How are living educational theories being produced and legitimated in the boundaries of cultures in resistance?

Jack Whitehead, Department of Education, University of Bath

Visiting Professor at Ningxia Teachers, University, Guyuan, China.

Presentation for the Cultures in Resistance Conference. The 7th Conference of the Discourse, Power, Resistance Series, 18-20 March 2008 Manchester Metropolitan University.

Abstract

A critique of the languages, logics and standards of judgment in contemporary cultural practices for the legitimation of educational knowledge in the Academy will reveal, using multi-media narratives, how they deny the educational significance of the recognition of educational responsibility towards the other in educational relationships.

An approach to the generation of living educational theories in boundaries of cultures in resistance will be presented. This includes a self-study of persistence in the face of pressures over a working life in education at the University of Bath. The self-study includes a visual narrative of pressures over a 34 year research programme into the nature of educational theory. The pressures could have breached the principle of academic freedom and other values of academic responsibility. Theoretical insights from psychology, sociology, theology, philosophy, educational research and inclusionality will be integrated into the analysis. The data-base includes some 30 living theory theses legitimated in the Academy over the past twenty years.

Introduction

I was attracted to submit a proposal for the 7th conference of the Discourse, Power, Resistance series because of the focus on Cultures in Resistance. My interest in culture is because of my recognition that while good ideas can be generated in a specific context they must become a cultural influence if they are to have a widespread influence in the education of social formations. The good ideas I have in mind have emerged from a 34 year old research programme into the nature of educational theory at the University of Bath. Whether they are good ideas is open to your questioning. They inform my critique below of the languages, logics and standards of judgment in contemporary cultural practices for the legitimation of educational knowledge in the Academy.The critique is made from the perspective of a living educational theory approach in boundaries of cultures in resistance that includes the following ideas from my research programme:

  • that 'I' exists as a living contradiction in enquiries of the kind, 'How do I improve what I am doing?' in the sense that 'I' holds together the experience of embodying certain values while experiencing their denial in practice.
  • that the expression of embodied values as distinctive of educational relationships carry a life-affirming and/or a dynamic loving, energy.
  • that the meanings of these energy flowing values can be clarified and developed through their emergence in the practice of action reflection cycles.
  • that in the process of clarification in their emergence in practice they are formed into explanatory principles of educational influences in learning and into living epistemological standards of judgement.
  • that individuals can generate their own living educational theories as explanations for their educational influences in their own learning, in the learning of others and in the learning of social formations in enquiries of the kind, 'How do I improve what I am doing?'
  • that living educational theories already legitimated in the Academy have generated a new epistemology for educational knowledge with living units of appraisal, energised and values-laden standards of judgement and living logics of inclusionality.
  • that generating living educational theories in the boundaries of cultures in resistance carries hope for the future of humanity.

My interest in understanding cultures in resistance is because of my experience of working in the boundaries of such cultures that serve both reproductive and transformatory interests in the legitimation of living educational theories. My interest in generating living educational theories in these boundaries, is in enhancing the transformatory power of education in the lives of individuals and social formations.

Because I make a distinction between social actions and educational actions in terms of energised values in educational relationships I will clarify this distinction after I have explained how I am using my meanings of culture, resistance and inclusionality.

Culture

I draw my understanding of culture from Said (1993) when he writes:

As I use the word, 'culture' means two things in particular. First of all it means all those practices, like the arts of description, communication, and representation, that have relative autonomy from the economic, social, and political realms and that often exist in aesthetic forms, one of whose principal aims is pleasure. Included, of course, are both the popular stock of lore about distant parts of the world and specialized knowledge available in such learned disciplines as ethnography, historiography, philology, sociology, and literary history..... Second, and almost imperceptible, culture is a concept that includes a refining and elevating element, each society's reservoir of the best that has been known and thought. As Matthew Arnold put it in the 1860s.... In time, culture comes to be associated, often aggressively, with the nation of the state; this differentiates 'us' from 'them', almost always with some degree of xenophobia. Culture in this sense is a source of identity, and a rather combative one at that, as we see in recent 'returns' to culture and tradition. (Said, pp. xii-xiv, 1993)

The first meaning of culture can be associated with transformation, the second with reproduction. I think of cultures as living phenomena that are social constructions sustained by collective communications in forms of life. Particular individuals may die and the culture can continue. If all the individuals sustaining a culture die, the culture dies. Hence my stress on the living and my interest in the influence of living educational theories in sustaining and or transforming cultures in resistance.

Resistance

Writing about resistance, in the tertiary level of education in Japan, McVeigh distinguishes a form of social malaise as 'resistance':

By 'resistance' I do not mean a conscious, organized, and systematic insurrection against the sociopolitical order. Rather, I employ this term to designate actions and attitudes that do not directly challenge but scorn the system. This form of subtle resistance ignores rather than threatens and is a type of diversion (if only temporary) from, rather than a subversion of, the dominant structures. (McVeigh 2002: 185-186).

I can understand this notion of resistance, but it is not the way I am using the idea of resistance when I write from a position in the living boundaries of cultures in resistance. By the 'living boundaries of cultures in resistance' I am meaning that that there is something expressed in the boundary sustained by one culture that is a direct challenge to something in the other culture. For example, in education there is a political culture that has been imposing a regime of testing in schools. There is a professional culture that has been stressing the importance of creativity. There continues to be tensions in the boundaries of these cultures that can be understood through the perspective of inclusionality.

Inclusionality

In my research programme into the nature of educational theories I work from the perspective of inclusionality developed by Rayner (2005) and Lumley (2008) and described below. I am particularly interested in the logics of educational theories.

I like Marcuse's (1964, p. 105) idea of logic as a mode of thought that is appropriate for comprehending the real as rational. In the generation of living educational theories I use three forms of rationality, the propositional, the dialectical and the inclusional. There is a 2,500 year history of conflict between adherents to propositional and dialectical logic in which the adherents to one position deny the rationality of the other (Popper, 1963, p. 313-17). Within a living educational theory, insights from both propositional and dialectical theories are included as I show below. The living logics of inclusionality that permit this inclusion, without denying the rationality of propositional and dialectical thinkers, are grounded in Rayner's (2005) understanding of inclusionality as a relationally dynamic awareness of space and boundaries as connective, reflective and co-creative. I like the way Lumley expresses inclusionality in his fluid-dynamical world view as:

"...an inspiring pooling-of-consciousness that seems to include and connect all within all in unifying dynamical communion.... The concreteness of 'local object being'... allows us to understand the dynamics of the common living-space in which we are all ineluctably included participants.” (Lumley, 2008, p.3)

I am working with the living logics of inclusionality in the critique below. The critique rests on distinguishing the languages of educational and social actions through the expression of a dynamic loving energy in educational relationships.

Distinguishing educational and social actions through a dynamic loving energy.

I like the recent developments in the social sciences regarding autoethnographies. I think that much of what I am going to say can be seen as an autoethnography in the sense of an explanation for the life of an individual that takes account of cultural influences.

Where I think the educational explanations in living educational theories go beyond limitations of explanations from social sciences, of educational influences in learning, is in the recognition and representation of a dynamic loving energy as an explanatory principle for educational influences in learning. It may be that other participants in the conference work with a different understanding of social action to the one that I use. It may be that your understanding of social actions include flows of life-affirming energy that have a social source. In his work on the phenomenology of the social world Schutz draws attention to Weber's understanding of a social action being that action which:

" ...by virtue of the subjective meaning attached to it by the acting individual (or individuals), takes account of the behaviour of others, and is thereby orientated in its course." (Schutz, 1972, p. 29)

This is my understanding of a social action. In my understanding of educational actions they go beyond this understanding of a social action. An educational action includes a flow of life-affirming energy with values. This life-affirming energy, that others describe as a dynamic loving energy (Formby, 2007; Walton, 2008), while mediated by the individual and the social, flows from outside the individual and the social. Hence the distinction I draw between educational and social actions.

In the production of my own living educational theory I draw on a language used by theologians to communicate meanings of a life-affirming energy that is not grounded in a theistic faith of belief. I am aware of a life-affirming energy that I am expressing in both the production of this written text and in the communication of my performance text. I need language to communicate the meanings expressed with the flow of this energy through my body as I explain my educational influences in learning. I draw on language whose meanings used by the originator are different to my own. For example, I draw on the language of the Christian Theologian, Tillich (1973, p. 168), to refer to my experience of the expression of a life-affirming energy as a state of being affirmed by the power of being itself. For Tillich this power is intimately related to his God. For me, having no religious belief or faith in God(s), the words are used to communicate a flow of life-affirming energy with the power of being itself. In my understanding of how I recognise my tendency to impose my view of the world on others and seek to avoid this, I draw on the ideas of the Jewish Theologian, Buber, where he writes of the special humility of the educator:

"If this educator should ever believe that for the sake of education he has to practise selection and arrangement, then he will be guided by another criterion than that of inclination, however legitimate this may be in its own sphere; he will be guided by the recognition of values which is in his glance as an educator. But even then his selection remains suspended, under constant correction by the special humility of the educator for whom the life and particular being of all his pupils is the decisive factor to which his 'hierarchical' recognition is subordinated." (Buber, 1947, p. 122)

One of my main criticisms, of present cultural practices for legitimating educational knowledge in the Academy, is focused on differences between the explanatory principle of an embodied expression of a dynamic loving energy in educational relationships and the language of academic explanations of educational influences in learning. Here is a visual representation of the expression of the dynamic loving energy I have in mind from a video-clip on YouTube:

The clip is taken from a visual narrative of a teacher-researcher's enquiry from her master's programme:

How am I integrating my educational theorizing firstly with the educational responsibility I express in my educational relationships with the children in my class, but also with the educational responsibility I feel towards those in the wider school community? (Formby, 2008, )

The visual narrative that includes the video-clip includes the context:

Recently I watched a video clip from my Yr 2 class of myself with a little boy, J, who wanted to wear a Samuel Pepys' wig, a history resource to bring The Great Fire of London to life. I knew immediately that the video clip said something significant about me and about my relationships with the children in my class.

The images below are the moments in the educational relationship that resonate with Claire as expressing her flow of a dynamic loving energy. They are placed side by side because in the first one Claire feels that she is expressing most fully this energy and in the second is receiving the recognition of her pupil.

The main point of the critique below is to reveal omissions of the explanatory principle of a dynamic loving energy (Walton, 2008) in the propositional languages, logics and standards of judgement of much academic writings about education. These writings are reproducing one polarity of a dialectic in the living boundaries of cultures in resistance. In the other polarity the boundary is supporting the inclusion of living educational theories with their energised, values-laden standards of judgment, in the Academy.

In the analysis that follows I first critique the languages, logics and standards of judgment in contemporary cultural practices for the legitimation of educational knowledge in the academy.

I then offer a living educational theory approach to boundaries of cultures in resistance.

Finally I present a performance text of a situated analysis of cultural resistance as a self-study of persistence in the face of pressures within boundaries of resistance. The self-study of persistence is presented with a desire for recognition of an outstanding contribution to educational knowledge. This persistence includes the pressures in the power relations of cultural boundaries that can constrain the flow of values, skills and understandings that carry academic freedom and other values of academic responsibility. The performance text also includes an engagement with the ideas of others from their propositional and dialectical theories and connects with other living educational theories that are flowing freely through web-space as gifts from their creators.

A critique of the languages, logics and standards of judgment in contemporary cultural practices for the legitimation of educational knowledge in the Academy.

At the beginning of my career in education, in 1966, on the initial teacher education programme in the Department of Education of the University of Newcastle, I produced my first special study on 'A Way To Professionalism In Education?' I began teaching in 1967 as a teacher of science at Langdon Park School in London's Tower Hamlets, one of the most deprived areas in London. Between 1967-72 I believed that my main contribution to the profession would be as a science teacher in secondary schools. However, in 1971 I began to question the validity of the dominant view of educational theory. In this view, educational theory was believed to be constituted by the disciplines of the philosophy, psychology, sociology and history of education. I studied these disciplines for my Academic Diploma and MA in Education at the University of London, Institute of Education between 1968-1972. I also studied my explanations for my educational influences in my own learning and in the learning of my pupils. Comparing these explanations I could appreciate that no explanation derived from any discipline of education, taken individually or in any combination, could produce a valid explanation of my educational influence in my own learning or in the learning of my pupils. The mistake in the disciplines approach is explained below.

My sense of vocation changed with the recognition of this error in the disciplines approach to educational theory. I began to believe that my greatest contribution to enhancing professionalism in education might come from contributing to the reconstruction of educational theory in Higher Education. I was fortunate to have my application for a post of lecturer in education accepted by the University of Bath in 1973. This has enabled me to spend the last 34 years, with economic security, on my research programme into the nature of educational theory. I do not want to underestimate the importance of this economic security and will return to its significance later.

Through the support of the University I have been able to present at many international conferences in China, Japan, Australia, the UK, Ireland, South Africa, Canada and the United States, and examine many masters dissertations and doctoral degrees in different universities in different countries. Hence I feel that I have some understanding of the languages, logics and standards of judgment being used to legitimate educational knowledge in different cultures.

My critique of the languages, logics and standards of judgment in contemporary cultural practices for the legitimation of educational knowledge in the Academy is similar to the critique given by Paul Hirst of his original support for the idea of a disciplines approach to educational theory. I am thinking of his point that much understanding of 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 1983, p. 18)