For the Monday Group and an invitation to colleagues

5.00-7.00 1WN 3.8, Monday 24 October 2005.

News from the week:

Maggie's doctoral thesis is now formally submitted and we are hopeful that the viva-voce examination will take place in January. Karen has her transfer seminar next week. Marie is off to Holland with a group of teachers having organised a consultancy for Jack to contribute to the delivery and support of an action research and inclusional practice project with a Bath and North East Somerset LEA staff group. Jean is off to New Zealand to lead workshops on action research. Ken is contributing to an evening of dance in Bradford on Avon on Saturday. Moira's computer is now fixed and the newsletters are flowing again from China's Experimental Centre for Educational Action Research in Foreign Languages Teaching. Mark is submitting an application for the Vice Chancellor's Supervisor's Award at Edith Cowan University. Joao – it would be good to hear how the restructuring of the Sensory Support Service is going on. The Fifth Volume of Passion in Professional Practice, edited by Jackie, Cheryl and Heather will be available at the Act, Reflect Revise 111 Conference for the 10/11 Nov. in Ontario with Jackie. Volumes 1-IV are accessible from the frontpage of http://www.actionresearch.net and the draft keynote on 'Creating Living Theories of Educational Influence for a Productive Life' can be accessed at:

http://www.jackwhitehead.com/monday/arrkey05dr1.htm

After we've caught up with any other news from the week let's spend some time exploring the implications of what Yaqub and Jack intend to do at an interactive session at the Higher Education Forum next Wednesday ( I'm seeing implications in relation to Alan's ideas on inclusionality and neighbourhood). In a part of my contribution http://www.jackwhitehead.com/monday/jwpmHE.htmI'll be drawing attention to the living theories flowing through web-space, including those of Ram Punia, Marian Naidoo, Mary Hartog and James Finnegan and emphasising the importance of Alon's research into the development of a heuristics of a human existence. Any other contributions for Monday evening, just bring them along or e-mail them in:

Teacher Self-study For Exploring Effective Practices of Inclusion: in the context of engaging with student cultural diversity in the Curriculum – What works?

Yaqub Murray, Royal Agricultural College.

Jack Whitehead, University of Bath.

An Interactive Session at the Higher Education Academy Forum

on

Engaging with Student Cultural Diversity in the Curriculum – What works?

26^th October 2005 at The Graduate Centre, London Metropolitan University,

What we intend to do - Using access to web pages we intend to demonstrate how Jack knows 'what works' for him, and others, in the engagement of student cultural diversity focusing on his PhD supervision as a critical self-reflective practice of Self-Study and Living Educational Theory. Jack's living commitment to Self-Study of teacher education practices is mune, open and welcomingly inclusive of yours, mine, and his own. Jack's educational and political influence on the social formation of curricula in Higher Education Academies owes much to his joint publications with Jean McNiff.  They have developed a unique approach to evidence-based practice in the form of twenty years of PhD supervision of students, in cultural diversity. Jack will show how he creatively and critically encourages students to craft their own curriculum within the 'formal' curriculum in ways that work in students' own terms, and against the benchmark of doctoral theses legitimised by the Academy.  Jack has a remarkable web archive, that breathes and grows, that points to his commitment to engaging with his own knowledge accounts of 'what works?' in his own engagement with Self-Study of his inclusive and emancipatory practice. Yaqub will explore 'what works' for him through a personal narrative of inclusivity in which he hopes to show how as a mixed-race, mixed heritage, white~brown, Muslim with indigenous traces, his multiple-practices as a doctoral educational researcher,  as senior lecturer, as College diversity adviser, as a Masters programme facilitator, as a change consultant, and as a counsellor, his nomadic and border life as an educator is the very evidence of what seems to be working in his engagement with student cultural diversity in the curriculum. While, simultaneously, Yaqub explains how his consciousness of the significance of first-person evidence of 'what works' in second person (with colleagues and students)  and third person (the College and wider Academy) contexts of student cultural diversity has been augmented by his current doctoral Self-Study. Both Jack and Yaqub have, together, nurtured a project since 1999 in which we explore White and White with Black Teacher Identities, which has led them both toward developing a research nomadology that includes a compassionate and critical conversation with racism, critical race theory, whiteness postcolonial subject positions, and inclusional identities as loyalty to humanity.

John Wadsworth will be contributing ideas on the significance of embodiment for education drawing on his own experience and Merleau-Ponty's ideas on perception and language http://www.jackwhitehead.com/monday/wadsworth241005.htm. John is interested in exploring the methodologies being used by SAPERE/Philosophy for Children in his action research. See http://edrev.asu.edu/reviews/rev141.htm For a 2001 Review of Unfolding Bodymind: Hocking, Brent; Haskell, Johnna; and Linds, Warren. (Eds.) (2001) Unfolding Bodymind: Exploring Possibility Through Education, Volume Three of the Foundations of Holistic Education Series. Brandon, VT: Psychology Press/Holistic Education Press.

The contributions in Unfolding Bodymind build on the work of Merleau-Ponty and Varela