>Please do write with your down to earth practical thoughts ........<

Problem 2: Heidi tells you that another pupil is calling her a 'Nazi'
because her home language is German. Such verbal abuse is damaging Heidi's
self-esteem and undermining your school's commitment to race equality and
multiculturalism. You decide to turn Heidi's bilingualism and biculturalism
into assets, not liabilities.

Hi David,

Welcome! Here's my one shillingi, my rupee, and my bag of cowrie shells in
reciprocation for your fabulous two cents worth!

I've just visited your accessible, and pristine web page, which
is a reservoir of scholarly work, not least your own. I enjoyed the
irony of this. You have more publications and conferences than most
colleagues in my HEI, including me. How did I feel about this? Well, I felt
in the presence of a professional educator with 'subject' (discipline,
German language) and 'practical-cum-vocational' educational interests.
In your SEN focus I feel your energy for social justice, in general,
reflected in your classroom work an research in (the) particular.
Browsing your web page I found myself encountering you through the
impeccable presentation of your practice. A teacher who is as serious about
his work as the 'caricatured' university-based subject specialist. I feel
your assiduous pedagogic care pervading your web space. This quality of
care, which is surely an educational standard of judgement for pedagogic
practice, flows through professional channels into linked pages. Browsing
your site is an educational experience, literally, and in the broadest of
senses.Your page is a 'living archive', an educational resource.I see your
page as an expression of  'pedagogic practice', your unique educational
practice.

I'd like your web page linked to the Royal Agricultural College Diversity
web pagebecause your web page will enhance ours. Is this okay for you,
David? Well, those are my first down to earth practical feelings and
thoughts.

I enjoyed your paper in the Projects, Presentation's and Publications
section, from which I have excerpted the passage at the top of this
posting.

After reading the above scenario in which you highlight 'white-on-white'
racism I felt a growing anticipation of hearing your voice on the practice
of teaching equal opportunities, the celebration of diversity and
inclusion, and teaching against racism. I didn't. So I would like to make
contact with any of your colleagues, and from any teacher participating in
this e-seminar, or any writings I may have missed on your web page that
present 'research stories' on racism issues among children and staff in
schools. I would like then to link those papers, or web pages to my own,
http://www.rac.ac.uk/~paul_murray/default.htm

When you've had time to familiarise yourself with some of the threads of
this e-seminar, David, you will come across Peter Mellet's invitation to
participate in a review of published work - at
http://www.bath.ac.uk/%7Eedsajw/module/kathy.htm  "An infant/primary Action
Research module" by Kathryn Yeaman (1995).

Thanks, David. And now for something different.


Hi All,

I'd like to fulfil my promise to Peter in combining my review of Kathryn's
paper with three papers I retrieved and read from your web page,
http://www.specialeducationalneeds.com/
[Home page, then go to Research Outcomes, click on Problems in School
Subject teaching, go to Special Education Needs (SEN) and click on
Inclusive Curricula, then click on RE, then scroll down to Provision and
Practice and you can retrieve papers 2, 3, and 4, below]

I'd like to share some down to earth practical thoughts and feelings about
all four papers because I think my practical thoughts have pedagogic value.


[A] Here is my starting point:

"Clearly at the heart of any pedagogical perspective there is an aim to
promote a particular kind of interaction, which determines how the pupils
will experience, engage with and respond to the religious content. The
nature of the interaction in any pedagogical model will be dependent on the
choice of pedagogical procedures or strategies, which in turn will reflect
the pedagogical principle 'driving' the model! Evidently not even the
experts are clear on the distinction between these two. How reassuring it
was, as a non-specialist, wrestling with these new ideas, to read:

"As evident from the contributions to this book, experienced researchers
have difficulty in distinguishing between the pedagogical principles
underlying their project and the pedagogical strategies implementing
them, even when they have been asked to do so (Grimmett, 2000, p.21)
-from Julie Lankester's paper.


[B] The Papers:
1. An infant/primary Action Research module" by Kathryn Yeaman (1995).

2. Padded Budgies - Experiential and Enactive Teaching, Special Educational
Needs in RE- Julie Lankester

3. Affirming RE - Elizabeth Weightman

4.Tell the Story Simply - Sandy Cave
http://www.farmington.ac.uk/documents/new_reports


[C] Some thoughts, feelings and standards of judgement of a pedagogic kind:

Julie Lankester suggests in her paper, "The nature of the interaction in
any pedagogical model will be dependent on the choice of pedagogical
procedures or strategies". Kathryn accounts in her paper for how she
develops her own pedagogical model. Kathryn fashions her own
pedagogical 'model' of the particular (not at all generalisable, nor yet
replicable) from the grounds of her teaching interactions with her young
students. She doesn't adopt an 'off the shelf' model. She doesn't go to
a 'doctor' of education for a prescription.

Kathryn's account presents her own 'courage to be' ostensively,
a courage to be that Paulus Tillich is more famous for writing
about. I like the pivotal post-positivist irony in this. But Kathryn does
more. In 1995 Kathryn demonstrates a quality of 'methodological
inventiveness' that Marion Dadds and Susan Hart identified in their
educational practice, and gave a name to this in 2001
(Doing Practitioner Research Differently, London: Routledge Falmer).

Elizabeth Weightman's paper is powerful. In her introduction, Elizabeth
writes, 'Before moving onto the main 'body' of the report I would like to
briefly establish my learning and teaching background which will
undoubtedly have influenced my work and report since it is impossible to
be completely objective or neutral in these aims.' I agree with Elizabeth.
But why would a teacher following her vocation imagine that it is
normatively 'good' to
strive for objectivity when her aim is stated thus,  "The end product
would, I hoped, be a better understanding of the nature of RE and,
importantly the ability to obtain and produce more appropriate materials
for my pupils in the future.'

Hope extended to (my) pupils through RE teaching (which involves a
commitment to Theism) is not a neutral nor objective activity: it is
profoundly subjective, spiritual and human. I would have liked Elizabeth's
account to have demonstrated some of the 'objectively subjective' quality
of
Kathryn's account. Kathryn's account is practical and down-to-earth.
Because of the way Kathryn includes classroom voices, class activities in
a 'living sense',
and a profoundly serious interplay of self-reflection in her text.

While Elizabeth's, it seems to me, is propositionally practice.
Elizabeth presents classroom materials, to be sure, though she does so in
a propositional sense.
Materials are offered as 'plans', perhaps, and not as 'living
plans', through which we could glimpse Elizabeth teaching RE, the
challenges she faces and deals with, her pauses, how she catches her
breath, and her reflective moments. I would have loved Elizabeth;'s
account to have included her student's voices in responsiveness to
the 'pedagogic model and strategies' Elizabeth is offering them. I would
have liked to have been transported into the situatedness of Elizabeth's
classroom: what I call the 'particular' (after Baudrillard). By contrast,
Kathryn takes us into the particular and while there we can how her
educational standards of judgement
are unfolding, emergent, the product of her 'unfolding bodymind'.

Elizabeth's paper takes me closely to her mind. But I am not sure of her
presence in her paper as an 'embodied teacher'. Her body is dislocated from
the account. Kathryn's account is embodied and held through the very tight
parameters of her work. And this also causes a tension for me because I
believethat Elizabeth is doing marvellous work in her classroom.

Reading Elizabeth's paper I enjoyed the extent and merit of her
scholarship.

I loved section 3 of her paper looking at the various approaches to RE
teaching from the 'confessional approach' through to the Essentialist
Approach outlined by Watson (1993, Watson, B., The effective teaching of
RE, Longmans).

Because Elizabeth drew effectively, extensively, and in critically
scholarly ways on propositional theorising (Watson's and Ashton's in
section 3) I was able to appreciate the theoretical construction Elizabeth
brings to her RE teaching.

This enabled me to feel confident in her epistemological pluralism. Her
open-mindedness. As a Muslim in Britain, living in the shadow of
Huntington's crass thesis of the 'clash of civilisations', I have to admit
feeling very insecure and jittery about how I am perceived. I become
defensive quite easily these days. The angry Muslim, the neo-terrorist. I
can easily become the hook for the projections of others because, like my
doctoral colleague Alon Serper, though in different ways to Alon, I am
prepared to enter into 'bold talk' and 'race talk', and to talk openly
about my project as an
educator in contributing to postcolonial social formations that will lead
to the destruction of whiteness, i.e. the privileging dynamic of 'normal
white.

I have a grandchild attending a rural primary school in Wiltshire.
I watch her being absorbed into the Christian Christmas story.
She wants Granddad to come along and watch her, and I do out of love for
my family. But I feel excluded when there is no parity afforded by her
school to other religious stories that include me, my family, my
granddaughter, and several centuries of rich storied narratives apart from
Easter and Christmas.

When I read Elizabeth's section 3 I was given a propositional theoretical
account (i.e., Watson) of approaches to RE. This helped me to disentangle
my experiences and make sense of them in a way that Kathryn's paper does
not provide.

This brings me to an important standard of judgement for what I believe to
be compelling educational research and theorising. I am an advocate of what
I am beginning to call 'Live Theorising'. In my live theorising doctoral
account of my teaching practice, I am confluencing propositional theories
of the general (nomothetic) with living theories of the particular
(ideographic).

In my 'live theorising' approach I propose that particular, singular
experiences of racism and oppression (also of SEN learners who are white)
when told through a storied voice can have profound impact in terms of how
we can relate to those experiences and how we might want to take action
against them. I think narrative and storied first-person relatability can
embrace black and white, SEN person, teacher and parent and so-called able
learner's (Bassey, 1995). This is the power of first-person consciousness
studies: a first-person story needs a second-person audience. And we know
the mountains of Bakhtinian research into dialogical relationship to
supportmy point. Vygotsky's contribution to learning and 'zones of
proximity', which I liken, figuratively, and perhaps mistakenly,
to 'closeness', relationship, and relatability are important, too.
However, the 'I' of the Action Research project is incontrovertibly an 'I'
mediated by a wider context,
'out there', that can be explained in realist ways, the better to identify
material hegemonic practices. It seems to me in my 'real life' that the
particular is mediated by the general patterns of hegemonic practice on a
global scale. Studies in particularity, which are central to Living
Educational Theory also need to reflect in them something of this 'wider
context' if they are to be invitational, credible and compelling research
stories.

This is my practical and down to earth thought following my reading of
Kathryn's paper alongside three other papers on David's web page.

In general terms Living Educational Theory accounts could better display
their significance for the quality of  'live theorising' I have in mind if
they were to keep in mind the following:

[i] the author's account  of their 'I' situated in social, political space
(a realist dimension)

[ii] an awareness of how the 'I' is being mediated historically,
materially, and in the 'here and now' by hegemonic practices, (exploring,
and learning from the idealist/realist tension)

[iii] a serious scholarship of appropriate accounts of hegemony,
propositional
and living (avoiding the pitfall of the logic of the excluded middle,
after Alan Rayner)

[iv] an explicit statement by the writer of their own particular
ontological position in
respect of issues of social justice, accompanied by an appropriate
epistemological framing.
(I do enjoy the way Mo Griffiths is achieving this, and her joint chapter
in the International handbook of Self Study of Teacher Education
Practices, 2004, with Liz Bass is precisely what I have in mind.
Not a model or template: but a wonderful illustration of scholarship and
first person awareness confluenced.
Jean McNiff's Action Research text, principles and practice, demonstrates
this in a variety of creative and convincing ways)

My approach to 'Live Theorising' aims to explore, enhance and demonstrate
these criteria.

[D] But why do I think they are so important for the nature of educational
theory?

I think such theorising is indicative of the kind of concerns that
influence my design of curricula, my Diversity practice, my critical
pedagogy, and my postcolonial practice. I pedagogise my theorising in ways
that enable to  understand and guide my practice. After all what is the
point of a living educational theory, or 'live theorising' account if the
educational theory that is emergent isn't actualised into pedagogic
practice: what Bernstein refers to as 'pedagogisation, in that way that
only a sociologist could!

As I read the four papers above I did so with these four criteria of 'Live
Theorising' in mind. Hopefully without them blocking my appreciation of
each paper in its own unique and self-referential terms. I observe and
comment, and don't 'judge'. Thus I could encounter the strengths and
possibilities held in each paper, allowing them to impress me,
differently. I was deeply impressed by the seemingly unaware
ethnocentricity in Sandy Cave's, Tell the
Story Simply. I am a story teller and I tell stories to paying audiences to
raise money for social justice concerns, such as homelessness. A simple
story is an invitational story. This is my down to earth and practical
thought on the matter.

All four papers indicate Stenhouse's canonical point that teachers are best
placed to produce their own knowledge claims about their practice. Don't
you also think that teachers accounts of their practice if the teacher
explains how their particular storied voice of agency is crimped, cramped
and sometimes crushed by Western hegemonic practices. Wouldn't it be
helpful because we are teaching within particular spaces of globalisation
to [a] explain my particular space, and [b] situate self, other, and
practice in
the analysis of the global? And if this is the case, then teachers also
need to become not only scholars of the practicalities of their work, but
also scholars of the conceptual nature of how their work is being
manipulated by the condition of global capitalism, new imperialism, state
violence as racism, and the postcolonial condition.

When I sit down to discuss and draft my Critical Issues in Organization
Module 3038, I have to keep in mind what I mean by 'critical' and what I
mean by a critical pedagogy. What is happening at Gleneagles is impacting
the commodification of my classroom, your classroom. Are we all, as
teachers, producing fodder for Tesco and Walmart, or the corporate pursuit
of global hegemony?
http://www.rac.ac.uk/~paul_murray/Documents/Tescoisation%20and%
20Walmartization38.doc

Why teach RE at all when the shopping mall is the new Temple? Is
it time for a critical RE?

[E]Here's story to end on that points to my commitment to my postcolonial
critical pedagogy: The Story of Layla and Alex.

Layla, my five year old granddaughter recently told me that her classmate,
Alex, doesn't use brown in the paintings he does on class 'painting days'.

Why's that, I asked.
Oh, because Alex says brown is the colour of poo.
What do you think about that, Layla?, I asked.
Well, I told Mrs G. (her class teacher) and she said, get on with your
painting Layla.
Did you?, I asked.
Mm, yes...and I told Alex, my Dad's brown and he isn't poo'.

Moral of Layla's Story? - Layla's teacher missed her postcolonial moment.
Layla didn't though. Though Layla and Alex now have two different
narratives of brown and poo. Their teacher was struck by moral muteness
(Chris Keeble, DSO, 2005, Action Masters research proposal, available on
my web page next Monday).

In the moment that Mrs. G  could have influenced a 'colonial syntax' from
within a reforming 'postcolonial grammatology', she forgot how. She forgot
the down to earth and practical moral actions she could have taken. That
is, of course, if she shares this way of 'seeing' as a teacher. And this
is where Kathryn's paper, and the other three papers, are so vitally
important. Kathryn's paper speaks explicitly from the particular voice of
her 'I', and she is not morally mute. While Elizabeth, Julie and Sandy
each point to their moral adroitness through their papers, they don;t she
us how they translate moral and ethical ideas into their RE teaching
practice. The importance of stories for Hannah Arendt is their political
value. I see this. But my colleague Chris Keeble suggests that personal
narrative is a space from which we can challenge our own,and
other's 'moral muteness'. Yes, language is key in the growth of children's
vocabulary for multiracial and postcolonial citizenship. Their grasp of
language will affect children's abilities to tell their stories as adults.
This is where the power of the teacher is so immense. I work with young
adults, mainly, and I am finding this kind of language teaching to be
crucial when students supervised by me ask questions relating to the
realization of their personhood. This is why I believe it is the teacher's
inner world and outer world dispositions that are crucial for the kinds of
teaching practice, and those down to earth practical actions,
that I imagine could support postcolonial pedagogy in the classroom.

The project of my 'live theorising' is to provide sutures, to heal the
Cartesian wound of dualism, by asking teachers to account for the
particularity of their practice within the general patterns of their
social and political 'wider context'. And to do this narratively, and with
the authority of scholarship, both living and propositional if this is
what it takes to produce compelling research stories. And I believe it is
after several years of my own research enquiry. With this insight I am now
capable of writing my thesis. For this is it.

This is why my postcolonial critical pedagogy is an account of my
particular educative practice set within what Joy James identifies neatly
as the state violence of racism, and what MacLaren and Farahmandpur refer
to as global capitalism and new imperialism (2004). This is what I mean by
my pedagogy of the postcolonial particular.

And this comes down to a simple desire: to find practical ways of
improving pedagogic practice when talking to Layla and Alex, aged 5, about
the pedagogy of poo (as distinct from the Pedagogy of Poo).
My postcolonial critical pedagogy is complex, simple, conceptual,
practical, theoretical, ontological, epistemological and above all, it is
what I do in the everyday ordinariness of my teaching life as I express my
loyalty to humanity.

I hope my cowrie shells are acceptable here, as an alternative to American
Express.

Yaqub