistemology Change Nov/Dec, p.29)
The ideas of Lomax and Schön seem to complement each other. In a focused and practical manner, Pam Lomax (1999, ibid.) outlines “... a new evidence based professionalism based on a value of respect for the integrity of our acts. ... A new discipline of educational enquiry ...” (p.13) that could act in an emancipatory manner within the practices of teachers and their educational relationships. Action research principles and practice are fundamental to this new form of evidence-based professionalism. For his part, Donald Schön (1995, ibid) calls for a new scholarship that can provide an appropriate form of description and explanation of that new discipline of educational enquiry: He senses that the new scholarship: “ ... 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 logic of Question and Answer
I feel that engagement with contributions to the e-symposium must be dielectical in nature and process rather than propositional-objectivising-analytical. However, in common with most of the writing that engages with the field of educational research, the exposition of the ideas contained in contributions will rely heavily on propositional forms of writing. Yet all the statements that constitute a piece of writing are effectively answers to questions; questions that the writer has posed or which the evolving subject matter has posed to the writer. R. G. Collingwood (1934, 1991) called this relationship ‘the logic of question and answer’. He wrote:
“... you cannot find out what a man (sic) means by simply studying his spoken or written statements, even though he has spoken or written with perfect command of language and perfectly truthful intention. In order to find out his meaning, you must also know what the question was (a question in his own mind and presumed to be in yours) to which the thing he has said or written was meant as an answer.” (p.31)
Twenty years later, Hans-Georg Gadamer (1960, 1989) reviewed Collingwood’s ideas and takes essentially the same point of view:
“... the meaning of a sentence is relative to the question to which it is a reply, i.e. it necessarily goes beyond what is said in it.” (p.333)
Gadamer observed inter alia that, despite Plato, we are not yet ready for a logic of question and answer. He then notes a further dimension to this questioning:
“Thus we come back to the point that the hermeneutic phenomenon also contains within itself the original meaning of conversation and the structure of question and answer. For an historical text to be made the object of interpretation means that it asks a question of the interpreter. ... To understand a text means to understand this question.” (p.333)
We must understand the question to which the text is an answer (Collingwood) and we must respond to the questions the text asks of us (Gadamer).
Bernstein (1993, ibid.) also draws on Gadamer to reinforce his view of the need for dialogical sensitivity when he says:
“Gadamer in his ontological version of hermeneutics has been arguing that our ontological condition, our very being-in-the-world, is to be dialogical beings.” (p.49, original emphasis) and “One of the primary lessons ... is that we engage in critique as second person participants and not as third person neutral observers.” (p.319, original emphasis)
An aesthetically engaged and appreciative response
The approach outlined above to engaging with a text through a double dialectic of question and answer has an intuitive and aesthetic quality, as described by Collingwood in his earlier writing (1924 Speculum Mentis. Oxford: Oxford University Press):
“and those parts of the work of art which he (sic) could not in some sort have invented for himself will pass him by unseen. ....‘How much, as one grows older, one finds in so-and-so,’ people say, ‘that one never saw before!’ .... for one never sees in anybody's work but what one brings to it. ..." (p.68)
Further discussion about bringing an aesthetically engaged and appreciative response to a text is provided by Pat D’Arcy (1999 The Whole Story PhD thesis, Bath University www.actionresearch.net) who draws on the work of Louise Rosenblatt written over a period of more than fifty years. In respect of attitude, Rosenblatt (1985 The Transactional Theory of the Literary Work: Implications for Research, from: Researching Response to Literature and the Teaching of English (ed.) Charles. R. Cooper, Norwood, N.J.: Ablex) draws a firm distinction between the two stances that a reader can take to a text - an efferent (i.e. markedly analytical) approach or an aesthetic (i.e. markedly affective) approach:
“In an efferent reading, the reader’s attention is ... focused mainly on what is to be taken away from the transaction ... In an aesthetic reading, the reader’s attention is focused on what he (sic ) is living through during the reading event. He is attending both to what the verbal signs designate and to the qualitative overtones of the ideas, images, situations and characters that he is evoking under the guidance of the text.” (p.38)
Placing the nuances of the aesthetic approach itself to one side, I wonder, can we choose to take either an efferent or an aesthetic approach to a text? Pat D’Arcy (1999, bid) offers the view that logically, one would expect a reader to take an aesthetic stance to a work of literature and an efferent stance to non-literary writing; but this is not always necessarily the case. She cites Rosenblatt’s examples of the tendency for respondents to literature to take an efferent stance - whether they are literary critics and theorists, university students or pupils in school:
“The tendency is to turn away from the lived-through experience and to efferently apply a ready-made system of analysis to the reading.” (p.39)
Why do readers turn away from the subjectively-appreciated smell of the particular case and prefer to embrace a cognitively generated abstraction? Perhaps it is because the former requires an acknowledgement and an identification of the self (see Collingwood 1924 above) that must enter into the transaction of the aesthetic reading. To repeat Collingwood (1924, ibid.): “For one never sees in anybody's work but what one brings to it. ..." It is through this transaction or interplay of reader/text that the evocation arises of what the reader ‘makes’ of the story being told by the text inside his or her head. It is as if the reader creates a virtual text, this evocation expressed by Rosenblatt (1985, ibid) as being:
“...also aesthetic in the sense that it becomes another story rising out of the transaction that is taking place. This version created by the reader from the words on the page, is variously referred to by theorists as the ‘virtual experience’ (Langer), the ‘literary work’ (Iser) or the ‘virtual text’ (Bruner).” (p.297)
These activities are all closely inter-related aesthetically speaking, leading as they do from choice of stance, through the act of reading, to the virtual text and finally to the reader’s recollection of that evocation. What the reader makes of the story lies at the heart of this whole sequence. It is the virtual text which is evoked as a result of the reader’s stance and transaction with the story, to which an aesthetic response can be made.
Taste
Perhaps Rosenblatt's stance (above) is simply a matter of taste and of attitude, two aspects of our selves that act as gatekeepers to our attention and receptivity. Those who occupy the more positivist paradigms might say that they are not troubled by such matters as taste and attitude, but I maintain that we are all prejudiced by these most fundamental of personal attributes. So far as taste is concerned, I would point you to Gadamer’s (1989, ibid) discussion of Taste (pp. 34 - 42) within the Chapter entitled The significance of the Humanist Tradition. In particular Gadamer speaks of:
“... the view that the sense of taste ... still contains the beginnings of the intellectual differentiation we make in judging things.” (p.35)
This observation refers to the writing of the 17th century Jesuit Balthazar Gracian who looked on taste as a ‘spiritualisation of animality’. Taste of the tongue “this most animal and inward of our senses” (Gadamer) leads to and co-exists with taste of the mind that prejudices the way that we make our judgements. Drawing on Kant, Gadamer observes that: “... the true sense of community .. is taste.” (p.34)
Thymos and megalothymia
I must ask: what is the intention of the writer of a paper? I turn to Francis Fukuyama’s (1992 The End of History and the Last Man Penguin Books, London) discussion of thymos and of megalothymia, to try to gain a better understanding of who we are (in the broadest sense) as writers and as readers - as living beings who write and who read. Fukuyama develops his ideas from:
“... Hegel’s non-materialist account of history, based on the ‘struggle for recognition’.... human beings have natural needs and desires for ... food, drink, shelter ... Man ... in addition ... wants to be ‘recognised’ ... as a human being, that is, with a certain worth or dignity.” (p.xvi)
He continues:
“... The propensity to invest the self with a certain value, and to demand recognition for that value, is what ... we would call “self-esteem”. The propensity to feel self-esteem arises out of the part of the soul called thymos. [Plato, in the Republic noted that there were three parts to the human soul - a desiring part, a reasoning part, and a part he called thymos, or “spiritedness”.] It is like an innate human sense of justice. People believe that they have a certain worth, and when other people treat them as though they are worth less than that, they feel the emotion of anger. Conversely, when people fail to live up to their own sense of worth, they feel shame, and when they are evaluated correctly in proportion to their worth, they feel pride. (p.xvii)
Within the context of review, I feel that any contribution made in an honest and heartfelt manner to improve the quality of an educational process should meet with the universally sought-after affirmation (but not necessarily, endorsement). Where the genesis of that affirmation comes about through an acknowledgement of Fukuyama’s isothymia (a desire to be evaluated as equal to others) within the aegis of a critical dialogical community, the person affirmed takes the care-full critique of their contribution as the substance of that affirmation. However, Fukuyama turns his attention solely to self-evaluation (and away from my idealised form of peer-appraisal) as he introduces the concept of megalothymia.
“... there is no reason to think that all people will evaluate themselves as the equals of other people. Rather, they may seek to be recognised as superior to other people, possibly on the basis of true inner worth, but more likely out of an inflated and vain estimate of themselves. .... megalothymia.” (p.182)
Fukuyama (and I) maintain that there is no room for megalothymia in a just society:
“Socrates enters into an extended discussion of thymos in the Republic because the thymotic part of the soul turns out to be crucial for the construction of his just city “in speech” ...” (p.183)
If our city of educational research and research-based professionalism is the be ‘just in speech’, then we must break down the barriers that exist between the various xenophobic views of that which constitutes valid educational research. There are insights to be gained from each others’ traditions that will help to inform our own ongoing enquiries; and there can be no room for megalothymic review of each other's work.
Principles into practice
I am concentrating here on the aesthetic aspects of a piece of writing – or certainly on those aspects that are not amenable to a straight form of propositional analysis – because I maintain that these are the implicit elements that convey the main essence of Pam Lomax’s New Discipline of Educational Enquiry, Donald Schön’s New Epistemology of Practice, and Richard Bernstein’s ‘Ethical Imperative’. The reviewing process that I am suggesting here will particularly look for descriptions and explanations of education action research enquiries that are expressed in these terms. When an educational action researcher writes about an attempt to improve the quality of his or practice, that person is making a claim that they understand their own educational development (Whitehead 1989, 1999 – do you need me to give you the references?).
My stance, therefore, is that I engage in a double dialectic with a text as I attempt to explicate and understand the questions answered by the text (Collingwood) and the questions that it asks of me (Gadamer). As I evoke my own virtual text (Rosenblatt) within such a form of question and answer, the text communicates with me by way of a sympathetic resonance. Engaged in the process of review I see myself as a ‘respectful editor’, listening carefully, using linguistic, emotional, and cognitive imagination to grasp what is being expressed and said in both ‘alien’ and ‘sympathetic’ traditions, without either facilely assimilating what others are saying to my own categories and language or dismissing it as incoherent nonsense (Bernstein in Donmoyer, 1996, ibid).
Peter Mellett (14 May 2005)