"What am I learning as I research my life in Higher Education as a healing nurse, researcher and Shingon Buddhist priest, and as I pedagogise a curriculum for healing nurses? Weaving the webs of consciousness"
Je Kan Adler-Collins
Fukuoka University, Japan
Paper presented at the British Educational Research Association Annual Conference, University of Manchester, 16-18 September 2004
Draft
Our Symposium’s question is:
“How are we contributing to a new scholarship of educational enquiry through our pedagogisation of postcolonial living educational theories in the Academy?”
The title of my contribution in response to this question is: Weaving the webs of consciousness’ and the question I pose in turn is:
“What am I learning as I research my life in Higher Education as a healing nurse, researcher and Shingon Buddhist priest, and as I pedagogise a curriculum for healing nurses? Weaving the webs of consciousness”.
From the very onset of this presentation to you, I wish to acknowledge with an open heart the scholarly work of postcolonial writers and the voice, power and passion that they are bringing to the brotherhood of humanness. This text represents my first tentative but focused engagement with the theory of postcolonial writings where like Murray claims in his paper. I was and am living these values before becoming aware of the academic knowledge base that underpins the theory..
I would like to frame the positional stance of my paper within that of educational knowledge through self-study action research and the generation and testing of my own living educational theory. Such generation is set against my practice embedded in a background of colonial thinking, actions and power relationships within the academy. Such power relationships have given rise to the emerging area of scholarship, that of postcolonial theory.
It is not lost on me the irony of my circumstances as I live in a culture that was itself a colonising one with a recent history of brutal actions committed in the pursuit of its colonial ambitions. Japan herself on being defeated in the last world war was colonised by the post war powers in particular America. For many Japanese they feel acutely the Americanisation of their culture and their exists a deep cultural divide between the older generations of Japanese who see their culture being eroded and replaced with the neon glitter of Materialism and the young who are concerned about very different issues to their elders
As I work to pedagogise my values and knowledge as a healing reflective nurse with a consciousness that sees the possibility that my thoughts could be seen to be colonising as my academic theory is grounded in the training I received in a western paradigm. I seek at this point of my understanding to outline where I am, explore with you a set of ideas, and share with you experiences that I have had along my journey as an educator, living and generating my own educational theory in practice in this Global classroom of ours, the university of physical life.
(Bullough & Pinnegar, 2004) say that:
“The consideration of ontology, of one’s being in and toward the world, should be a central feature of any discussion of the value of self-study research” (Bullough & Pinnegar, 2004 p. 319)
I therefore wish to tell you a story, one where my ontological values, including love, move into living epistemological standards of judgement that can be used to judge the validity of my contributions to educational knowledge and theory.
The story belongs to the true tradition of storytelling. All cultures used to value story as the mode of transmitting knowledge, values and wisdom to the listener. Not only are the stories imbued with these values but in their telling they can be engaging and fun, a process which is, I think, a critical aspect of learning and remembering.
In the modern western concept of academia, the tradition of storytelling has been relegated to a lesser position than it once held, due to the advance of science and the representation of “facts”. Something has been lost from the richness and expressiveness of our communication. Some one is silencing our stories; they are being marginalised as just romantic ramblings. A culture that is without stories is in danger of becoming without heart, consisting of soulless blocks of data and information that no longer speak to the souls and hearts of the people but remain in the hands of the few privileged individuals for whom such data and its representation is their very lifeblood. The consequence of this trend is directly linked to the expansion of Western colonialism and its dominance at the expense of other cultures, voices and stories. The consequences of this dominance are clearly visible in today’s world where the stories are of war, suffering, exploitation and violence to the inhabitants and habitat of the great spaceship called mother earth.
Often, in cultures that have been labelled “less advanced than our own”, at the end of the working day devoid of cable television, videos, or the instant media pool of thoughtless escapism, people would make the time and hence the space to meet in the telling of their stories. Elders would pass on the deeds of warriors past, battles fought and lost. The women would tell of healing and morality, the land and its stories. Often the faith keepers would share their stories of mystery, magic and wisdom. Yet grounded in all these stories were the realities of daily living and the situations the people found themselves in. It was a way of communal sharing, bonding, clarification of roots and identity, and above all a learning space as the participants acted and interacted in the complex social and human relationships that took place around the telling of their stories.
In the Native American traditions, at a sacred fire the tobacco is offered to the four directions, the great prayer is said and the eagle feather is passed to each speaker who then is listened to in the telling of their story. Each story is original and unique to the teller who, in seeking wisdom from the link that the eagle feather represents to the creator, can open their heart and, for those who listen, the story can often become a teaching. I struggle with the correct form of language, as I am mindful that this is an academic scholarly gathering. By so being, the expected rights of passage include the use of certain high English and educational technical language, complex engagement with words, and, of course, referencing and the clear citing of references.
As this is an oral presentation I have deliberately excluded from this story many of the cited references. (This paper has 30 cited references. Therefore the references are cited in brackets along with some textual analysis and comments. The full-text paper can found and downloaded from my home page and will be given at the end of this presentation).
The focus is on the story, its process and its learning. The academic authority, so loved by the western colonial mindset and so very different, I would argue, from the living authority of my own being as a writer and story teller, has, I suggest, no place in the telling of the story but rather in the later analysis of the claims or ensuing discussions that may arise from its telling. I am however mindful that one cannot sign up for a game of Rugby and decide to play football.
To assist this process of presenting an oral academic paper in keeping with my values as the narrator, combined with my requirements to write academically, I wish to use bracketing within the written text, as demonstrated by Ben Cunninghan in his PhD thesis (Cunningham, 1999) where he cites Manen’s (1990:175) use of bracketing as being to “bracket preconceptions, prejudgement, beliefs and biases.” Ben goes on to explain:
“that doesn't mean what I bracket is unimportant. No, it only means that I work on what is outside the brackets separately first. I distance myself from what is inside the brackets, temporarily, until I am satisfied that I have understood everything represented outside the brackets to the best of my ability. What is inside the brackets is based on my values. In bracketing them I don't forget about them completely. No, it's just that I've now got a device for keeping them at a distance while I examine the textual data in front of me. Later I can synthesise both that which emerges from my examination of the data and that which is within the brackets"
I wish to extend Ben's understanding by suggesting that bracketing allows more than one process to occur at the same time. By this I mean that the story and its telling is a living narrative grounded in the facts of the actual events. The emotions that such events evoke can often be very deeply felt, even if in the narrative I am referring to events that have passed. The emotions are in fact living and being experienced again in real time, that of the present telling. Bracketing allows the narrative to weave its oral pictures and the listeners’ engagement to focus on the listening. Bracketing also allows scholarship and academic rigour to be present in such a manner that the space for telling the story is not violated but rather is strengthened by the academic underpinning. This can be used in the application of rigour to the learning, and claims of the account can also show where I have tried to make sense of situations and events and circumstances using the skills of an academic researcher, nurse educator and Buddhist priest.
[ My use of narrative clearly follows the ideas of McClure (McClure, 1996): “I did this, then I did that involves making links backwards and forwards of a story which is, moreover, still in the telling. (It) involves a kind of retrospective search for the prospective significance of events and decisions. This continuous process of moving to the past to assess actions and learning to the filter the clarity of hindsight brings allows me to identify tensions that I have lived and experienced and through the application of analysis and learning change the embodied values of the experienced past into the actions of the present. Evidence of such changes and learning will hopefully be found as an altered future where I can identify by spiralling back to the past where I made the change.
Kearny (Kearney, 1984): “The structure of narrativity demonstrates that it is by trying to put an order on our past, by retelling and recounting what has been, that we acquire an identity. These two orientations - towards the future and towards the past - are not, however, incompatible” ]
Visual images can be confusing, and you may be asking yourselves, what is a baldheaded white guy doing dressed as a Buddhist priest, holding an Indian eagle feather?
The answer to that question lies in the telling of the story.
It may not be appropriate to describe my training in that tradition here and now, but if I hold in my heart the intent, then the space created in here with you will become sacred and hold twenty minutes of shared story.
My story is a self-reflective action research enquiry where I examine forms of my knowing and my claims to know, through the methodology of a critical enquiry relating to my reflective story.
My story represents a journey of several interwoven strands of my "I", those of soldier, nurse, Buddhist priest, teacher and researcher. I seek to pedagogise my knowing and claims to know through the introduction of a healing curriculum for nurse training at a Japanese university. This journey has been held up to critical examination, publication and reflection over an eight-year period of completing a Masters Degree in Education [(J. Adler-Collins, 1997, 1998a, 1998b, 1999a, 1999b, 1999c, 2000, 2003)] and an M.Phil to Ph.D transfer paper at Bath University in January of this year, with the projected completion of my thesis in January 2005.
I have chosen the medium of story to make explicit my values to you and show how traumatic life events [(JeKan Adler-Collins, 1996)] can be transcended, re-examined and turned to the positive through engaging with finding the values of my "I", looking at these values and transcending them in terms of creating my living educational theory. This journey was made into a documentary by the BBC.
Story is another way of representing action research without constraining it within the traditional prepositional form - there is no necessary logic of connectedness in story....
Carter (Carter, 1993) says that a story:
" is a theory of something, what we tell and how we tell it is a revelation of what we believe.... (stories are) products of a fundamentally interpretative process that is shaped by the moralistic impulses of the author and by narrative forces or requirement."
(Carter, 1993, p.9)
In the telling of my story I engage with the educational issues of the day, focusing around research methodology, claims to know, representing forms of knowledge and scholarship, its validation and the tensions these issues bring into my research and practice. As part of the process I struggle with finding a form of knowledge and its representation which allows me to hold my fundamental values as a priest, nurse and educator within a colonial system with a consciousness that sees the advent of postcolonialism as an urgent requirement for the advancement of mankind.
I am mindful that while seeking academic accreditation for my life’s work the multiple strands of self are often brought into tension. The resolution of these tensions in the creation and expression of my living educational theory is the challenge I face in my story.
My story weaves a path of learning as I move into and out of phases of confusion and tension, towards a new understanding, changing and modifying my understanding of my "I" as a result of the learning and insights achieved.