For the Monday Group and an invitation to colleagues:

5.00-7.00 1WN 3.8 Monday 30/01/06.

Catching up with each others' news of the week. This includes the amazing productivity of Eleanor, Erica, Jean, Jack, John, Eden and Marie, who having missed last Friday's deadline for the submissions of proposals for the BERA 06 Conference, 6-9 September in Warwick, all managed to submit their proposals for the extended deadline of 9.00 am on Monday morning. Much relief and well done. I'll have copies of the proposals to browse through on Monday.

Eleanor - How can love improve my practice? Researching the relation of being with doing.

Erica - A teacher-educator's self study of her personalised learning agenda and educational influence: contributing to the creation and testing of living educational theories.

Jack - How am I enhancing my educational influences with racialising discourses of whiteness in living educational theories?

John - How might an embodied engagement with astrological symbolism be of value as a creative, participative resource for ethical and cosmological enquiry?

Eden - How can I improve my ability to influence individuals and social formations in ways that effectively help generate new identities of inclusion, equality and justice?

Marie - How can I improve my practice as a Senior Educational Psychologist?

Jean submitted a proposal that focuses on her learning from her work in South Africa.

Submissions successfully submitted before the deadline include:

Marie and Jack - How do i~we improve our educational practices? Creating living standards of judgment for practice-based research.

Jack - How can self study enquiries in the generation of living educational theories be validated in creating a future for educational research? This is part of a Symposium proposal that Jean managed to organize with some five contributors in just 5 days from initial conception to submitted proposal!

I thought Maggie was inspirational in her viva on Monday and I'm hoping that Maggie will be coming across from Ireland for a July graduation and celebrations. Do have a browse though her impressive summary of ideas from her thesis at http://www.elearningeuropa.info/index.php?page=doc&doc_id=7020&doclng=6& on How can I support a web of betweenness through information and communications technology (ICT)

On Monday evening we will be revisiting John's work on the value of Astrology as a tool for philosophical and ethical self-enquiry and our conversation and video-tape of the 14^th November. Patrick Curry, John's supervisor from Bath Spa University intends to contribute to the session. Patrick has published on ecology, ethics and astrology. It should be possible to devote around an hour of our conversations to John's contribution.

I've been playing with the i-DVD application for creating DVDs with high definition video and I've given John a DVD of the session of 14^th Nov. that contains 9 moving thumbnail images (and a further 7 accessible from a folder). I'd like to explore our perceptions of the DVD images in relation to the possibility that they support Alan's ideas of inclusionality in his new book and in his overview of the book:

"This book expresses the flickering of hope, rooted in the despondence of a decomposing communion between human and non-human nature. It contains the incomplete story of the author's personal experiences of pain and joy, strengths and frailties, alongside his continuing quest to make sense of the world in a way that brings together scientific, artistic and spiritual views so that they complement rather than oppose one another. It treats individual consciousness as a vital inclusion of the wider collective realm from which we all emerge and into which we all subside like ripples at the interface of water and air. Hence it may help us to find more creative, peaceful and environmentally sustainable ways of living together, through a deeper understanding of the real nature of neighbourhood.

At the heart of the book is an innovative way of understanding the dynamic geometry of human and non-human nature, based on modern scientific evidence of the inextricability of space from energy, time and matter. This 'inclusional logic' treats all natural form as receptive-responsive flow-form, lacking any fixed executive centre or centres. Correspondingly, space and boundaries are envisaged as connective, reflective and co-creative, not divisive, in their vital role of producing heterogeneous local identity within a featured rather than featureless, dynamic rather than static, Universe. This understanding leads in turn to some new and exciting ideas about what it means to be Human in a complex and rapidly changing world. These ideas are based on regarding the Human 'Self' as a complex, dynamic togetherness of inner and outer through intermediary aspects, in much the same way that we can understand a river system as a creative interaction of stream with landscape mediated through its banks and valley sides. Each aspect simultaneously shapes the other.

This form of reasoning makes sense of many long held human emotional values and principles. With it, we can appreciate our complex self-identities as receptive neighbourhoods in dynamic, loving and responsive relationship. It could just be the most profound transformation in our comprehension of and about all time."

Viv – if it feels appropriate it would be good to continue to focus on your enquiry into the reduction of bullying in schools. Marie – you might like to summarise the enquiry for your Ph.D. proposal? Jackie is preparing a proposal for The Invisible College gathering before AERA in San Francisco in April. We should also have something to share from Moira before our session on the 6^th Feb. Pat – hope to see you as we wish Moira well on her trip back to China for the final phase of her five year VSO project in Guyuan. If anyone has any contacts with the South African Council of Educators it would be good to know before Jean's, Jack's and Joan's trip next month.

Looking forward to another stimulating Monday evening conversation.

Love Jack.