Letter to Joy in response to her draft educational enquiry
on 'Language of Learning to the Language of Educational Responsibility', 14
September 2007.
Dear Joy – At the end of the session on Tuesday I said
that I would like to respond to your draft enquiry with a letter that might be
useful to you in the final phase of your present enquiry. I also wanted to respond in a way that
all the group might enjoy and see the relevance to their own enquiry.
I've eight ideas to share. I reference each idea to the ideas
of others to highlight its significance for the growth of my educational
knowledge. The ideas are all related to the importance of making public and
sharing your embodied knowledge as an educator in a way that communicates to
colleagues, pupils and parents and contributes to the knowledge-base of
education.
I know my emphasis on seeing your writing as a contribution
to our professional knowledge-base of education might have a different emphasis
from your own. I think that your emphasis (and I may be mistaken here) is on
writings that help you to understand how to enhance the educational experiences
of your pupils. My own emphasis is on making public the embodied knowledge of
the educators I work with through the masters programme. I hope that what I say
relates to both our interests because our professional knowledge-base rests on
making public our embodied knowledge as educators. I think that we are
contributing to this educational knowledge by explaining our educational
influences in our own learning, in the learning of others (and perhaps in the
social formations in which we live and work).
1) The importance of your living educational theory in
contributing to the knowledge-base of education.
My passion for contributing to the creation of a knowledge-base for education, from the living educational theories of professional educators, came out of my experience of the following mistake in the view of educational theory that assumed that it could replace the practical principles I used to explain my educational influences with my pupils, by principles from disciplines of education such as the philosophy, sociology, psychology and history of education. In my tutoring I hope that you feel my passion to retain, to deepen and to extend our understandings of your practical principles in my tutoring of the educational enquiry and others units. I hope you feel my resistance to any colonising tendency to replace your practical principles in your living educational theory by principles from any other theory whilst acknowledging that some insights from other theories can be useful in the creation of your own. By your living educational theory, I am meaning your explanations for your educational influence in your learning, in the learning of others and in the learning of the social formations in which we live and work.
Here is the acknowledgement of the above mistake, about this replacement, by Paul Hirst, one of the original proponents of the old disciplines approach, when he says that 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 (my emphasis) 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." (p. 18)
Hirst, P. (Ed.) (1983) Educational Theory and its Foundation Disciplines. London;RKP
I hope that this explains my emphasis on the importance of
distinguishing your 'educational' enquiry as a practitioner-researcher from
ideas generated by 'education' researchers whose ideas are bounded by the
conceptual frameworks of the philosophy, psychology, sociology, history,
economics, politics, theology, leadership and management of education.
2) The importance of distinguishing your educational
enquiry from 'education research'.
Rather than take for granted the idea that we understand the
nature of an 'educational enquiry', I am suggesting that you could briefly
explain to your readers the importance of recognising what distinguishes an
enquiry as 'educational'. The
importance of doing this can be understood in relation to argument that the
British Educational Research Association should be re-branded as the British
Education Research Association:
One way of handling the distinction might be to use the
terms 'education research' and 'educational research' more carefully. In this
paper, I have so far used the broad term education research to characterise the
whole field, but it may be that within that field we should reserve the term
educational research for work that is consciously geared towards improving
policy and practice..... One problem with this distinction between 'education
research' as the broad term and 'educational research' as the narrower field of
work specifically geared to the improvement of policy and practice is that it
would mean that BERA, as the British Educational Research Association would
have to change its name or be seen as only involved with the latter. So trying
to make the distinction clearer would also involve BERA in a re-branding
exercise which may not necessarily be the best way of spending our time and
resources. But it is at least worth considering. (Whitty, 2005)
Whitty, G. (2005) Education(al) research and education
policy making: is conflict inevitable? Presidential Address to the British
Educational Research Association, University of Glamorgan, 17 September 2005.
My own feeling is that this would be a mistake as it would
help to retain the control of the education researchers over what counts as
educational research. I set out my views in the 100th Issue of
Research Intelligence of August 2007 and this is attached to the end of this
letter with a reference to the importance of living educational theories for
making the world a better place to be.
3) The importance of bringing your embodied knowledge as
an educator into the public domain through creating your living educational
theory from a self-study of your own educational influences.
I liked
Catherine's Snow's point about the importance of making public your knowledge:
"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." (Snow,
2001, 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.
Where I disagree with Catherine Snow is in her belief that
we should be rejecting personal adecdotes. I believe that our living
educational theories are generated from our personal adecdotes of our
educational influences as we strengthen the validity and rigour of our
educational enquiries. I've stressed the importance of starting to generate our
living educational theories from our personal anecdotes and I believe that you
might find the ideas of Michael Connelly and Jean Clandinin, helpful in
'framing' your educational enquiry and a narrative enquiry.
4) The importance of understanding narrative enquiry as a
legitimate method in educational research
Here are some extracts from pages 1-5 of 'Shaping a
Professional Identity: Stories of educational practice' F. Michael Connelly and
D. Jean Clandinin (Eds). Ontario; Althouse Press, 1999.
"Following the work of Dewey (1938), Schwab (1970),
Polanyi (1958), Gauthier (1963), Johnson (1987), and others, we became
fascinated with trying to understand teachers as knowers: knowers of
themselves, of their situations, of children, of subject, of teaching, of
learning. To reflect our epistemology interest in the personal and practical
nature of education we coined the term "personal practical
knowledge," which we defined as the following:
'A term designed to capture the idea of experience in a
way that allows us to talk about teachers as knowledgeable and knowing persons.
Personal practical knowledge is in the teacher's past experience, in the
teacher's present mind and body, and in the future plans and actions. Personal
practical knowledge is found in the teacher's practice. it is, for any teacher,
a particular way of reconstructing the past and the intentions of the future to
deal with the exigencies of a present situation. (Connelly & Clandinin,
1988, p.25).'
Increasingly, as our work progressed, we came to see
teacher knowledge in terms of narrative life history, as storied life
compositions, These stories, these narratives of experience, are both personal,
reflecting a person's life history - and social - reflecting the milieu, the
contexts in which teachers life. Keeping our eyes firmly on the question of
teacher knowledge, we realized that knowledge was both formed and expressed in
context. Within schools this context is immensely complex and we adopted a
metaphor of a professional knowledge landscape to help us capture this
complexity.
'A landscape metaphor is particularly well suited to our
purpose. It allows us to talk about space, place, and time. Furthermore, it has
a sense of expansiveness and the possibility of being filled with diverse
people, things, and events in different relationships. Understanding
professional knowledge as comprising a landscape calls for a notion of
professional knowledge as composed of a wide variety of components and
influenced by a wide variety of people, places and things. Because we see the
professional knowledge landscape as composed of relationships among people, places
and things, we see it as both an intellectual and moral landscape. (Clandinin
& Connelly, 1995, pp. 4-5)'
We view the landscape as narratively constructed: as
having a history with moral, emotional, and aesthetic dimensions. We see it as
storied. To enter a professional knowledge landscape is to enter a place of
story. The landscape is composed of two fundamentally different places, the
in-classroom place and the out-of-classroom place. We described the
out-of-classroom place as:
'a place filled with knowledge funneled into the school
system for the purpose of altering teachers' and children's classroom lives.
Teachers talk about this knowledge all the time. We all make reference to
"what's coming down the pipe"; "what's coming down now";
"what will they throw down on us next". In this metaphorical
expressions we hear teachers express their knowledge of their out-of-classroom
place as a place littered with imposed prescriptions. It is a place filled with
other people's visions of what is right for children. Researchers, policy
makers, senior administrators and others, using various implementation
strategies, push research findings, policy statements, plans, improvement
schemes and so on down what we call the conduit into this out-of-classroom
place on the professional knowledge landscape. We characterize this theory-driven view of practice
shared by practitioners, policy makers, and theoreticians as having the quality
of what Crites (1971) called a
sacred story.'
With respect to the in-classroom place we wrote:
'Classrooms are, for the most part, safe places,
generally free from scrutiny, where teachers are free to live stories of
practice. These lived stories are essentially secret ones. Furthermore, when
these secret lived stories are told, they are, for the most part, told to other
teachers in other secret places. When teachers move out of their classrooms
onto the out-of-classroom place on the landscape, they often live and tell
cover stories, stories in which they portray themselves as experts, certain
characters whose teacher stories fit within the acceptable range of the story
of school being lived in the school. Cover stories enable teachers whose
teacher stories are marginalized by whatever the current story of school is to
continue to practice and to sustain their teacher stories. (Clandinin &
Connelly, 1996, p.25)'
Soltis (1995) summarized our language of the landscape as
a "language of 'secret places,' 'sacred stories,' 'cover stories,' the
'conduit,' and its 'rhetoric of conclusions' - categories designed to penetrate
our social construction of the reality of teaching and schooling" (p.
vii). In addition to our recognizing the secret, sacred, and cover stories that
make up the landscape, we realized that stories were also told about people and
their institutions. We came to differentiate these as teacher stories and
stories of teachers, school stories and stories of schools. This latter set of
stories might, depending on the circumstances, be secret stories or cover
stories. Sacred stories have a special quality." (Connelly & Clandinin, 1999, pp 1-3.)
"As we listened to practitioners and conducted the
work on which this book is based, we realized that the theoretical puzzle was
to link knowledge, context, and identity. We developed a further term to begin
to make this link, namely, 'stories to live by'. This term is the intellectual
thread that holds this book together. This thread helps us to understand how
knowledge, context, and identity are linked and can be understood narratively.
Stories to live by, the phrase used throughout this book
to refer to identity, is given meaning by the narrative understandings of
knowledge and context. Stories to live by are shared by such matters as secret
teacher stories, sacred stories of schooling, and teachers' cover
stories." (Connelly & Clandinin,
1999, p.4)
References used by Clandinin and Connelly in the above
passages:
Clandinin, J. & Connelly, F.M. (1996) Teachers'
professional knowledge landscapes: Teacher stories - stories of teachers -
school stories - stories of schools. Educational Researcher, 25 (3), 24 -30.
Clandinin, J. & Connelly, F.M. (1995) Teachers'
professional knowledge landscapes. New York: Teachers College Press.
Connelly, F. M. & Clanindin, J. (1999) Shaping A
Professional Identity: Stories of Educational Practice. London Ontario: Althouse Press.
Connelly, F. M. & Clandinin, F. M. (1988) Teachers as
curriculum planners: Narratives of experience. New York: Teachers College
Press.
Crites, S. (1971) The narrative quality of experience.
Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 399 (3), 291-311.
Dewey, J. (1938) Experience and education. New York: Collier
Books.
Gauthier, D. P. (1963) Practical reasoning. Oxford:
Clarendon Press.
Johnson, M. (1987) The body in the mind: The bodily basis of
meaning, imagination, and reason. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Schwab, J. J. (1970) The practical: A language for
curriculum. Washington, DC: National Education Association, Center for the
Study of Instruction. (Reprinted in Westbury & Wilkoff, Science,
curriculum, and liberal education: Selected essays. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press. 1978.)
Soltis, J. F. (1995) Foreword. In D. J. Clandinin & F.
M. Connelly, Teachers' Professional Knowledge Landscapes (pp. vii-viii). New
York: Teachers College Press.
I particularly like this point about searching and defending
your own criteria for evaluating the quality and validity of your enquiries:
We think a variety of
criteria, some appropriate to some circumstances and some others, will eventually
be the agreed-upon norm. It is currently the case that each inquirer must
search for, and defend, the criteria that best apply to his or her work. (p.7)"
Connelly, F.M. & Clandinin,
J. (1990) Stories of experience and narrative inquiry. Educational Researcher,
Vol. No.5, pp. 2-14.
One of the ways you can strengthen the systematic nature of
your educational enquiry is to show that you are using action reflection cycles
in the course of your enquiry. I like the way your pupils responded to the TASC
wheel and offered their suggestions about how it could be improved as a valid
representation of their own learning.
5) Using Action Reflection Cycles and the TASC Wheel in
your educational enquiry
The work of Belle Wallace in
developing the TASC model for problem solving is being used to underpin the
Process in which students will engage. In her book Teaching the Very Able Child
there are materials which exemplify the essential elements of the
problem-solving process.
You can access the WebQuest site with the TASC Wheel from:
http://www.webquestuk.org.uk/TASC
WHEEL/Learn from Experience.htm
Joy, I do like your emphasis on educational responsibility
and I think you are contributing to the development of a language of education
that Gert Biesta is moving towards through his belief that as educators and
educational researchers we should be moving beyond a language of learning into
a language of education. I think that what he says about learning as process of
acquisition and learning as a response may appeal to you.
6) The
importance of developing a language of education that goes beyond a language of
learning through the exercise of your educational responsibility towards
yourself and your pupils.
Here are
the ideas of Gert Biesta that I particularly like. I think they may appeal to
you. I find myself differing about the idea of 'responsibility for' the other.
I prefer the idea of 'responsibility towards' the other, as I find myself
resisting the idea that anyone could take responsibility for me.
"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)."
"The
Space of Responsibility: Ethical Space
Levinas
articulates an insight that comes quite close to the central idea of the notion
of intersubject space, namely, that our primordial being-in-the-world is a
being-in-the-world-with-others. Levinas takes his point of departure in a
critique of the common gesture of Western philosophy in which the ego cogito, or consciousness, is considered
to come first, and in which the primary relationship of the ego with the world
and with other beings is conceived as a knowledge-relationship. Levinas,
however, wants to challenge the "wisdom of the Western tradition" in which it
is assumed that "human individuals.... are human through consciousness"
(Levinas 1998b, 190). He wants to challenge the idea "that subject and
consciousness are equivalent concepts" (Levinas, 1989a, 92). To do so, he
argues that the subject is engaged in a relationship that is "older that the
ego, prior to principles" (Levinas, 1989a, 107). This relationship is neither a
knowledge relationship - as there is not yet an ego or consciousness that can
know – nor an act. Levinas characterizes it as an ethical relationship, a
relationship of infinite responsibility for the other (see Levinas, 1989b).
Levinas
stresses that this responsibility for the other is not a responsibility that we
can either choose to take upon us or choose to neglect, since this would only
be possible if we were an ego or consciousness before we were inscribed in this
relationship. In this sense it is "a responsibility that is justified by no
prior commitment"
(Levinas 1989a, 92; emphasis in original). Levinas describes this
responsibility as "an obligation, anachronously prior to any commitment", and
as an "anteriority" that is "older that the a priori" (Levinas 1989a, 90),
"older that the time of consciousness that is accessible in memory" (Levinas,
1989a, 96). He also refers to this relation (p. 50) of responsibility as
"an-archical" (Levinas 1989a, 92). By this he wishes to emphasize that it is a
relationship with a singular other without "the mediation of any principle" (Levinas
1989a, 92). He calls it a "passion" and argues that this passion is absolute in
that it takes hold "without any a priori" (Levinas 1989a, 92)."
(p.51)
"I
have suggested that rather than looking for the substance or essence of the
human being, we should ask the question where the human being as a unique
individual comes into presence . My discussion of objective space has
shown that no one – no one – comes into presence when the space
of coming into presence can only relegate the subject to a certain fixed
position, to a point on the map. As the idea of disjunctive space suggests, the
coming-into-presence of unique, singular beings is not something that can be
controlled by the space but is necessarily something that "interrupts" the
program. This interruption should not be seen as a disturbance, as something
that threatens the purity of space, but should be taken as a sign of some
coming into presence. The discussion of intersubjective space shows that coming
into presence is not something that one can do by oneself. On can bring one's
beginning into the world, but one needs a world- a world made up of other
"beginners" – in order to come into this world. One needs others who take
up one's beginnings, always in new and unpredictable ways, in order to come
into the world. This means that the social space, the space of intersubjectivity,
is not a mirror in which we can finally see and find our true selves. The space
of intersubjectivity, so we might say, is a "troubling" space, but this is a
necessary troubling, a troubling that only makes our coming into the world
possible. The discussion of ethical space suggests that long before we are a
doer, a knower, an ego who can take responsibility, we are already identified,
we are already positioned from the outside by a responsibility that is older
that the ego. What makes me unique in this assignation, what (p.53)
singularizes me, what "makes" me into a unique, singular being, is not my
identity, is not a set of attributes that only belongs to me, but is the fact
that I am
responsible and that I cannot slip away from this assignation. Interestingly enough, the
discussion on ethical space suggests that the first question about the subject
is not the question "What am I?" but the question "Where are you?" The latter
is the question that singularizes us, and it is this question that, in a very
fundamental sense, can be understood as an educational question. It is the
question that calls us into presence: or to be more precise, it is that
question that calls me, as a singular being, as some one, into the world. This world, as I have
emphasized throughout this chapter, is by necessity a world of plurality and
difference; it is a world of otherness." (p.54)
"In the
foregoing chapters I have presented a different way to understand and approach
education, one that isn't based on a truth about the human being, one that
doesn't claim to know what the humanity of the human being consists of, and one
that doesn't think of education as the production of particular identities or
subjectivities or the insertion of newcomers into an existing social order.
Instead I have argued for an approach that focuses on the multifarious ways in
which human beings as unique, singular individuals come into the world. I have
argued that we come into the world as unique, singular beings through the ways
in which we take up our responsibility for the otherness of the others, because
it is in those situations that we speak with our own "voice" and not with the
representative voice of the rational community. I have shown that the world in
which we come into presence is a world of plurality and difference, because we
can only come into the world if others, who are not like us, take up our
beginnings in such a way that they can bring their beginnings into the world as
well. I have therefore argued that the educational responsibility is not only a
responsibility for the coming into the world of unique and singular beings; it
is also a responsibility for the world as a world of plurality (p. 117) and
difference. The creation of such a world, the creation of a worldly space, is
not something that can be done in a straightforward manner. It rather entails a
"double duty" for the creation of worldly spaces and for their undoing. Along
these lines I have tried to articulate a way to understand education that
itself responds to the challenges we are faced with today, including the
disappearance of a language of education in the age of learning." (p. 118)
Biesta,
G. J. J. (2006) Beyond Learning; Democratic Education for a Human Future.
Boulder; Paradigm Publishers.
<The
refences for Levinas used by Gert Biesta in the above quotations are:
Levinas, E.
(1998a) "The I
and totality." In E. Levinas, Entre-nous: On Thinking-of-the-Other,
13-38. New York: Columbia University Press.
Levinas, E. (1998b) "Uniqueness." In E. Levinas, Entre-nous,
189-196. New York: Columbia University Press. >
These ideas bring me to the boundaries of my present
understandings and I offer the following 2 points because I've an intuition
that they might resonate with some of your own understandings. Point 7 from
Yaakub Murray draws attention to the problem of opening up new ideas while
stabilising them so that they can be communicated. I've included point 8 from
Alan Rayner, because of my intuition that it contains meanings that will be
particularly significant for those of us who are working from a perspective of
inclusionality. As I've said I want to share these two points because they are
are the limits of my comprehension and I'm going to have to think a lot more
about them in terms of their implications for my educational enquiry.
7) Stabilising the relationally
dynamic and responsive flow of your life in education in communicating your
meanings
"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)
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.
8) Writing
from an inclusional perspective with an understanding of relationally dynamic
and responsive educational relationships
"An Inclusional Principle and Logic thereby
emerges. This can be expressed ecologically as follows. Content is contextual: the inhabitant
is a dynamic inclusion of the habitat, not an exception from it, as objective
rationality would have us make believe.
Content simultaneously forms from and gives expression to
the receptive spatial pool that it fluid dynamically includes and is included
in; the inhabitant transforms the habitat and vice
versa as inseparable but distinguishable (discernible) aspects of one
in the other. Inclusional flow entails the local-non-local logic of 'somewhere
as a dynamic inclusion of everywhere', not solely the local logic of discrete,
opposing objects." (Rayner, 2007)
Rayner, A. (2007) Inclusional Research Streams, Unpublished paper.
Here is the piece from Research
Intelligence
Whitehead, J. (2007) Is Education Research
Educational? Research Intelligence, Issue 100, August 2007, p. 17.
I'm hoping that the letter is
interesting and useful – I know I've enjoyed writing it. Smile.
Love Jack.