Offering explanations for our contributions as creative educational practices for a living networked world of educational quality
Jean McNiff, St Mary’s University College and the University of Limerick
Jack Whitehead, University of Bath
Paper presented at the British Educational Research Association Annual Conference, Institute of Education, University of London, 5-8 September 2007
Practitioner Research SIG symposium
Educational Knowledge: Explanations and Knowing
Abstract
This paper is an account of our collaborative research as we encourage practitioner-researchers worldwide to produce their accounts of practice for academic validation, in the form of their living educational theories, using traditional print and multimedia forms of representation. We offer explanations for our pedagogical and institutional practices that are grounded in our belief in individuals’ infinite capacity for creativity in their realisation of the good. We explain how the accounts are already influencing the development of new forms of institutional epistemologies, as practitioners show how they hold themselves accountable for their influences in socio-cultural transformations. Thus we link quality in practice with the production of quality accounts. By making our own research processes public we claim that we are contributing to significant new discourses about how rigorously conducted educational research may be construed as that which can enable others to justify their conception of a social good that is grounded in the processes of the communicative action of infinitely creative people as they seek to transform their ever-emergent world.
Introduction
This paper is a brief account of what we do and why we do it as we work collaboratively in educational research, so it stands as an explanation for our lives of enquiry in education. We see our work as our contribution to a world in which all are held as equal in value, in terms of their being in the world, and in terms of what they are able to contribute to that world. While, like Popper (1957) and Gray (2004), we do not believe in historicism or grand rules by which human society is ordered, or that social affairs are in any way predetermined, we do believe in an ordered society, and the idea that people may exercise their agency in contributing to the betterment of their society, in the way that they live together for the benefit of all. So while we do not necessarily believe in social progress as an historical inevitability, we do believe in social improvement as a form of individuals’ intentional action for the purposes of realising their hope for social solidarity and growth (Rorty 1999). This improvement, we believe, stems largely from the idea of accountability, the idea that each and every person should hold themselves accountable for what they do and why they do it, that is, they should offer explanations for their lives. This is what we are doing here. In this paper we set out what we understand as the origin, nature and potentials of a good social order, and how educational research can serve as a key driver in contributing to public understandings of how a good social order can be achieved and sustained.
Yet to hold true to our articulated idea of personal and social accountability, we have to show how we hold ourselves accountable for our work in education and in educational research, in terms both of how that work contributes to new practices within our personal spheres of influence, and also how accounts of our practices, such as this paper and its multimedia representations of our practices, can contribute to new public understandings of the processes involved in improvements in the social order.
Furthermore, if we are claiming that our work is contributing to a world of educational quality, we need to clarify our understanding of the terms ‘educational’ and ‘quality’, on the assumption that ‘educational quality’ defines what it means to experience and contribute to social good. And, to avoid falling into the trap of engaging in persuasive rhetoric without showing the living justification for our claims, we need to produce a strong evidence base to show that we are justified in claiming that by showing our accountability, and encouraging those in whose learning we have some influence, primarily ourselves, to show their accountability, we are contributing to a good social order through educational research. Consequently, making claims to good practice, the kinds of practices that we feel have potential for improving the social order, requires the articulation of appropriate forms of standards of judgement. In this paper, therefore, following Whitehead (2004), we take a view that it is our responsibility to explain how the process of attempting to realise our educational values in itself may be seen as ‘good’. Our idea of ‘the good’ is in our striving towards educational goals, though not necessarily in our arriving at those goals, because, like Dewey (1938), we believe that growth itself is both means and end of education, and that one of the conditions of that growth is freedom, which also acts as its own means and end (Sen 1999), as well as its own justification. It is our responsibility to show how we judge our work in relation to whether we have contributed to improvements in new educational practices, and also in terms of whether we have contributed to new understandings of the kind of research that lends itself to explanations for those practices, that is, a form of research that is itself educational for practitioners, the quality of whose practices may be judged in terms of the realisation of its underpinning values.
Our paper therefore offers an explanation of how we do what we support other people in doing, in relation to how we believe a good social order may be realised, that is, by each individual offering public explanations, grounded in a lived evidence base, to show that they did their best to live in the direction of their educational values, in spite of the hazards involved, and in spite of the problematics of struggling to define their lives in terms of the living realisation of their values. Our explanation contains our living evidence base, in the form of multimedia representations of our practices, and the articulation of how we judge those practices in relation to our own educational values. We place this account in the public domain, to test our ideas against the critical responses of our peers in educational research, and we will take this feedback as the steer for new practices as we continue our collaborative working with others in educational research.
Why do we offer explanations?
We begin by explaining why we are writing this paper, and offering explanations for why we do what we do. This involves expressing our belief that all practitioners should be interested in the quality of their work, and this includes learning from work whose quality is not as good as it could be. Not to offer public accounts for their learning would be to raise doubts about their capacity and their appropriateness for the task. Making judgements about the quality of one’s practice may therefore be seen as a form of moral accountability, as well as explaining how those judgements are arrived at. It is insufficient simply to claim that one’s practice is good, without also demonstrating and explaining why it is good, or how ‘good’ should be understood in relation to ‘good practice’. This brings practice into the world of research, for if practice may be understood as what we do in relation with others, research may be understood as offering explanations for why we do what we do in practice, and both practice and research need self-consciously to articulate how and why they should be seen as good quality, each in relation to the other.
Our first task, therefore, is to show how we believe we are contributing to a living networked world of educational quality, and why we are motivated to do so.
We are motivated to do so because we believe, as noted earlier, that the kind of world we wish to live in is a world in which all are held as equal in value, in terms of our being in the world, and in terms of what we are able to contribute to that world. To support this view, we draw on ideas from Chomsky (1986), who argues persuasively that the capacity for potentially infinite original creativity is part of human genetic endowment, and on the ideas of Said (1994), that each new moment is a beginning, grounded in its own past, that holds all its futures potentially within itself. Bohm (1983) further argues that all new beginnings are an unfolding of previous beginnings, while Arendt (1971) maintains that, given that ‘plurality is one of the basic existential conditions of human life on earth’ (p. 74), the beginnings of an individual have implications for other individuals living collectively. We agree with Husserl (1967), who argues that the nature of each new moment is largely influenced by the intention of the individual whose moment it is, so we understand the nature of collective human living as the sharing of the intention that informs the ever-present now. Like Raz (2001), we understand that values inform our lives, so the realisation of those values may be seen as the articulation of our intent of how we are with others.
These ideas, among others, give the steer for how we practise, and the kind of evidence base we produce to show what we do. Jack has pioneered the idea of visual narratives in educational research, and excerpts from such narratives appear below. Similar excerpts can be seen in another of Jack’s presentations at this conference on Generating Educational Theories That Can Explain Educational Influences In Learning: living logics, units of appraisal, standards of judgment. At: http://www.jackwhitehead.com/jack/jwbera07sem.htm
In the first clip at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ud-zPjvae8 Jack is responding to Yaakub Murray’s enquiry into Progressive Islam
In the second clip at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CkKyeT0osz8 Jack is advocating the extension of the influence of Ubuntu ways of being, enquiring and knowing in educational research as a workshop in South Africa, organised by Jean.
As practitioner researchers, as these examples demonstrate, we see ourselves as engaging in practices that we understand as educational, that is, valuing the other in terms of their being in the world, and in terms of what they are able to contribute to that world; and engaging in the kind of pedagogical practices that encourage the inclusion, acknowledgement and valuing of the other as a basis for sustainable human living (see also Habermas 2001), practices that are about the exercise of the capacity for self determination and self development (Young 1990, 2000). These pedagogical practices include finding ways of encouraging the freedom to explore such capacities, on the basis that the kind of individual development that leads to social sustainability needs to be grounded in the practice of freedom (Sen 1999).
So how do we understand our practice?
We see our practice as comprising three key areas, which may be analysed separately in papers such as this, but which are in reality connected through generative transformational relationships. The relationships, in our case, are dynamic relationships of influence, in a state of continual transformation, and are invisible, in the same way that a railway network is held together as a totality by the invisible dynamic relationships of all its parts. If a train in one area of the network is held up, the entire network is potentially influenced. Changes in one element of a network potentially influence the entire network, and these changes may compromise and also improve. So it is with the separate areas of our practice. Improvements (or errors) in one area inevitably have a potential influence in the other areas. Furthermore, the entire practice unfolds in its dynamic transformational relationship with the world of which it is a part, so that what happens in one part of the networked world influences the other parts, through the dynamic strands of relational influence. The nature of our practice can therefore be understood as holistic and ecological (following Gregory Bateson 1974), because, first, our practice responds in real time to what is going on both within and between ourselves, and what is happening in our local contexts, and how these local contexts are always already within a global setting and are therefore inevitably influenced by it; and, second, our practice responds to the same issues in real time as it contains and unfolds into the future. Our practices carry influence both for what is happening in this moment, and also for how we shape and influence the future of ourselves and others, and are reciprocally influenced by what they do in their ever-present nows.
The three areas of practice that we identify are (1) our actions with ourselves and others, (2) our research into those actions, and (3) our communication of what we are doing. As our paper unfolds, we therefore explain how we make judgements about the quality of the three separate areas, and we go on also to explain how the judgements of the three areas are grounded in the same ontological and epistemological values that emerge in practice as our living standards of judgement, and therefore how the separate processes of making judgements about the individual parts becomes a process of making judgements about the whole. The constellation of the different areas of our work orbits around the key values that inspire and fortify the work. Using a form of generative transformational action enquiry that is grounded in the question ‘How do I improve my learning?’ (Whitehead 1989; McNiff and Whitehead 2006), we explain how we seek to encourage the production of personal and collective accounts that self-consciously address issues of methodological rigour (Winter 1989) and explanatory adequacy (Chomsky 1986), including our own (see Whitehead and McNiff 2006). We endeavour to make explicit the processes of transforming our values into our living standards of judgement, and we claim that the standards themselves and the practices that they account for can be understood as good quality in terms of explaining the processes whereby the conceptual expressions of embodied values can transform into free-flowing processes of communication as people publicly account for their lives.