Hello everyone. I wanted to respond to your comment of the 22nd October, 
Sarah and my apologies for not getting back to you earlier.

'I want to understand how 'generative' it is as an educational process.'

I would like to speak as someone who has gone through her own living 
eductional theorising - and I do like Jean's point about being careful 
about capitalising living educational theory, theories and theorising, 
because such thinking can lead to closed-thinking and insights. My 
experience of developing my own living theories has been a process of 
growing up and of coming more fully into the world and into my 
responsibilities as a human being. I think I was remarkably lucky in both 
my supervisor (Jack Whitehead) and my Ph.D. examiners (Professor Richard 
Winter and Professor Morwenna Griffiths)for both times, as the first time 
I was not successful in my submission. I have written extensively 
elsewhere about working with Jack as a supervisor (see papers most notably 
before I went to China in 2001 - available at: 
www.actionresearch.net/moira.shtml) but here I want to write about my 
experience of being examined for my Ph.D. on both occasions because of 
their generative nature. I believe that I was scrupulously fairly dealt 
with, and it was indeed this care and rigour and sense of justice, that 
constituted some of the greatest learning of my life. On the second 
attempt a year after my first, in 1996, I was successful (Laidlaw, 1996).

I submitted my first attempt in 1995. The viva was strenuous and so 
difficult. It lasted about two hours. I was told very openly from the 
beginning that I was not going to be allowed to pass this time. It came as 
a body-blow, to be honest. I don't mean I was cock-sure, but I wasn't 
particularly worried. I'd given it my best shot, I'd had such excellent 
supervision, and yet, as I was told at the very beginning of the viva 
(indeed a phone-call had alerted Jack and myself earlier in the day) I was 
not to pass without major re-writes. I had not communicated my living 
educational theory to two people who, I saw clearly, genuinely wanted to 
understand my thesis. The questions I was asked were rigorous (Winter, 
1989) and just (Griffiths & Davies, 1995). I realised very quickly, that 
if these two professional educators didn't understand what I wanted to 
say, then I had to find a better way of communicating with them and it was 
my responsibility, not theirs. As soon as I realised this (and it was a 
huge learning curve for me), I had this sense of the Ph.D. meaning so much 
more than a certificate of competence. It was about communicating the 
values I cared about passionately - fairness, love, democratic practices, 
justice and so on. And if I cared about these values, then I had to show 
that in my viva. Therefore, so far, the Ph.D. was becoming living to me as 
well, because I found I wanted to fight for the values, not for my 
Ph.D.The Ph.D. itself was simply a symbol then of the kind of person I 
wanted to be, and my examiners were completely open to this, and gave me a 
lot of space in which to grow into the responsibility for what I cared 
about. It wasn't enough to state it, I realised, I had to live it, then, 
now. I count it as generative, this whole process of engaging in living 
theorising, because it engendered growth, not just with my students 
(although let's face it, that's got to be equally as important as self-
knowledge and self-earning). My examiners, after about an hour, then said 
that I had the choice to choose new examiners in my resubmission or I 
could choose them again. I was rather taken aback by that because by then 
I wanted passionately to communicate it to them. I wanted them to 
understand what my living educational theory was. It became personal, and 
I mean that in the best possible sense. If memory serves me well, hugs 
were exchanged at the end of this viva, and I had this feeling of walking 
on air. I'd been refused my Ph.D. this time (I had a year within which I 
might resubmit) and yet I suddenly knew what my living educational theory 
meant to me. It was no longer treatise, or even description and 
explanation of my own educational development. It was me.I was and would 
become my Ph.D.. I would cfreatively engage with my teaching and 
theorising in such a way that the Ph.D. and I would be different 
representations of each other.

I hold that experience of my viva as being the single-most signifiacnt 
learning episode in my life because I was in the presence of people whose 
sole aim was to understand and to clarify and to learn.Through each one of 
us engaging with the spirit of the thesis as well as the text, we broke 
through the tyranny of systems and emerged into a living learning 
opportunity. It was awesome.

I would not begin to try to generalise from this at all. All I can say is 
that in my learning, through a full engagement with the learning processes 
available to me as a living theory action researcher, and most importantly 
with the people I encountered through the systemic aspects of my learning 
processes, I was helped to a dialectical relationship with others, that 
then generated my living theorising.It's not causal of course, but it's 
value-laden.

I've been listening to:http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=d2SJz-bMU0Q as I 
write this as it helps me to think! Hope you enjoy it too, everyone!

Best wishes, Moira

References:
Griffiths, M. & Davies, C. (1995). In Fairness to Children. London: Taylor 
and Francis.
Laidlaw, M. (1996).How can I create my own educational theory as I offer 
you an account for my educational development? (Ph.D thesis, Bath 
University, Bath). Retrieved from 
http://www.actionresearch.net/moira2.shtml 
Winter, R. (1989). Learning from Experience. New York; London: Falmer 
Press.