Jack - 

“What would you like to do to celebrate your 61st birthday?” you asked 
early last month. “Have a chat with you about standards of judgment, record 
the conversations and post a distillate on the BERA website” I said (even 
though lunch at the George was on offer) -  so here it is, pared down as a 
narrative summary constructed almost entirely from the words we used.

OK Jack - as I understand it, the context of this BERA e-seminar is to 
reveal standards of judgment that are appropriate to evaluating the quality 
of the knowledge we are generating as practitioner-researchers - standards 
of judgment being the appropriate standards we use to evaluate our claim to 
having knowledge; plus the need for us to understand the logic which is the 
mode of thought appropriate for comprehending the real as rational, as 
understood within the perspective we are working in.

We were speaking all the time with reference to the video-clip at 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HxqRF2tVLB4 which shows me explaining my use 
in December 2002 of the music of Stephane Grapelli and Django Reinhardt in 
their ‘Minor Swing’ -  and their expression of affirmation in their own 
achievement at the end of the piece -  to evoke my feelings of affirmation 
for Jackie Delong’s achievement in gaining her doctorate. The feeling of 
sharing the pleasure in this celebration of Jackie’s achievement may be 
experienced at the moment of the laughter when I explain to the group that 
they should listen attentively for what follows the last note -  and 
Margarida asks how she will know it is the last note if she hasn’t heard 
the piece before! I heard this question and the immediate laughter not as a 
challenge to my rhetorical flow; my intuitive response had a quality 
(through Alan Rayner’s ‘receptive responsiveness’) which opened the 
opportunity for the group as a whole to affirm its conviviality through its 
subsequent laughter. The ‘eruption’ of humour towards the end of the clip 
shows the flow of life-affirming energy through the boundaries of the 
relationships into a community celebration that is focused on Jackie 
Delong’s achievement. The purpose of this clip (which you used and 
commented on at 
http://www.jackwhitehead.com/jack/mfjwDIVERSEcomplete.pdf) is to emphasise 
the importance of expressing pleasure, through laughter, in both our webs 
of betweenness and pedagogies of the unique in our communities of practice. 

There is a concurrent need for receptive responsiveness if dialogue is to 
truly be educational - and for something to be educational it has to 
improve the quality of our lives. The clip represents a relationally-
dynamic process: you are bringing your four years as supervisor as a facet 
of your productive life; Jackie her thesis as a body of knowledge from 
practitioner research; music as metaphor for that achievement; all informed 
by values that were energised and affirmed by those present and encouraged 
by my understanding of dialogical relationship and the living nature of my 
own embodied knowledge that I brought to the occasion. 

And what did I bring to that group? Why/how did I behave as you see me in 
that clip? I reckon that, by the age of 56 as I then was, I ought to have 
become an expert in some aspect of the business of living and thus be able 
to integrate the holistic and the intuitive (Dreyfus and Dreyfus). All of 
us should aspire to be able to grasp our lives entire in moving seamlessly 
between the layers of life present in such a group - to be able to respond 
at a variety of levels all at once - words, grammar, aesthetic, music -   
and if we are to enter into that dynamic equilibrium with each other and 
with that sense of resonance, we are enabled to lift each other up to that 
level where all these different aspects of human discourse and all these 
channels are open and flowing at the same time because we are experts at 
the business of being alive. Such a gathering is itself a work of art, in 
that it is able to lift up - educate -  at both emotional and intellectual 
levels. You and I agree about what we experienced as being educational that 
evening - through applying similar standards of judgment? What are the 
appropriate standards of judgment that are required to enable someone who 
was not there, who is viewing the clip and reading this text, to draw the 
same conclusion - to gain a vicarious view as if they had been present? 

Perhaps two related but distinguishable standards of judgment are at work 
here: lexical definition and the ostensive expression of meaning which is 
emerging in relation to the enquiry process, which is something we are 
expressing together. There are (1) sentences, statements and propositions 
and (2) Lived expression of meaning which is flowing through me as I 
respond to others -  but there is also (3) - something which is being 
evoked by my creativity from the creative responses of others present into 
a shared form of expression within which the sense of self becomes subsumed 
in the flow of energy generated by the group’s response. And by ‘subsumed’ 
I mean that you and I have a congruent view of what we experienced in 2002  
and of its educational value - in the same sense that singing in a choir 
gives a resonance that makes me feel that I am singing with the voices of 
all those around me. Agreeing to a standard of judgment means that we sing 
with the other’s voice and know the meaning. Dialogical responsiveness 
requires us to listen as we speak but not to speak when we are listening -  
involving equilibrium and resonance, as we strive with good intent to feed 
our individual readings back to the group. The closest I can get to an 
expression of standards of judgment at work in this respect is when I am 
able to say “I now know that you understand what I mean” - and when we are 
all in a group ad saying this to each other. 

Now - and this is the nub of the present enquiry - what is educational 
about the clip and about this discourse we have started to carry out over 4 
years later? We agree that meanings are emergent, coming out of the very 
process of dialogue (rather than in terms of cyclical grammatical 
definitions) and from the forms of receptive responsiveness needed for 
dialogue to actually be educational - those are the standards of judgment 
to be brought to the BERA symposium. In the clip, you will see me looking 
and connecting around the group as I speak - I am speaking with 
attentiveness, connecting music as metaphor with the lives of those 
present. I like to think that I am moved by a desire for an expression of 
authenticity of being, rather than striving to create an appearance. 

But what contribution to improving the quality of our lives can the clip 
and this annotation to it make? Perhaps the potential educational influence 
of the other depends on the quality of the relationship as we recognise the 
living and emergent nature of the standard of judgment - not as something 
pre-defined and external to us. We were all there within our own dialogue 
with the occasion. To what extent was it a shared dialogue? And to what 
extent can others read this narrative and view the clip and apply the same 
standards of judgment and so create their own congruent dialogue within the 
meanings of their own lives? Those forms of life joined together and shown 
in the clip - could it be that the emerging aesthetic - the thing that 
connects us - that something done with good intent that strives to be 
authentic - carries its own standards of judgment? Is it that they are 
developed and made manifest as the spoken dialogue linearly unfolds and the 
unspoken dialogue holistically develops between those present? Or, as in 
(3) above - something which is being evoked by my creativity from the 
creative responses of others present into a shared form of expression 
within which the sense of self becomes subsumed in the flow of energy 
generated by the group’s response.

Now Jack - perhaps we could open up a conversation from which new 
understandings might emerge, the first step being for you to let me know 
how far the above ‘pick and mix’ narrative reflects the areas of interest 
we touched on and the connections we made - and to what extent it is 
educational. 

- Pete