Download Why do we offer explanations?

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 practitionerresearchers 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
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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.
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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
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In the first clip at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ud-zPjvae8 Jack is responding to
Yaakub Murray’s enquiry into Progressive Islam
QuickTime™ and a
TIFF (Uncompressed) decompressor
are needed to see this picture.
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
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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.
We now explore this idea further, as we speak about the theoretical frameworks we use to
analyse and make judgements about our practices.
What kind of analytical and theoretical frames do we use?
In offering explanations for our contributions as creative educational practices for a living
networked world of educational quality we draw insights from a number of propositional
and dialectical theories in the generation of our own living theories. We understand that
explanations of educational practice and influence are influenced by the logics that
structure them. Most explanatory frameworks in theories that are legitimated as valid
knowledge in the Western Academies have been influenced by the propositional logic of
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Aristotle, with the Law of Contradiction eliminating contradictions between statements
on the grounds that two mutually exclusive statements such as ‘I am free/I am not free,’
cannot both be true simultaneously. Dialecticians claim that such propositional theories
mask the dialectic nature of reality with its nucleus of contradiction. In dialectical
theories, living contradictions (Ilyenkov, 1977, p. 320) such as ‘I am free/I am not free,’
are held to be the nucleus of theory. The 2,500-year-old arguments between dialecticians
and formal logicians can be appreciated in Popper’s (1963, p. 316) claim that dialectical
theories, because they contain contradictions, are entirely useless as theories and based on
nothing more than a loose and woolly way of speaking. In Marcuse’s (1964, p. 105)
view, logic is a mode of thought that is appropriate for comprehending the real as
rational; and propositional theories, by eliminating contradictions, are masking the
dialectical nature of reality. Over the 2,500 years of this debate the dialecticians and
formal logicians have tended to deny the rationality of the other.
In the development of our living educational theories we draw insights from both
propositional and dialectical theories. We recognise the rationality in each position, while
using our own living logics and living standards of judgment in our explanations.
In explaining our contributions as creative educational practices for a living networked
world of educational quality we draw on ideas from Biesta (2006) and Mary Catherine
Bateson (1989).
For example, we like the way Biesta analyses the need to go beyond a language of
learning in a language of education. We agree that ‘we come into the world as unique
individuals through the ways in which we respond responsibly to what and who is other’
(Biesta, 2006, p. ix).
We also agree with Biesta’s response to the question ‘What is Learning?’, where he
makes a distinction between the process accounts of individualistic and sociocultural
theories and his own response theory. He says that in many ‘process’ accounts, learning
is assumed to be about ‘the acquisition of something “external,” something that existed
before the act of learning and that, as a result of learning, becomes the possession of the
learner’ (p. 26).
In his view of learning as response he focuses on what challenges, irritates, or even
disturbs us, rather than as the acquisition of something we want to possess. He says that
both ways of looking at learning – learning as acquisition and learning as responding –
might be equally valid, depending, that is, on the situation in which we raise questions
about the definition of learning. He argues that the second conception of learning is
educationally the more significant, ‘if it is conceded that education is not just about the
transmission of knowledge, skills and values, but is concerned with the individuality,
subjectivity, or personhood of the student, with their “coming into the world” as unique,
singular beings’ (p. 27).
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We see ourselves working with ideas of learning as acquisition as well as learning as a
creative response in our explanations for our contributions as creative educational
practices.
Our explanations are also focused on a living networked world (Church, 2004) of
educational quality. Our explanations include transformational patterns of influence as
these are manifested in the production of emancipatory educational practices and their
articulation as scholarly research accounts. We are thinking of accounts such as Delong
(2002), with the creation of a culture of inquiry for supporting a living theory approach to
professional development in a District School Board. We are thinking of Sullivan’s
(2006) living theory of a practice of social justice in which she realises the right of
Traveller Children to educational equality. Our explanations are distinguished by their
living logics and living standards of judgement as well as our inclusional ways of being,
enquiring and knowing. By inclusionality we mean a relationally dynamic awareness of
space and boundaries (Rayner, 2005) that is distinguished by a sustained attention to
diversity and interdependence in explaining our educational practices, and this view has
implications for our understanding of good practice, as outlined here by Mary Catherine
Bateson:
But what if we were to recognize the capacity for distraction, the divided will, as
representing a higher wisdom…? Perhaps Kierkegaard was wrong when he said
that ‘purity is to will one thing.’ Perhaps the issue is not a fixed knowledge of the
good, the single focus that millenia of monotheism have made us idealize, but a
kind of attention that is open, not focused on a single point. Instead of
concentration on a transcendent ideal, sustained attention to diversity and
interdependence may offer a different clarity of vision, one that is sensitive to
ecological complexity, to the multiple rather than the singular. Perhaps we can
discern in women [sic] honoring multiple commitments a new level of
productivity and new possibilities of learning.
(Bateson, 1989, p. 166)
How do we make research-based judgements about our understanding of our
practices?
We both consistently offer explanations for our living practices, using our preferred
forms of media. Jack enjoys working with multimedia, since multimedia can show the
lived reality of the evidential base of knowledge claims. Jean enjoys working with
traditional print-based accounts. Both forms of communication are complementary, and
aim to demonstrate the validity of the claims that we make, that we are creating our own
living educational theories as well as providing resources that will enable people to
access their own meanings as they offer their living theories of practice for public
critique.
Jack began his explanation for his contribution as creative educational practices for a
living networked world of educational quality in his 1976 account of working with six
teachers over a twelve-month local curriculum project to improve learning with 11–14
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year-olds in mixed ability science groups (Whitehead, 1976). The creative educational
practice was to:
(1) create a network of in-service support
(2) organize resources for enquiry learning
(3) establish a process of self evaluation.
He continues to include these three practices in his explanations as can been seen in his
multi media presentation on Generating Educational Theories That Can Explain
Educational Influences In Learning: living logics, units of appraisal, standards of
judgment (Whitehead, 2007).
The network of in-service support is now web-based at http://www.actionresearch.net and
includes the organisation of resources for enquiry learning. These resources include the
living theories of practitioner-researchers who have explained their educational
influences in their own learning and in the learning of others in educational enquiries of
the kind, ‘How do I improve what I am doing?’
Jack communicates the process of self-evaluation through multi-media and digital
technologies to stress the importance of visual narratives in explaining one’s educational
influence in terms of living the values one uses to give meaning and purpose to one’s life.
Action reflection cycles are used in clarifying the meanings of the values as these emerge
in practice. These action reflection cycles take the form of expressing concerns when
values are not lived fully, creating action plans to improve practice, acting and gathering
data on which to make a judgement about the effectiveness of the actions, modifying the
concerns, ideas and actions in the light of the evaluations. The process of self-evaluation
also includes the production of an explanation of educational influences in learning that is
subjected to the evaluations of a validation group to strengthen the validity of the
explanation.
Jean communicates the same processes of self-evaluation through print-based texts (for
example McNiff and Whitehead, 2005, 2006). These texts are deliberately written in an
accessible form to enable practitioners to offer their own accounts of practice in ways that
demonstrate the validity of their claims to knowledge, so that the accounts may be readily
validated by the Academy.
We both advocate the use of Habermas’ (1976) four criteria of social validity in
strengthening the validity of the explanations. These are concerned with (1) the
comprehensibility of the account, (2) the appropriateness of the evidence that justifies the
assertions, (3) the explication of the values-based assumptions as to what constitutes
‘educational influence’, and (4) the authenticity of the account in the sense of showing
over time that the researcher is committed to living the values they espouse, as fully as
possibly. The importance of explicating our value-based assumptions is that they
communicate what we mean by good quality.
This brings us to the third element we have identified as constituting our practices, along
with, first, our understanding of our actions and second, how we make research-based
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judgements about the educational quality of those actions. This third element deals with
the need for quality in the communication of research-based accounts.
How do we make judgements about the communicability of our accounts?
We understand how the criteria of social validity in turn transform into criteria for
judging the communicability of the text that comprises the research account and thereby
establish its quality. Our print-based and multimedia-based texts aim to communicate to
the reader/listener the standards of judgement we use to test the validity of the evidence
base in which our knowledge claims are grounded. We therefore try to show how the
social criteria for judging the validity of a knowledge claim about practice, and about the
processes of making judgements about the practice, also act as the same criteria for
judging the quality of the communicability of the research account. All three aspects are
commensurable, and grounded in our values. When we present our printed and
multimedia accounts, we ask, ‘Is our text comprehensible, authentic, sincere and
appropriate?’ We ask the same questions of this text here. Especially, in relation to
Chomsky’s (2000) insights that the logical form of an enquiry contributes to the form of
its living practice, we ask whether the logical form of our enquiry has informed both the
explication of the values base of the enquiry and its communication, using those same
values throughout as living standards of judgement. We focus specifically on the nature
of the logical form, in offering explanations for our contributions as creative educational
practices for a living networked world of educational quality. We also hope that it is clear
that we are using three distinct logics in our propositional, dialectical and inclusional
explanations, and that the inclusional form of our explanations incorporates and embeds
propositional and dialectical logical forms within itself through the dynamic
transformational nature of their formal and lived relationships.
We emphasise the inclusional nature of these relationships by referring to and using
Biesta’s (2006) distinction between a process approach to learning in which learning has
to do with the acquisition of something external that existed before the act of learning and
a response approach that is ‘concerned with the individuality, subjectivity, or personhood
of the student, with their “coming into the world” as unique singular beings’ (p. 27).
We explain our contributions as creative educational practices in terms of both our
learning from our creative responses and our assimilation and learning from the
pedagogic influences from the existing knowledge in our culture. We are using dialectics
in the sense of recognising and working with contradictions in our living networked
world of educational quality. We both experience ourselves as living contradictions in
our recognition that we hold together, in what we do, the values that give meaning and
purpose to our lives with values that negate these meanings and purpose. We seek to
show our value of integrity in working towards the full expression of the values that give
meaning and purpose. We explain what we are doing in our educational practices in
terms of responding to others and in terms of living our values and understandings as
fully as we can.
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With our inclusional explanations we start with what we are doing in our practice. The
digital technologies that Jack uses extensively enable us to show ourselves in our practice
and to use ostensive expressions to communicate the meanings of our embodied values.
Marian Naidoo’s (2005) doctorate shows this process in the emergence of her living
theory of inclusional and responsible practice as she clarifies her meanings of living with
a passion for compassion. Mairin Glenn (2006) has also used a visual narrative in the
communication of her embodied values in developing her living theory of a holistic
educational practice.
Using our action reflection cycles we explain our intentions for our productive lives to
ourselves and others, and generate our own living theories of our practice (McNiff,
2007). In the clip below, you can see Jean outlining what she intends to be doing in a
range of global contexts from the video clip taken in 2007 in a seminar at St. Mary’s
University College, Twickenham. This expression of values-based intention can be
understood as the grounds for why Jean generates her own living theory for herself and
others.
QuickTime™ and a
TIFF (Uncompressed) decompressor
are needed to see this picture.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jsbelPVpUC8
Our research findings / our contribution to knowledge
What we are claiming is that the accounts we encourage and disseminate, including our
own, can be understood as good quality and potentially world-leading in terms of their
significance, originality and rigour (Hefce, Research Assessment Exercise 2006). In
saying this we are recognising the financially driven pressures to perform well in the
RAE. To do this we see that we would need to establish our ideas as world leading. We
recognise the financial significance to our institutions of the RAE and want to play our
part with our colleagues in sustaining this economic wellbeing while at the same time
acknowledging the frequently damaging influences of the RAE (Dadds and Kynch, 2003)
We also want to feel and know that others have found useful some of the ideas that have
emerged from our research. While we can both feel pleasurably affirmed if others
recognise our ideas as world leading, this is not what motivates us. What motivates us is
the generative energy we feel as others acknowledge that they have found our ideas of
use in the creation of their own forms of life.
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In offering explanations for our contributions as creative educational practices for a living
networked world of educational quality, we hope that you will feel the significance of
contributing your own living theory to those already flowing through the world wide
web. We hope that you can see a useful distinction between propositional, dialectical and
inclusional/living logics that can support your confidence in the rigour, validity and
academic legitimacy of your explanations of your educational influences in your own
learning, in the learning of others and in the learning of social formations.
Conclusion
By making our own processes of knowledge-creation public we are seeking to contribute
to educationally significant discourses about how rigorously conducted educational
research can enable us to justify our conception of a social good that draws on processes
of the communicative actions (Habermas, 1976, 1987) of infinitely creative people as
they seek to transform their ever-emergent world.
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