Living critical standards of judgement in educational theorising

 

Jack  Whitehead, University of Bath

 

Paper to be presented in the Symposium on Creating Inclusional and Postcolonial Living Educational Theories at BERA 2005, University of Glamorgan.

 

Fourth DRAFT 31 JULY 2005

 

Abstract

           

This presentation focuses on the communication of the meanings of living critical standards of judgement in educational theorising. The living critical standards emerge from an analysis of the educational influence of practitioner-researchers in their own learning, in the learning of others and in the education of the social formations in which we live, work and research. The evidential bases of the analysis include 18 doctoral theses awarded between1996 and 2005 for which I was sole or joint supervisor, including my own. These can be accessed at http://www.bath.ac.uk/~edsajw/living.shtml

 

The analysis will show how each practitioner-researcher clarifies, in the course of their emergence, in the practice of educational enquiry, the embodied ontological values to which they hold themselves accountable in their professional practice.

 

The analysis will also show how, through the process of clarification, the embodied values are transformed into the living epistemological standards of critical judgement used to test the validity of the claims to educational knowledge in each doctoral thesis. These standards of judgement will include the traditional standards of originality of mind, critical judgement, original contribution to knowledge and extent and merit of the work.

 

The scholarly significance of the analysis is that it shows an inclusional form of educational theorising that overcomes limitations in the generation of explanations for the educational influence of individuals in learning, from propositional and dialectical theories of education.

 

A distinction will be drawn between education theories and educational theories. This distinction will be used to show how living educational theories can draw insights from the traditional disciplines of education while being resistant to categorisation within any existing discipline of education. The need to develop a new discipline of educational enquiry, to explain the educational influence of individuals in their own learning, in the learning of others and in the education of social formations, will be explained.

 

 

Introduction

 

Some 35 years ago the Institute of Education of the University of London was a world leader in terms of the originality, significance and rigour of the approach to educational theory, known as the 'disciplines' approach. Having studied at this Institute the philosophy, psychology, sociology and history of education that constituted this approach between 1968-70, I initially accepted the approach. I then rejected it in 1971 on discovering that none of these disciplines either singly or in any combination could produce an adequate explanation for my educational influence in my own learning or in the learning of my students. My reason for rejecting the approach was well put in 1983 by Paul Hirst, one of the originators of the 'disciplines' approach when he acknowledged the following mistake in his understanding that 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 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."

(Hirst, 1970, p. 18)

 

My rejection of the old 'disciplines' approach in 1971 was based on my commitment to personal knowledge in the sense that I could recognise the validity of my explanations of my educational influences in my own learning and in the learning of my pupils. The validity of the practical explanatory principles, in these explanations, was denied in the 'disciplines' approach in the sense that there were seen as being at best pragmatic maxims that would be replaced (my emphasis) by principles with more fundamental, theoretical justification in a rationally developed educational theory. It was this desire and commitment by the adherents to the 'disciplines' approach, to replace the practical principles in my explanations of my educational influence in learning, that I experienced as violating and colonial.

 

My response to the anger I felt at the country's most influential Institute of Education advocating a mistaken view of educational theory was to move in 1973, to the University of Bath with a creative passion to see if I could contribute to the reconstruction of educational theory. What I had in mind was the reconstruction of educational theory in the form and content of the explanations that teacher-researchers produced for their own educational influence in their own learning and in the learning of their students. My interest in educational theories that could explain educational influences in the learning of social formations developed later. In the Appendix of my Presidential Address to BERA in 1988 you will see a list of accounts by practitioner-researchers that mark my own progress as a supervisor of practitioner-research. There are no completed doctoral programmes listed. The first completion followed the Address.

 

In the Appendix there is a list of some successfully completed 18 doctoral research programmes I have either singly or jointly supervised where the researcher has graduated over the past ten years  (1995-2005) I have also included two masters dissertations because of their original contributions to living educational theory). If you are accessing this in your browser the live urls will take you directly to the Abstract and content of each thesis and dissertation. Each thesis and dissertation is a narrative of the learning of the practitioner-researcher as they enquire into improving their own practice. I believe that the University of Bath is similar to other Universities in requiring that doctoral degrees demonstrate original and significant contributions to knowledge, originality of mind and critical judgement, extent and merit and matter worthy of publication.  In each thesis the individual practitioner-researcher has considered the ontological values that give meaning and purpose to their life. Through clarifying these meanings in the course of their emergence in practice each researcher has produced, usually through the use of a clearly articulated methodology of action research, living epistemological, or critical standards of judgement, that can be used to evaluate the validity of the knowledge claims.

 

The purpose of this paper is to communicate my experience and meanings of living critical standards of judgement in my educational theorising. I am sharing the ideas in this BERA forum so that the significance and validity of the ideas can be assessed through the mutual rational controls of our critical discussion.

 

I imagine that you are all familiar with the experience of the flows of energy in living critical standards of judgement. I mean this in the sense that in asking questions about the meaning and purpose of your lives you are aware of the flows of energy in making judgements of value in what you do, about what you have done, and about what you intend to do. As you reflect on your experiences of schooling I imagine that everyone here has experienced the flow of energy of  living values in critical standards of judgement. I believe that everyone here, has reflected about what was worthwhile, or not, in the learning and pedagogies we experienced at home at school and for many here, at university. I could of course be mistaken in this belief that you are all familiar with the flows of energy in living values. The validity of my belief is open to question from the ground of your experience. I will consider in more details later the epistemological significance of this openness to questioning the validity of one's beliefs.

 

I also believe that you will be unfamiliar with the form of the language I use to communicate my meanings of living critical standards of judgement. It isn't that I don't think you understand, in your own way, the flows of energy that are life-affirming, or the experiences of loving what you do, or the meanings of your own critical standards. It is just that I don't think you will have thought about the possibility that such meanings could be synthesised into living critical standards of judgement in educational theorising. It is this possibility that I now want to consider.

 

Introducing the experience, expression and communication of a loving flow-form of life-affirming energy as a living critical standard of judgement in educational theorising

 

As a bedrock of my hope in human existence I bear witness to a flow of energy that carries hope for the future of humanity and my own. I experience love in such a flow of energy in what I do in education. My students tell me that they feel the expression of love for what I do as a life-affirming energy that flows into our relationship and influences their enquiries. I recognise this love in Cho's terms when he says that with love, education becomes an open space for thought from which emerges knowledge. For Cho, as for me, it is important to make clear that in explaining the educational influence of love in learning, between two or more people in an educational relationship, it is not a matter of  'merely caring for one another, nor do they pass knowledge between each other' (Cho, 2005, p. 95). It is a matter of seeing that love opens a space for those in educational relationships to preserve the distinctiveness of their positions by turning away from one another and toward the world in order to produce knowledge through inquiry and thought (Cho, 2005. p. 95).

 

 

Evidence for my belief that it is possible to reach an intersubjective agreement on the meaning of such a living standard of educational judgement is provided by the agreement between Moira Laidlaw and me that the relational flows of meaning in the video clip below, from which the following still image was taken, can be described through our agreed ostensive definition as a loving flow-form of life-affirming energy in educational relationships:

 

The following 9 MB video clip will take several minutes to download using Broadband (10 minutes on my system) and opens in Quicktime.

 

http://www.jackwhitehead.com/mlendSorenson.mov

 

 

 

More still images from the classroom with Moira Laidlaw at Guyuan Teachers College in China on the 15 October 2004 can be seen at:

 

http://www.jackwhitehead.com/moira151004/moira151004.html

 

 

To re-inforce our meanings of a loving flow-form of life-affirming energy, Moira also provided this photograph she took of a Mother and son, with the Mother's permission, in Beijing. :

 

 

My use of mult-media representations of living critical standards of judgement emerged from the recognition that many significance meanings in educational discourse were communicated non-verbally, through multi-sensory perceptions. To appreciate and communicate my meanings of flows of energy whose form was being constituted by my values I needed to show these meanings in the course of their emergence in the practice of living enquiry.

 

I am fascinated by the question of whether it is possible and desirable for the development of educational theorising with living critical standards of judgement, to extend this agreement, between Moira and me, with your agreement, that as we watch the video-clip  we-i are experiencing a loving flow-form of life-affirming energy in the channels of space and dynamic boundaries of the educational relationships. So, one of the tests of validity of my belief that it will be possible to legitimate such loving flows of life-affirming energy, as living critical standards of judgement in educational theorising, within our social contexts and educational relationships, rests on this meaning resonating with your own, first through the uniqueness of our intuitive responses and then into the explicit cognitions of our shared language.

 

Having worked with Madeline Church over the six years of her doctoral research programme I was delighted to see her graduate on the 19th July 2005 from the University of Bath. My delight may be appreciated through what I experience as Madeline's embodied expression of love in the image. You can read Madeline's tentative conclusion about love in the Abstract to her thesis below the picture.

 

 

 

CREATING AN UNCOMPROMISED PLACE TO BELONG: WHY DO I FIND MYSELF IN NETWORKS?

 

Abstract




My inquiry sits within the reflective paradigm. I start from an understanding that knowing myself better will enhance my capacity for good action in the world. Through questioning myself and writing myself on to the page, I trace how I resist community formations, while simultaneously wanting to be in community with others. This paradox has its roots in my multiple experiences of being bullied, and finds transformation in my stubborn refusal to retreat into disconnection. 



 

I notice the way bullying is part of my fabric. I trace my resistance to these experiences in my embodied experience of connecting to others, through a form of shape-changing. I see how question-forming is both an expression of my own bullying tendencies, and an intention to overcome them. Through my connection to others and my curiosity, I form a networked community in which I can work in the world as a network coordinator, action-researcher, activist and evaluator. 



 

I show how my approach to this work is rooted in the values of compassion, love, and fairness, and inspired by art. I hold myself to account in relation to these values, as living standards by which I judge myself and my action in the world. This finds expression in research that helps us to design more appropriate criteria for the evaluation of international social change networks. Through this process I inquire with others into the nature of networks, and their potential for supporting us in lightly-held communities which liberate us to be dynamic, diverse and creative individuals working together for common purpose. I tentatively conclude that networks have the potential to increase my and our capacity for love. 



 

Through this research I am developing new ways of knowing about what we are doing as reflective practitioners, and by what standards we can invite others to judge our work. I am, through my practice, making space for us to flourish, as individuals and communities. In this way I use the energy released by my response to bullying in the service of transformation.

 

In was my clear understanding, in being with Madeline at her graduation along with her family and friends, and having accompanied her in the journey for her doctorate, that her tentative conclusion about networks having the potential to increase her and our capacity for love, could be transformed into a more confident assertion. I mean this in the sense that I believe Madeline has demonstrated that she has increased her capacity for love through the relational dynamic networks described in her thesis.

 

In the following picture I see the expression of my meaning of a loving flow-form of life-affirming energy. The picture was taken on the 22nd July 2005 as I was talking with Peter Mellett about our shared values of love and understanding in education. The context of our conversation was the ending of the BERA Practitioner-Researcher SIG e-seminar of 2005 that I had been convening. We were talking about the final posting Pete was intending to make on the process of reviewing the quality of practitioner-researcher accounts in relation to the theme of the seminar on The Nature of Educational Theories: What counts as evidence of educational influences in learning.

 

 

Jack Whitehead on the left, Peter Mellett on the right.

 

You can access a more detailed paper on 'Developing the dynamic boundaries of living standards of judgement in educational enquiries of the kind, 'How do I improve what I am doing?' from http://www.jackwhitehead.com/jwartl141015web.htm.

 

Having introduced the idea of living critical standards of judgement in educational theorising I now want to analyse their significance for educational research through an exploration of a distinction between living educational theories and theories of education.

 

Why distinguish living educational theories from theories of education?

 

My rejection of the old disciplines approach to educational theory was based on its mistaken assumption that the practical principles in my explanations for my educational influence would be replaced, in a rational developed educational theory, by principles with more theoretical justification from the disciplines of education. I use the idea of living educational theory to mean the explanations that individual's produce for their own educational influences in their own learning, in the learning of others and in the learning of social formations. These explanations can include insights from the traditional disciplines of education without being subsumed within any of the conceptual frameworks or methods of validation of the traditional disciplines of education. Because I value and use many insights from the disciplines of education in the creation and testing of my living educational theory I do not want to be misunderstood as saying that I am rejecting the idea that these disciplines are significant in the growth of educational knowledge and theory. What I want to be clear about are the distinguishing characteristics of living educational theories and their living critical standards of judgement that make them distinct from the traditional disciplines and theories of education. I am thinking of these distinguishing characteristics in terms of:

 

i)               the living critical standards of judgement that can be used to evaluate the validity of claims to educational knowledge that are made from a living theory perspective.

ii)             the adequacy of the explanations of educational influences in learning

iii)            using embodied ontological values in accounting for ourselves and our learning

iv)            transforming embodied values in living epistemological standards of critical judgement

v)             evolving inclusional, responsive and postcolonial forms of educational theorising

vi)            creating a new disciplines approach to educational theorising through educational enquiry

 

 

Why focus on living critical standards of judgement in educational theorising?

 

Like Kilpatrick (1951) in the first issue of Educational Theory, I believe that educational theory is a form of dialogue that has profound implications for the future of humanity and one's own. In creating and evaluating one's own living educational theory I see individuals explaining their educational influences. The explanations of educational influence in their own learning, in the learning of others and in the learning of social formations are given in terms of values and understandings that constitute the meanings and purpose they give to their lives.  As I write Londoners are responding to a number of 'terror' bombings.  Israeli and Palestinians, Afghans, Iraqi's and other citizens around the world are doing the same - responding to 'terror' bombings. In many cases individual 'suicide' bombers have died, having intentionally detonated explosives with the intention of killing others. The passions, understandings and community identities that can motivate someone to kill themselves and others involve living critical standards of judgement. Their intention to kill others in this way is motivated by both ontological values that give meaning and purpose to their lives and by living critical standards of judgement that can explain how their will to live this life can be transcended by a willingness to die and kill others because of their living critical standards.  This is one of my reasons for focusing on the nature of living critical standards of judgement. I see such standards as being constituted by the values and understandings that individual's and communities believe carry hope for the future of humanity and their own.

 

Another reason is that critical standards of judgement are necessary in the validation and legitimation of what counts as knowledge in the Academy. Having said that they are necessary for validation I agree with Foucault's analysis of regimes of truth where he focuses on the power relations that determine what counts as truth in a particular context. He says that his analysis is not a battle on behalf of truth, but that he seeks to understand the power relations that constitute what counts as truth in a particular context. I am seeking to do both. I am seeking to understand the nature of living critical standards of judgement with an awareness of the influence of regimes of truth in my own understandings.

 

In my workplace of the University of Bath, one way in which knowledge-creation is supported is through the supervision and legitimation of doctoral theses. The criteria used by examiners of these theses, supported by the disciplinary power relations of the University, are that a thesis must demonstrate originality of mind and critical judgement, extent and merit and contain matter worth of publication.

 

In legitimating living educational theories in the Academy, the doctoral theses must satisfy the examiners and the university that the critical judgements used in the thesis are communicated and used appropriately in the process of knowledge-creation.  By concentrating on the nature of living critical standards of judgement in this paper I do not want to underemphasise the importance of the qualities of originality of mind that have also got to be demonstrated for the legitimation of a doctoral thesis. The processes of pedagogisation and enquiry learning that support the development, expression and communication of originality of mind in living theories will be the focus of another paper.

 

In the contributions to educational knowledge being made by the living educational theories at http://www.bath.ac.uk/~edsajw/living.shtml , the individual practitioner-researchers explain their educational influence in their own learning in terms of the values and understandings that carry their hope for the future of humanity and their own.  The values and understandings that give meaning and purpose to their lives are clarified in the course of their emergence in the practice of enquiry. I am thinking here of a form of enquiry, informed by cycles of action and reflection in which individuals experience a tension, concern or contradiction because their values are not being lived as fully as they believe they can be. They imagine what to do to live their values more fully. They act and gather data on which to make a judgement on the effectiveness of their actions and understandings. They evaluate the effectiveness of their values and understandings and modify their concern, tension or contradiction in relation to their evaluation. As educational action researchers, they also make their explanations of learning public, together with the critical standards of judgement they use to evaluate the validity of their explanations. This fulfils a requirement of research that it is a form of systematic enquiry that is made public.

 

The living standards of critical judgement in the creation and testing of living educational theories are embodied ontological values and understandings that give meaning and purpose to life and which have been clarified in the course of their emergence in practice and transformed into the living standards judgement.

 

When I write about embodied ontological values forming living critical standards of judgement, I am referring to flows of energy that are necessary in explaining any action. We cannot do anything without energy. In my experience and awareness of my will to live there is a flow of life-affirming energy that I associate with Bataille's (1987, p. 11) idea of assenting to life up to the point of death and to Tillich's (1962, p,168) idea of being grasped by the power of being itself. When I say I 'associate' my meanings with theirs, I do not mean that I am giving the same meaning to their words. Their words help me to carry my own unique meanings. For example, I do not have any theistic beliefs, while for Tillich there is a theistic meaning in his being grasped by the power of being itself.

 

The third reason for focusing on living critical standards of judgement is related to the importance of capitalism, ideology, culture and race in understanding the reproduction and transformation of social formations. Their importance for my enquiry is that they influence the identities and living theories of individuals and are influenced by them.  Here is how I relate my commitment to the singular and responsible in living critical standards of judgement with the social, collective and cultural, through the ideas from Bakhtin, Ramachandran, Seve, Boudrillard, Said, Habermas, Bernstein, Bourdieu, Rikowski and Murray.

 

With Bakhtin, I recognise that 'I' do not fit into traditional theories and that there is a fundamental error in rationalist philosophy:

 

"As Bakhtin explains 'I' do not fit into theory - neither in the psychology of consciousness, not the history of some science, nor in the chronological ordering of my day, not in my scholarly duties...... these problems derive from the fundamental error of "rationalist" philosophy... The fatal flaw is the denial of responsibility - which is to say, the crisis is at base an ethical one. It can be  overcome only by an understanding of the act as a category into which cognition enters but which is radically singular and 'responsible'." (Morson & Emerson, 1989, p. 13.)

 

For me, the meaning of I in 'How do I improve?' is showing myself acting with cognition, radical singularity and responsibility, in educational theory creation. I am aware of understanding myself, in the way described by Ramachandran in terms of continuity, unity, embodiment and agency:

 

What exactly do people mean when they speak of the self? Its defining characteristics are fourfold. First of all, continuity. You've a sense of time, a sense of past, a sense of future. There seems to be a thread running through your personality, through your mind. Second, closely related is the idea of unity or coherence of self. In spite of the diversity of sensory experiences, memories, beliefs and thoughts, you experience yourself as one person, as a unity.

 

So there's continuity, there's unity. And then there's the sense of embodiment or ownership - yourself as anchored to your body. And fourth is a sense of agency, what we call free will, your sense of being in charge of your own destiny. (Ramachandran, V. S. 2003)

 

I relate Ramachandran's point about a thread running through my personality to Seve's idea of personality as meaning:

 

"... the total system of activity of a given individual, a system which forms and develops throughout his life and the evolution of which constitutes the essential content of his biography. The personality is not at all to be reduced to individuality, or to the ensemble of the particular formal characteristics of an individual's psychism whether these particular characteristics refer back to biological conditions in themselves independent of personal activity and to the infantile structurations which preceded it, or on the contrary, are only explained by the particular logic of this activity. The personality is the scientific concept which corresponds to the fundamental unity of these two simple formulae: what a man makes of his life, what his life made of him."  (Seve, 1978, p.461)

 

 

In my question , 'How do I improve.....?' I am working with Bakhtin's notion of being 'radically singular' and responsible and with Boudrillard's notion of singularies being an appropriate response to globalisation. The importance of working with a contextualised understanding of self-identity is being highlighted by Sky News Reports, as I write this on the 7th July 2005. The report is of explosions, terrible injuries and fatalities in London with confirmation from a European News Agency of a terrorist attack that co-incides with the Leaders of the G8 countries meeting at Gleneagles in Scotland and the day after the celebrations of the successful London bid to host the Olympic Games in 2012:

 

Positive alternatives cannot defeat the dominant system, but singularities that are neither positive nor negative can. Singularities are not alternatives. They represent a different symbolic order. They do not abide by value judgments or political realities. They can be the best or the worst. They cannot be "regularized" by means of a collective historical action.  They defeat any uniquely dominant thought. Yet they do not present themselves as a unique counter-thought. Simply, they create their own game and impose their own rules. Not all singularities are violent. Some linguistic, artistic, corporeal, or cultural singularities are quite subtle. But others, like terrorism, can be violent. The singularity of terrorism avenges the singularities of those cultures that paid the price of the imposition of a unique global power with their own extinction........  Only an analysis that emphasizes the logic of symbolic obligation can make sense of this confrontation between the global and the singular. To understand the hatred of the rest of the world against the West, perspectives must be reversed. The hatred of non-Western people is not based on the fact that the West stole everything from them and never gave anything back. Rather, it is based on the fact that they received everything, but were never allowed to give anything back. This hatred is not caused by dispossession or exploitation, but rather by humiliation. And this is precisely the kind of hatred that explains the September 11 terrorist attacks. These were acts of humiliation responding to another humiliation.  (Boudrillard, 2003)

 

So, when I extend below my understandings of 'I' in asking, researching and answering the question, 'How do I improve....?,  these understandings are informed by the above ideas. I am thinking particularly of 'I' being radically singular, in acts, actions and activities that are motivated by values such as freedom, responsibility, compassion and life-affirming energy. 'I' is connected to influences from the ideas of others and the socio-historical and socio-cultural formations in, and with which I live, work and learn.

 

I am connecting the singularity of my 'I' to the influences of the social, historical, cultural and racial through Said's understandings of influence and originality:

 

"As a poet indebted to and friendly with Mallarme, Valery was compelled to assess originality and derivation in a way that said something about a relationship between two poets that  could not be reduced to a simple formula. As the actual circumstances were rich, so too had to be the attitude.  Here is an example from the "Letter About Mallarme".

 

No word comes easier of oftener to the critic's pen than the word influence, and no vaguer notion can be found among all the vague notions that compose the phantom armory of aesthetics.  Yet there is nothing in the critical field that should be of greater philosophical interest or prove more rewarding to analysis than the progressive modification of one mind by the work of another.

 

It often happens that the work acquires a singular value in the other mind, leading to active consequences that are impossible to foresee and in many cases will never be possible to ascertain. What we do know is that this derived activity is essential to intellectual production of all types. Whether in science or in the arts, if we look for the source of an achievement we can observe that what a man does either repeats or refutes what someone else has done – repeats it in other tones, refines or amplifies or simplifies it, loads or overloads it with meaning; or else rebuts, overturns, destroys and denies it, but thereby assumes it and has invisibly used it. Opposites are born from opposites.

 

We say that an author is original when we cannot trace the hidden transformations that others underwent in his mind; we mean to say that the dependence on what he does on what others have done is excessively complex and irregular. There are works in the likeness of others, and works that are the reverse of others, but there are also works of which the relation with earlier productions is so intricate that we become confused and attribute them to the direct intervention of the gods. (Paul Valery, 'Letter about Mallarme', in Leonardo, Poe, Mallarme, trans. Malcolm Cowley and James R. Lawler (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), p. 241.

 

Valery converts 'influence' from a crude idea of the weight of one writer coming down in the work of another into a universal principle of what  he calls 'derived achievement'. He then connects this concept with a complex process of repetition that illustrates it by multiplying instances; this has the effect of providing a sort of wide  intellectual space, a type of discursiveness in which to examine influence. Repetition, refinement, amplification, loading, overloading, rebuttal, overturning, destruction, denial, invisible use – such concepts completely modify a linear (vulgar) idea of 'influence' into an open field of possibility. Valery is careful to admit that chance and ignorance play important roles in this field; what we cannot see or find, as well as what we cannot predict, he says, produce excessive irregularity and complexity. Thus the limits of the field of investigation are set by examples whose nonconforming, overflowing energy begins to carry them out of the field. This is an extremely important refinement in Valery's writing. For even as his writing holds in the wide system of variously dispersed relationships connecting writers with one another, he also shows how at its limits the field gives forth other relations that are hard to describe from within the field." (Said, 1997, p.15)

 

In relation to socio-historical influences I am thinking ideas from Habermas where he focuses on learning, communication and social validation in the evolution of society.

 

In his monumental work on The Theory of Communicative Action, Habermas  attempts to free historical materialism from what he calls its philosophical ballast. He uses two abstractions. The development of cognitive structures are abstracted from the historical dynamic of events. The evolution of society is abstracted from the historical concretion of forms of life. He says that both abstractions help in getting beyond the confusion of basic categories to which the philosophy of history owes its existence:

 

A theory developed in this way can no longer start by examining concrete ideals immanent in traditional forms of life. It must orient itself to the range of learning processes that is opened up at a given time by a historically attained level of learning. It must refrain from critically evaluating and normatively ordering totalities, forms of life and cultures, and life-contexts and epochs as a whole. And yet it can take up some of the intentions for which the interdisciplinary research program of earlier critical theory remains instructive.  (Habermas, 1987, p. 383)

 

This focus on learning is sustained from his earlier work on the  'Legitimation Crisis' where he says:

 

'It is my conjecture that the fundamental mechanism for social evolution in general is to be found in an automatic inability not to learn. Not learning but not-learning is the phenomenon that calls for explanation at the socio-cultural stage of development. Therein lies, if you will, the rationality of man. Only against this background does the over-powering irrationality of the history of the species become visible.' (Habermas, 1975, p.15)

 

I share Habermas' understanding that communicative action raises the following validity claims:

 

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:

 

a)    Uttering something understandably;

b)    Giving (the hearer) something to understand;

c)     Making himself thereby understandable. And

d)    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 (p.2) the utterance of the speaker (can trust him). Finally, the speaker mush 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, p.3)

 

The significance of this idea on social validity, in relation to living critical standards of judgement in living educational theories, is that that the standards have not only been clarified in the course of their emergence in practice. They have also been subjected to the critical scrutiny of a peer validation group in relation to their use as explanatory principles in the individuals' account of their educational influence in learning.

 

With my present focus on living critical standards of judgement, I do not want to lose sight of the role of personal knowledge in the affirmation of the validity of living educational theories. Michael Polanyi's (1958) Personal Knowledge sets out a post-critical philosophy with a logic of affirmation and conviviality that is significance in my understandings, presented below, of inclusional standards of judgement.

 

I now want to acknowledge the influence of other social theorists in the development of my own insights. From the work of Bernstein on Pedagogy, Symbolic Control and Identity I have integrated the following idea of pedagogy into my understanding of my educational influence as I pedagogise living educational theories in my educational practice. According to Bernstein:

 

Pedagogy is a sustained process whereby somebody(s) acquires new forms or develops existing forms of conduct, knowledge, practice and criteria from somebody(s) or something deemed to be an appropriate provider and evaluator - appropriate either from the point of view of the acquirer or by some other body(s) or both (Bernstein, 2000, p.78).

 

In the continuous development of my living educational theory and critical standards of judgement I am integrating Bernstein's notion of an explicit critical pedagogy. By an explicit pedagogy I follow Bernstein in referring to pedagogic relations that shape pedagogic communications and their relevant contexts. My pedagogy is explicit in his sense that it refers to a progressive in time pedagogic relation where there is a purposeful intention to initiative, modify, develop or change knowledge, conduct or practice by someone or something which already possesses, or has access to, the necessary resources and the means of evaluating the acquisition. In the case of explicit pedagogy the intention is highly visible (Bernstein, 2000, p.200).

 

One distinguishing feature between Bernstein's meanings and my own meanings of pedagogy is where he says that Explicit refers to the visibility of the transmitter's intention as to what is to be acquired from the point of view of the acquirer (ibid).  In my understanding of the educational influence of my critical pedagogy in my own learning I am engaged in a form of enquiry learning, rather than working with a 'transmission' mode of explicit pedagogy.

 

Bernstein says that his  approach is too limited to deal with large questions of culture and symbolic control. In the creation of living educational theory I do not want to lose sight of his insight that:

 

"....whereby symbolic control and its modalities are realised: how power relations are transformed into discourse and discourse into power relations. The process whereby this transformation takes place, formally and informally in families and education, is to my mind essentially a pedagogic process and, in more generalized and diffuse forms, by the public media within the context of the arenas of power of state-managed societies. Collectivism may have been weakened, the market may have greater autonomy, but the devices of symbolic control are increasingly state regulated and monitored through the new techniques of de-centred centralisation." (p.xxvi)

 

I say this because I do not wish to create the kind of 'mythological discourse' he draws attention to which can be created if the power relations described above are not taken into account:

 

"I would like to propose that the trick whereby the school disconnects the hierarchy of success internal to the school from social class hierarchies external to the school is by creating a mythological discourse and that this mythological discourse incorporates some of the political ideology and arrangement of the society.

 

First of all, it is clear that conflict, or potential conflict, between  social groups may be reduced or contained by creating a discourse which emphasises what all groups share, their communality, their apparent  interdependence.

 

By creating a fundamental identity, a discourse is created which generates what I shall call horizontal solidarities among their staff and students, irrespective of the political ideology and social arrangement of the society. The discourse  which produces horizontal solidarities or attempts to produce such solidarities from this point of view I call a mythological discourse. This mythological discourse consists of two pairs of elements which, although having different  functions, combine to reinforce each other. One pair celebrates and attempts to produce a united, integrated, apparently common national consciousness; the other pair work together to disconnect hierarchies within the school from a causal relation with social hierarchies outside the school." (p. xxiii)

 

Bourdieu is another social theorist whose ideas are influencing the development of my living educational theory, especially in my understanding of the role of what he calls the 'habitus' in social reproduction:

 

 "The objective adjustment between dispositions and structures ensures a conformity to objective demands and urgencies which has nothing to do with rules and conscious compliance with rules, and gives an appearance of finality which in no way implies conscious positing of the ends objectively attained. Thus, paradoxically, social science makes greatest use of the language of rules precisely in the cases where it is most totally inadequate, that is, in analysing social formations in which, because of the constancy of the objective conditions over time, rules have a particularly small part to play in the determination of practices, which is largely entrusted to the automatisms of the habitus."

(Bourdieu, p. 145, 1990)

 

My own research interests are focused on the use-value of social theories in helping me to develop my understanding of the educational influence of living educational theories in the learning and transformations of social formations. Bourdieu's point about the significance of the automatisms of the habitus, rather than the language of rules from social science in analysing social formations, continues to influence my understandings as I seek to enhance the educational influence of living educational theories in transforming social formations.

 

As I hold together, in my singular and responsible 'I', the embodied values that give meaning and purpose to my life, with understandings of the influence of socio-cultural and socio-historical practices, I continue to be influenced by my readings of Marxist theorists. My introduction to Marxist theory was through the work of Erich Fromm in 1966. I was inspired by his distinction between the productive and marketing personalities in his work 'Man for Himself' (Fromm, 1947).  I was also inspired the same year by his insight that if a person can face the truth without panic they will recognise that there is no purpose to life other than that they give to their own life through their own loving relationships and productive work. In his analysis of Fear of Freedom (Fromm, 1960, p. 18) he says that we are faced with the choice of uniting with the world in the spontaneity of love and productive work or of seeking a kind of security which destroys our integrity and freedom. From Fromm's work I learnt to hold together my sense of agency and responsibility with my understandings of the influence on my form of life of the historical development of capitalist formations.  I am still holding these together in my embrace of the postmodern insight from Lyotard that:

 

A postmodern artist or writer is in the position of a philosopher: the text he writes, the work he produces are not in principle governed by pre-established rules, and they cannot be judged according to a determining judgement, by applying familiar categories to the text or to the work. Those rules and categories are what the work of art itself is looking for. The artist and the writer, then, are working without rules in order to formulate the rules of what will have been done. (Lyotard, p. 81, 1984),

 

 

with Rikowski's understanding that:

 

 "The key point, however, is that the increasing and deepening colonization of the 'human' by capital is becoming more susceptible to analysis as its 'obviousness' is exposed by its own developing intensity. Hence, the less 'human' we become, then, paradoxically, the greater is the potential for starting to grasp our real predicament. Our capacity for awareness of our situation as capitalized life-form increases as our 'humanity' is left behind. The process of capitalization of humanity includes our 'consciousness' too; our sentient powers of thought, reflection, deliberation and capacity for 'reflexivity' (most beloved by some postmodern and liberal Left thinkers) are also incorporated within capital.' (Rikowski, 2002, p, 113)

 

In my own experience, practice and understandings (Whitehead, 1993, 2004) I have worked through some of the implications, for my educational influence in my own learning, of being singular and responsible and being influenced by the historical dynamic of events, culture and the habitus that serves the 'terror' of being eliminated from language game which supports one's identity in the work place and beyond:

 

"Countless scientists have seen their 'move' ignored or repressed, sometimes for decades, because it too abruptly destabilized the accepted positions, not only in the university and scientific hierarchy, but also in the problematic. The stronger the 'move' the more likely it is to be denied the minimum consensus, precisely because it changes the rules of the game upon which the consensus has been based. But when the institution of knowledge functions in this manner, it is acting like an ordinary power center whose behaviour is governed by a principle of homeostasis.

 

Such behaviour is terrorist.... By terror I mean the efficiency gained by eliminating, or threatening to eliminate a player from the language game one shares with him. He is silenced or consents, not because he has been refuted, but because his ability to participate has been threatened (there are many ways to prevent someone from playing). The decision makers' arrogance, which in principle has no equivalent in the sciences, consists of the exercise of terror. It says: "Adapt your aspirations to our ends – or else". (Lyotard, p. 64. 1984)

 

I have previously analysed the role of the living critical standard of judgement of academic freedom in relation to such 'terror' (Whitehead, 1993).

 

Freedom also forms a focus of Sen's economic theory of human capability in which in points out some limitations in economic theories of human capital:

 

"... what, we may ask, is the connection between "human capital" orientation and the emphasis on 'human capability' with which this study has been much concerned? Both seem to place humanity at the center of attention, but do they have differences as well as some congruence? At the risk of some oversimplification, it can be said that the litera­ture on human capital tends to concentrate on the agency of human beings in augmenting production possibilities. The perspective of human capability focuses, on the other hand, on the ability‑the sub­stantive freedom‑of people to lead the lives they have reason to value and to enhance the real choices they have. The two perspectives cannot but be related, since both are concerned with the role of human beings, and in particular with the actual abilities that they achieve and acquire. But the yardstick of assessment concentrates on different achievements.

 

Given her personal characteristics, social background, economic circumstances and so on, a person has the ability to do (or be) certain things that she has reason to value. The reason for valuation can be direct (the functioning involved may directly enrich her life, such as being well‑nourished or being healthy), or indirect (the functioning involved may contribute to further production, or command a price in the market). The human capital perspective can‑in principle‑be defined very broadly to cover both types of valuation, but it is typi­cally defined‑by convention‑primarily in terms of indirect value: human qualities that can be employed as 'capital' in production (in the way physical capital is). In this sense, the narrower view of the human capital approach fits into the more inclusive perspective of human capability, which can cover both direct and indirect conse­quences of human abilities." (Sen, 1999, p 293)

 

In my understanding and use of dialectical materialism developed by Marx from Hegel's dialectics (Whitehead, 1999) I find myself embracing the above insight from Lyotard's about the postmodern writer in a way that freely acknowledges the continuous creative possibilities in the insight and hence rejects the conclusion of those Marxist Educational Theorists who believe that postmodernist theory must be banished to the dustbin of history!

 

"Critical educators need an engagement with postmodernism since that can deepen the conceptual reservoirs of Marxist theories by pointing out the limitations of such thought. If this engagement is successful it must eventually banish postmodernist theory to the dustbin of history" (McLaren, Hill, Cole and Rikowski, 2002, p. 283)

 

In the development of my living critical standards of judgement, informed by Lyotard's insight and in relation to postcolonialism I have been influenced by Yaqub Murray's insights on the importance of race and postcolonial theory. I am thinking here particularly of the inclusion of an understanding of 'whiteness' in my postcolonial critical pedagogy. Through his writings on, 'How do I, a mixed race educator, contribute to a postcolonial present and future through talking, writing and acting my postcoloniality? Performing my Mixed-Race Educative Practice in White Spaces' Murray (2004) focused my attention on understanding 'whiteness' as a set of power relations that worked to uphold white supremacy and white privilege in the European slavery of black South Africans in particular and continue in such organisations as the Klu Klux Klan in America, the British National Party and in personal and institutional racism in the UK and other counties.

 

One of the ideas that has emerged for me in conversations and correspondence with Yaqub Murray is the importance of learning how to contribute to the evolution of a postcolonial social formation (these are my words) through loyalty to humanity. In the publication Race Traitor, (Ignatiev, 1997, http://racetraitor.org/abolishthepoint.html), loyalty to humanity is equated with 'treason to whiteness' . Ignatiev (1997) and Cox (1997) write that the point is not to interpret whiteness but to dismantle and abolish it . Treason to whiteness is understood as undermining, dismantling and abolishing those networks of power relations that serve to sustain supremacies and privileges based on race. In developing a living standard of a postcolonial critical pedagogy I hold myself accountable to providing evidence-based demonstrations that some of my educational influences in my own learning (Whitehead, 2000, 2005a), in the learning of others (2004, 2005b) and in the learning of social formations (Murray, Whitehead and Nceku 2005, a & b) carries this pedagogical intent. This pedagogic intent, in relation to the education of a social formation can be seen in the advertisement for:

 

Teacher self-study for exploring effective practices of inclusion –  Nceku Nyathi (Leicester Management School), Jack Whitehead (Bath University), and Yaqub Murray - Will be jointly facilitating an Interactive Session for the HE Academy on Engaging with Student Cultural Diversity in the Curriculum – What works? October 26, 2005, at http://www.jackwhitehead.com/monday/pmnnjwHEACADEMYFORUM5.pdf

 

Having given the reasons why living critical standards of judgement are significant in the creation, evaluation and evolution of living educational theories, I now want to focus on the adequacy of the explanations generated by these living theories.

 

How adequate are the explanations of the educational influence of practitioner-researchers in their own learning, in the learning of others and in the education of the social formations in which we live, work and research?

 

One assumption which grounds my belief that what I have been doing constitutes a worthwhile and productive life is that an individual's educational theory explains their educational influence in their own learning in a way that carries hope for the future of humanity and their own. This assumption is open to question as I have still some time left to improve my practice and the assumptions that guide what I do!

 

My question about adequacy and explanations is related to Macintyre's point that:

 

The rival claims to truth of contending traditions of enquiry depend for their vindication upon the adequacy and explanatory power of the histories which the resources of each of those traditions in conflict enable their adherents to write. (MacIntyre, 1988, p. 403)

 

It is also related to Schutz's notion of adequacy when he says that a researcher should show how 'the actor could himself have subjectively intended a certain meaning.' (Schutz, 1972, p. 234)

 

The significance of the question is in its relationship to living critical standards of judgement. There are several disciplines of education, each with its own distinctive conceptual framework and critical standards of judgement in its methods of validation, that are used to generation explanations about education. I don't feel any conflict beween the explanations of education that can be generated from these disciplines of education and the explanations generated by practitioner-researchers to explain their educational influence in learning. This is because I see that explanations of education generated from enquiries into the philosophy, psychology, sociology, history, management, economics, theology and politics of education can be helpful to an individual in generating their explanation of their own educational influence in their own learning, in the learning of others and in the learning of social formations.

 

However, I do feel a conflict when I recognise that accredited programmes of professional development in education adopt a curriculum and pedagogy of transmission of the conceptual frameworks and methods of validation of disciplines of education without a recognition in the curriculum or pedagogy of the significant of an educators' ontological values in the generation and testing of their own living educational theories.

 

Can embodied ontological values be used in accounting for ourselves and our learning?

 

In 1994, The Third World Congress on Action Learning, Action Research and Process Management, was held at the University of Bath and co-ordinated by Moira Laidlaw. In the first meeting of the organising committee we focused on deciding a theme for the Congress and Erica Holley proposed the theme that we accepted, 'Accounting for Ourselves'. What we had in mind was a World Congress where practitioner-researchers would share their accounts of their learning in terms of the values and understandings that they use to give meaning and purpose to their lives. 

 

While agreeing with Walsh (1972) that values determine our standpoint:

 

"When data are organised in terms of abstract general laws, we have the natural sciences. When they are organized in terms of understanding concrete individual cases that are suffused with meaning, the cultural sciences are the results.

 

But such meanings cannot be understood except in terms of values. The cultural sciences must, therefore, deal with values. But they can deal with them adequately only in terms of an objective science of values. This in turn can only be supplied by a philosophy of history. Values are not real, they merely have validity (Geltung). In a sense, value may be regarded as the polar opposite of actuality. It is in terms of value that we approach actuality and organize it. Our values determine our standpoint." (Walsh, p. xvi, 1972),

 

values in living educational theories can be distinguished from an 'objective science of values' that is supplied by a philosophy of history.  In living educational theories, values are to be understood as embodied and ontological, in the sense that they are living energies of action that give meaning and purpose to life and whose meanings are clarified in the course of their emergence in educational enquiry.

 

My claim that ontological values can be used in accounting for ourselves and our learning is supported by the living theory doctorate theses at http://www.bath.ac.uk/~edsajw/living.shtml . Each living theory is an account of learning in relation to the values used by the individual to give meaning and purpose to their lives. The fact that these theses have been legitimated in the Academy is of course no guarantee of their validity. However, each thesis addresses the issue of validity from the ground of both personal knowledge and social validity, with the explicit living critical standards of judgement that are used to evaluate the validity of the living theory in the course of its emergence. Marian Naidoo, the most recent graduate with a living theory thesis expresses this in the Abstract to her Doctorate:

 

Abstract

  

I am Because We Are. (My never-ending story) The emergence of a living theory of inclusional and responsive practice

 

I believe that this original account of my emerging practice demonstrates how I have been able to turn my ontological commitment to a passion for compassion into a living epistemological standard of judgement by which my inclusional and responsive practice may be held accountable.

 

I am a story teller and the focus of this narrative is on my learning and the development of my living   educational theory as I have engaged with others in a creative and critical practice over a sustained period of time. This narrative self-study demonstrates how I have encouraged people to work creatively and critically  in order to improve the way we relate and communicate in a multi-professional and multi-agency healthcare setting in order to improve both the quality of care provided and the well being of the system.

 

In telling the story of the unique development of my inclusional and responsive practice I will show how I have been influenced by the work of theatre practitioners such as Augusto Boal, educational theorists such as Paulo Freire and drawn on, incorporated and developed ideas from complexity theory and  living theory action research. I will also describe how my engagement with the thinking of others has enabled my own practice to develop and from that to develop a living, inclusional and responsive theory of my practice. Through this research and the writing of this thesis, I now also understand that my ontological commitment to a passion for compassion has its roots in significant events in my past.

 

How can embodied ontological values be transformed into living epistemological standards of critical judgement?

 

I experience my values as expressions of energy that can explain why I do what I do. I connect the value words I use to express my expression of values to this motivating energy. For example I refer to the life-affirming energy I express in my educational relationships and which I recognise in the educational practices of others as the state of being grasped by the power of being itself.  In my book on the growth of educational knowledge I focused on the motivating power of freedom and justice in the experience of holding together living contradictions of values and understandings and their negation.

 

What I mean by my ontological values are those flows of energy that carry the meaning and purpose of my life. In accounting for myself, in the spirit of The Third World Congress, I explain my educational influence in learning as I explore my question, 'How do I improve what I am doing?' in terms of living a productive life, a life that feels worthwhile.  A good part of this life has been spent in supporting the creation, dissemination and pedagogisation of living educational theories. One of my reasons for offering my ideas for public discussion and criticism at BERA and AERA stems from an anxiety. This is the anxiety of being open to the possibility that I might be mistaken. I remember experiencing this anxiety when I heard David Clark make the following statement in 1997 in an invited presentation to AERA not long before he died:

 

The honest fact is that the total contribution of division A of AERA to the development of the empirical and theoretical knowledge base of administration and policy development is so miniscule that if all of us had devoted our professional careers to teaching and service, we would hardly have been missed.  (Clark, p.5, 1997)

 

One of the reasons I value so highly the responses of critical friends is that they can point to my lack of awareness of significant ideas and to contradictions in my ideas, practices and beliefs. They can help me not to persist in error. This is a great service in the knowledge that my beliefs have been subjected to rigorous criticism. So far, the following idea on how to transform embodied ontological values into living epistemological standards of critical judgement, continues to have both personal and social validity.

 

In each of the living theory theses, individuals feel a tension, concern or contradiction when their ontological values are not being lived as fully as they believe that they could be. This stimulates the imagination with ideas on how to improve matters that form into an action plan. If the conditions permit, actions are taken with the intention of living values more fully. Data is gathered either formally or informally on which to make a judgement on the effectiveness of the actions. Actions and understandings are evaluated in terms of their effectiveness in enabling values to be lived more fully. Explanations of learning are subjected to the responses of critical friends and concerns, ideas and actions are modified in the light of the evaluations and explanations. 

 

In the course of this enquiry, the meanings of the ontological values are clarified in the course of their emergence in practice. The clarification can now include, with the change in University regulations of 2004, visual narratives. In this clarification the living experiences of ontological values are transformed in a visual narrative into living epistemological standards of judgement that can be used to evaluate the validity of the knowledge claims. Each thesis must meet standards of originality of mind and critical judgement. The living standards of critical judgement, in each thesis, have been formed through the above process of clarifying the meanings of ontological values in the course of their emergence through the practice of enquiry.

 

In my own thesis (Whitehead, 1999) I explain my educational influences in my own learning in terms of my ontological values and understandings. The latest transformation in the growth of my educational knowledge has emerged through my understanding of inclusional forms of educational theorising.

 

What educational influences in learning can evolve an inclusional form of educational theorising?

 

My educational theorising has evolved over the past 37 years from its beginnings in the disciplines approach to propositional educational theory into the dialectical theorising of living educational theories and into inclusional living educational theories. Each of these transformations were motivated by feelings of contradiction. 

 

My initiation into the disciplines approach to propositional educational theory was carried out with great passion and commitment by a group of philosophers led by Richard Peters at the Institute of Education between 1968-70.  My studies of educational theory were motivated by my desire to extend my cognitive range and understanding from an awareness in which I felt a lack of knowledge about education.

 

The evolution into the dialectical theorising of living educational theories was motivated by the experience of a mistake in the disciplines approach at the point where its assumptions clearly required the replacement of the embodied ontological principles I used as explanatory principles in my accounts of my educational influence in my own learning, by principles with more 'rational' justification from the disciplines of education. I experienced the contradiction of believing in the value of educational theory, yet not holding an educational theory I could believe to be valid. The clearest expression of my formulation of a dialectical approach to living educational theory is in the paper, Creating a Living Educational Theory from Questions of the Kind, 'How do I improve my practice?' 

(http://www.bath.ac.uk/~edsajw/writings/livtheory.html )

 

The evolution into an inclusional approach to living educational theories, which retains insights from both propositional and dialectical theorising, was motivated by an appreciation of Alan Rayner's understandings of inclusionality. In particular, it was motivated by the educational influence in my own learning of his understanding of inclusionality as a relationally dynamic awareness of space and boundaries that is connective, reflexive and co-creative. In this view of inclusionality a complex self is expressed as a contextualised understanding of self-identity that is formed through the reciprocal coupling of inner and outer spatial domains through an intermediary self-boundary.  My recognition of inclusionality took me back to my 1971 reading of Michael Polanyi's  (1958) post-critical philosophy in his Personal Knowledge, with his logic of affirmation and his valuing of conviviality. My recognition of a life-affirming flow of loving energy in the video-clips and images above, is grounded in such a logic of affirmation and valuing of conviviality. I tend to resist violations of this affirmation and conviviality, particularly in my postcolonial responses to colonising tendencies, while continuing to value my dialectical responses to the experience of living contradiction and the insights I gain from propositional theories that might help to enhance the appropriateness of my responses to the experience of living contradiction. In this way I can hold together both dialectical and propositional processes within my living logics and awareness of inclusionality.

 

Should we explore together the implications of creating a new disciplines approach to educational theory through educational enquiry?

 

Given the title of my doctoral research programme my answer is a resounding yes!

 

How do I improve my practice? Creating a discipline of education through educational enquiry.

http://www.bath.ac.uk/~edsajw/jack.shtml

 

Here is the Abstract to the thesis which sets out my justification for believing that we should explore together the implications of a new disciplines approach to educational theory through educational enquiry:

 

This thesis shows how living educational standards of originality of mind and critical judgement in educational enquiries has created a discipline of education.

 

The meanings of these standards emerged from an analysis of my research published between 1977-1999. The analysis proceeds from the base of my experience of myself, my I, as a living contradiction in the question, How do I improve this process of education here?

 

An educational methodology, which includes I as a living contradiction, emerges from the application of a four-fold classification of methodologies of the social sciences. Then the idea of living educational theories emerges in terms of the descriptions and explanations which individual learners produce for their own educational development.

 

A logic of the question, How do I improve my practice?, emerges from my engagement with the ideas of others and from an exploration of the question in the practical contradictions between the power of truth and the truth of power in my workplace.

 

A discipline of education, with its standards of originality of mind and critical judgement, is defined and extended into my educative influences as a professional educator in the enquiry, 'How do I help you to improve your learning?'

 

My living educational theory continues to develop in the enquiry , How do I live my values more fully in my practice?. I explain my present practice in terms of an evaluation of my past learning, in terms of my present experiences of spiritual, aesthetic and ethical contradictions in my educative relations and in terms of my proposals for living my values more fully in the future.

 

I think that there is some persuasive evidence that researching together the generation and testing of living educational theories can carry hope for the future of humanity. I am thinking particular of the evidence in the work of Jean McNiff, Yaqub Murray, Je Kan Adler-Collins, Margaret Farren, Tian Fengjun and Moira Laidlaw, and Branko Bognar.

 

Jean McNiff and I have sustained a most creative and educative relationship over some 24 years. We have delighted each other with our productive work, shared and developed our ideas together and provided support for each other in times of crisis. Jean's sustained and sustaining passion to explore the generative and transformatory potentials of action research (McNiff, 1988, 1993, 1999, 2000a &b, 2002, 2005)  have been an inspiration to me. Without Jean practicing what we preach about documenting learning through writing we would not have the evidence of the generative and transformatory learnings that have meant so much in the growth of our educational knowledge.  

 

Yaqub Murray initiated me into postcolonial and critical-race theorising and focused my attention on the importance of 'whiteness' as a concept to describe the power relations that continue to support racial inequalities. The educational influences, in my learning, of Yaqub Murray, in the generation and testing of my living educational theory can be appreciated in the growing sophistication of my understandings of postcolonial values and practices between our presentation to AERA in 2000 (Murray and Whitehead, 2000) and our presentations to BERA in 2004 (Murray, 2004; Whitehead, 2004). The titles of the presentations give a precise focus to the contents:

 

Murray, P. & Whitehead J. (2000) White and Black with White Identities in self-studies of teacher-educator practices. Retrieved 25 July 2005 from  http://www.bath.ac.uk/~edsajw/A2/aerapj.htm

 

Whitehead, J. (2004) Do the values and living logics I express in my educational relationships carry the hope of Ubuntu for the future of humanity? Retrieved 25 July from http://www.jackwhitehead.com/jwbera04d.pdf

 

Murray, P. (2004) Speaking in a Chain of Voices ~ crafting a story of how I am contributing to the creation of my postcolonial living educational theory through a self study of my practice as a scholar-educator. Retrieved 25 July from http://www.leeds.ac.uk/educol/documents/00003811.htm

 

In exploring together the implications of creating a new disciplines approach to educational theory through educational enquiry, I am advocating an engagement with postcolonial theorising and the development of Yaqub Murray's idea of a postcolonial critical pedagogy as a living critical standard of judgement. One of the ideas that has emerged for me in conversations and correspondence with Yaqub Murray is the importance of learning how to contribute to the evolution of a postcolonial social formation (these are my words) through loyalty to humanity. An idea that Yaqub introduced me to was being a 'traitor to whiteness'. I have come to understand 'whiteness' as power relations that sustain white supremacy and white privilege.  If you access Noel Ignatiev's paper from the url below you will see on the top right hand corner of the page RACE TRAITOR - treason to whiteness is loyalty to humanity. One of my living critical standards of judgement is loyalty to humanity in the sense of accounting to myself and others with values that carry hope for the future of humanity and my own.

 

Ignatiev, N. (1997) The Point Is Not To Interpret Whiteness But To To Abolish It. Retrieved 17 May 2005 from http://racetraitor.org/abolishthepoint.html

 

I have also been influenced by Major W Cox's contribution to the first conference on whiteness at Berkeley in 1997 where he presented his views on 'Time to Dismantle Whiteness'.

Cox. M. W. (1997) Time to Dismantle Whiteness. Retrieved 18 May 2005 from http://www.majorcox.com/columns/whitenes.htm  

 

Je Kan Adler-Collins is an assistant professor in the Faculty of Nursing at Fukuoka University. He is researching his pedagogisation of a curriculum for the healing nurse. As I supervised his masters degree programme (http://www.bath.ac.uk/~edsajw/jekan.shtml) with his clarification of the meanings of a safe healing space in his practice of complementary medicine, I learnt much about the connections between the energies of mind and body that support well-being. I also learnt much about Buddhist ideas on the inevitability of pain and suffering and the role of compassion and community in enhancing well-being. From visits to Fukuoka University I have come to a better understanding of the importance of interconnecting and branching networks of communication in the development of  collective~individual critical standards of judgement.

 

Margaret Farren is a lecturer in e-learning at Dublin City University. Her doctoral research programme

highlights the living critical standards of judgement of the educational influences in learning of a pedagogy of the unique and of a web of betweenness. The latter is connected with Celtic spirituality.

Through the use of her web-space, Margaret Farren has pedagogised the living educational theories of her students at http://webpages.dcu.ie/~farrenm/ . She has influenced my own understandings of the communicative power of the interconnecting and branching channels and networks of communication offered by the internet. These influences and understandings can be appreciated in our paper and video-conference presentation at the Diverse Conference of 5 July 2005 on Educational influences in learning with visual narratives at http://www.bath.ac.uk/~edsajw/monday/mfjwwebped2.htm . The visual narrative shows that Margaret Farren combines the collective~individual critical standards of a pedagogy of the unique with a web of betweenness in her educational relationships with her students.

 

Tian Fengjun and Moira Laidlaw (2005) are exploring the development of collective~individual educational standards of judgement in the living educational theories being generated by practitioner-researchers in China's Experimental Centre for Educational Action Research in Foreign Languages Teaching. The publication in June 2005 issue of Action Research Expeditions, with a discussion forum, connected to the paper, offers a dialogical space for continuing enquiry (http://www.arexpeditions.montana.edu/articleviewer.php?AID=87)

 

My reason for highlighting the work at this Centre in the development of living critical standards of judgement is because of the global significance for the future of having some 270 million children beginning the New Curriculum in China over the next few years. The values and understandings in the curriculum documents that underpin this huge curriculum and educational innovation are being expressed in the practices of teacher-educators at Guyuan Teachers College in China (Tian & Laidlaw, 2005)

 

In conclusion I want to draw your attention to the evidence that 10 year old pupil-researchers in Croatia are already developing an understanding of the living critical standards of judgement I have been writing about in this paper. Teachers and pupils working with Branko Bognar in Croatia have sent their video-evidence from their classrooms into the BERA 2005 Practitioner-Researcher e-seminar. I have Branko Bognar's permission to share the letter that takes you into some of the most inspiring evidence I have seen of the understandings of 10 year pupil-researchers of their own living critical standards of judgement. So I wish to conclude this paper with the voice of an outstanding educator and hopefully, if you view the video-clips with the voices of teachers and most importantly, the voices of the pupils-researchers.

 

3rd July, 2005. Dear Friends,

 

I worked hard two days and two nights to translate and title video recordings where you could see live example of our effort to apply action research in our educational practice.

The First video (available at http://www.e-lar.net/videos/Creativity-en2.wmv 11 Mb[1]) was the starting point in Vesna Simic's and my action research. Our shared value is creativity, so we try to find a way how to fulfil this value. We realised that creativity is fulfilled in her teaching of arts. But she confessed, and we find evidence for that when we analysed video recordings of her teaching, that she realised subject society and nature[2]<