Jack, hello! A quick point to start. I wonder about the part of the
question in which you write: 'that dymanically include us' strikes me as
restrictive. I think we also create the parameters that become/are our
contexts too.I see the word dynamic, but it only seems to be working one
way. And I don't think that's how you're actually meaning it, but do
correct me if I've misunderstood something.

OK, now to more pressing matters!

You wrote:
... have contributed to the generation of a knowledge-base of practitioner-
researchers that has been legitimated in the Academy and has established a
new epistemology for educational knowledge.

I think that's undoubtedly true. It's true in the sense that going back
some years now, living theory and other approaches to educational knowledge
have accumulated momentum and gained legitimacy in the Academy. This is an
incontrovertible fact - one look at:
http://people.bath.ac.uk/edsajw/living.shtml
should be enough to see how a collection of such rigour (Winter, 1989)
takes its place in the annals of educational research knowledge and theory
and cannot reasonably be gainsaid.

I sense, however, you're looking for a different kind of enquiring response
than that. Showing influence is such a wily, slippery playmate - here now
and gone tomorrow. Showing influence has to contend with circumstances,
personalities, systemic influences, politics, history, geography, faiths,
religions, gender, adult/child, oh and so on and so on.And so on!

If we take the stance that we are individuals - and I see you are using i-
we not I, which knowing you is highly significant - but for argument's
sake, if we take that stance of individualism, then the permutations of
influences upon us before we seek to influence - are incaluable. If we take
the stance that we are conjoined as human beings and as aspects of the
cosmos all together, then again the influences are still beyond our scope
to include in what we present of ourselves and our work and our contexts
and so on.

So, I suppose I'm saying that influence becomes what we can render
perceptible in some way, both within the processes of development and then
at one step removed as we present it to others.Which is why, I believe, we
(I mean people who develop their own living theories) concentrate on
values, because such a concentration highlights those aspects of the
complexities that otherwise remain invisible (imperceptible is perhaps a
better word).It also explains the contending schools of representation
(Eisner, 1993) with those wishing to provide an evidential basis for any
necessary claims about having 'improved' something (McNiff & Whitehead,
2006). And these values are perhaps what Alan is writing about in terms of
the flow of energies, which unite i with we.

I think the theses you have pointed to show how individuals have come to
know their influence and to improve the quality of it through their living
standards of judgement (values), and I'm thinking of Marion Naidoo's thesis:
'I am because we are: (a never-ending story):The emergence of a living
theory of inclusional and responsive practice,' which contains a DVD of her
practice, and was admissable as evidence. To a lesser extent, I see Pat
D'Arcy's 1998 thesis in which she wrote about engaged and appreciative
responses, which, in short, encourage feedback in ways that connect author
and respondent in a seamless web of creativit - to be along the lines we
are talking about here. It all seems to me to be leading towards an
integration of values,with actions and philosophies in order to enable a
more dynamic interaction with the life-force, in ways that stimulate
creativity and originality (ironically two of the standards levied by the
Academy for Ph.D. theses).

I am beginning to understand conceptually - something I was much quicker at
emotionally and spiritually - the confluence between the work you're doing
in Bath with living theorising and inclusionality. I think, whether
consciously or not, your work has been developing towards confluence rather
than divergence. I think you're a connecter, rather than an anatomist.

You ask the question, how can i~we... and I wish you'd asked the question,
how do I...because I think I understand quite a lot about how you do what
you do as, or example, a supervisor for these theses you quote from. You
have the capacity to sense the future, much, I suspect with the same
uncanny power that a salmon has in tracing its route to its spawning
place.It's the salmon's connection with the life-force. That's not a
flippant point. It's simply what I've seen of you over nearly twenty years.
No, not as a salmon, Jack. Pay attention! You have this really quite
uncanny ability to enter into the insights of others and help them find
their life-force, their way of doing it, creatively and originally, to
influence something for the good in their lives and the lives of others.
That's one of the things that these theses attest to. But this isn't about
saying how brilliantly you supervise, because that doesn't really get us to
the how. Or does it?

Isn't real-education (as we might term, real-ale) - in other words
antithetical to training - in the ways that we talk about it anyway (see
the 'we' above), that enabling of human knowledge into ways of
enfranchising others, to promote the vulnerable into greater freedom, to
equip our young people (and all of us throughout life) to think for
themselves, to rejoice in the gift of life and to see what they can bring
to it and transform it generatively for the good of themselves and others?
If that is the case, then explaining our educational influences in learning
to improve our educational influences as practitioner researchers should
perhaps become at the same time a greater immersion in what it is that
motivates us, i.e. our values.

There is, of course, no single or simple answer to your question. Our lives
are not singularities (at least I don't see them as that) but impinge, I
believe - and I think, Alan (Rayner) you're saying the same - on everything
else. I believe that in communities there is hope to understand more of
what it is that generates us and sustains us and enables us to improve our
practical values. If we seek freedom, then we need to live in freedom,
because in my understanding it is only ourselves we can change. As Gandhi
said. hence, I suppose your use of the word 'influence', rather
than 'change'.I guess we can only explain our influences by walking the
talk. Explanation isn't a discrete aspect of a process, is it? As we seek
to improve our educational influences within the contexts we're working in,
as I remember Jean (MnNiff) saying once, the way to freedom is freedom
itself. I'd like to illustrate this with a short aside into my time in
China in which i~we has evolved quite differently from our ways in the West.

I became starkly aware during my time in China that not only was I
contending (a harsh word, but it felt so hard at first) with differences
between a sense of community and a sense of a personal I (there seemed
little sense of it in China, which really threw me at times), but the
power/knowledge one was incalculably large for someone so steeped in
Western democracy as I was. When I asked a junior colleague a question she
(usually) would dart her eyes to the authority figure in the room (if there
was one) and then give her answer. I had no real way of knowing what was
actually going on in those quick glances but it wasn't something I had been
aware of in England. Thus understanding (let alone explaining) my
educational influences in such a context was incredibly difficult. My
standpoint was skewed for a start - culturally, historically, religiously,
linguistically, economically, racially: each aspect vie-ing for a space in
my deliberations until I sometimes felt I knew nothing.How coudl I promote
democracy, for example, or freedom, in such a context? What did freedom
mean? Where could we find a confluence? I think that's where the notion of
Action Research with Chinese characteristics came in - and tallies with
Pip's earlier discussion with RI about indigenous ways of knowing.

I believe I learned, however, how crucial to understanding anything - again
let alone explaining - evolved within community. It doesn't solve the bias,
the assumptions and so on that are honed in communities, but it gives us
scope to try and to try again. It was only when I first mooted the idea of
AR with Chinese Characteristics, I realised that this could be potential a
source of freedom rather than shackling their insights and experiences to
something grafted on.


So, and I apologise for the length of this - but I think as I write - I
abhore planning as you know, Jack! I feel any answers we're going to get,
anything valuable that we will learn will come from communities in which we
have a stake, in which belonging to (although I'm not quite happy with that
word) offers us greater freedom (and responsibilities). Jack, those theses
didn't happen jsut between you and the Ph.D. colleague - I know you know
this, but the point needs to be made, I feel. These theses grew as the
community grew - just as values grow as we grow. Just as cells grow.

How can we explain.... and so on. We're doing it. In communities, because
we are both ourselves and each other on so many profound levels. If we take
the path of rigid individualism, then we are left with the universe someone
like Richard Dawkins describes (The God Delusion, 2006) - don't get me
wrong, I LOVE his work because he makes me think, but I don't want to live
in his deterministic universe and I shan't! To me 2 + 2 sometimes, just
sometimes, makes 5. When I look at a sunset, say, or see a child delighting
in something or a baby laughing - to me that latter example is the most
glorious sound in the universe. If someone tells me that the baby is
copying, finding ways to attract attention, or whatever other deterministic
view of baby-development - I realise they are all true, but they are not
the whole truth. I am motivated by particular values, like love,
compassion, freedom, democracy - they move my being into a better place.
They move me and change me and by fully engaging with such values in the
world - in community, everything subtly changes. And I embrace the fact
that human beings have a capacity to perceive many forms of knowledge. All
simultaneously of value.

How can i~we improve our educational influences...

By relishing the joys and responsibilities of freedom, within communities
for the benefit of communities and individuals.And it seems to me that
you're doing that. You, refers to you, Jack; but it also refers to the Bath
Action Research communities and to so many other communities in the world
dedicated to those values.

O.K., it's getting on and I feel I have exhausted anything useful to say. I
may return to these letters again tomorrow.

It's been a pleasure, Jack. Love from,