Dear all,
I would like to thank Alon and Sarah for the opportunity to re-examine and articulate my own position on Living Educational Theory, Reflective Practice and Action Research as a transformative and generative process. In reflecting on their posts, I have been forced to distinguish better the ground of the debate and so distinguish and articulate what *I* think we are doing here a little more deeply.
The case being made against LET as I understand it (and the MAs and PhD's being granted under its auspices), is that the concepts of, for example, energy and flow, ubuntu (which says that we do not exist at all except in relationship to one another), inclusionality etc. are not merely 1. vague, 2. subjective and 3. unmeasurable, but 4. wrong because they destroy academic rigor in the name of something imaginary and, (from Sarah's e-mail to Geisha), hypocritical in practice. (Of course, hypocrisy is a common human failing but it's expression in any human life has never, to my knowledge, been an argument against the validity of the 'pretended' virtue or truth in itself!) These charges are important because, in fact, they are all true from a certain perspective!, (except the hypocrisy charge about which I know nothing and wish to know less):
1. The phenomena *are* vague and ill defined by our noun based (English) language, because: a, they are verb based and b, we have not yet created a full and truly descriptive language for them. We are still distinguishing these realities, or mechanisms of experience, and their operations. (As though we were fish who had finally begun to describe the ocean in which we swim.) I think this is something we can be aware of and, from my own perspective, deeply excited and inspired by. We create the world when we name it in this way.
2. They *are* subjective… and that's the whole point, of course. The understanding of the continuum of observer and observation is almost a century old, and yet the tyranny of the Victorian holy grail of clinical, (spurious), detachment/objectivity still demands - and gets - our worship. To assert the role of the observer as *predicating* the observation is still so radical that it makes us subversives of the kind that have always been universally detested in their time; smelly, wild eyed, long haired, idealistic, dangerous, naive etc. etc. :) (See early Christian church, abolitionists, pacifists, socialists, civil rights activists, hippies, and so on.) In the powerful sense of the wrongness, actually the dangerous and 'corrupting' influence of LET evident in the language, we too can recognize a reactive, 'establishment' position which is by no means unique to Alon and Sarah.
3. They *are* unmeasurable because they belong to the realm of love and faith, self-awareness and courage, disillusionment, personal courage and honesty and transformation.
4. And they are indeed 'wrong'… within the old paradigm by which it is impossible that mere shadows of discreet, clearly defined things and ideas should be treated as the ground or yardstick of intellectual endeavor. Sarah calls LET a 'movimiento sombras', a movement of shadows. She is right about the shadows. She means that LET is deceptive, destructive and dark and there, I disagree.
What all this can tell us is that we are in the process of creating a living language and from language, as we know, reality itself is constructed; that the reality we are exploring as we create the language with which to distinguish it, is a reality that (physics tells) us, is much more truthful than the objective model which our noun based language presently constructs. (As much more truthful as the interpretation of a spherical earth is more truthful than a flat one.) And we may also have a 'mission' to explain for ourselves and others, the direct relationship between what is immeasurable (life affirming energy, flow, intangible presence and so on), and its results.
I am baffled by one thing though - the accusation of woolly or fuzzy results, which I also heard from a few voices at this year's SOLES conference in San Diego. There is a dreadful muddle going on in that respect which, I suspect, arises from our reflexive need to control and define-to-death. (I think that this need keeps human beings in a state of near blindness because we prefer not to see than to see how much of what we are, and what we experience is not discreet but intangible and uncertain ; we prefer not to see that control-by-definition is an illusion. The uncertainty is supplied by a power we may explore, work through, with and within but cannot 'define to death'; the illusion we cling to is control of a world of discreet objects that we *can* define, dissect and dispose of.) Investigating the conditions that *produce* transformation is as important as investigating brain based learning; life affirming energy, (or any other phrase or word you want to use to describe it), may be impossible to measure - but its results in the classroom most certainly are not! In other words, the transformative power *is* evidenced in its effects, as trees bending testify to the wind. (N.B. LET is not a *creation*, but a distinction and articulation of a real process in which a kind of personal confrontation with inauthenticity, creates the opening for powerful transformation. This process is also described in different terms in Christian, Sufi, Buddhist and Hindu mysticism to my knowledge.) Thus I might describe the specific and measurable results of my own work as analagous to matter emerging out of light... These would have been impossible without that dynamic which LET describes. It is true that we can measure only one side of the 'equation' i.e. what materializes out of the 'light' (energy) as specific, observable result. But we have to learn how to *live* in the energy/experience that produces that result. When you cut away matter from energy, what remains is a corpse. And I am naturally alarmed at the voices I have been hearing who seem to be demanding nice, predictably safe corpses rather than a dread, living and mysterious power.
Everything I do and much of what happens in my classrooms, is based on that 'who am I being? and who am I being with? and how can we connect authentically?' type of questioning and 'living theory' that characterizes this type of AR practice. And it is self perpetuating. A wonderful colleague who wrote about my work as 'transformation' had no prior knowledge whatsoever of AR, or LET; she wrote as she did because she saw something in my classroom - something she had not experienced in a 'developmental' classroom in thirty years of teaching. Last week, she came with me to the SOLES Action Research conference in San Diego, where she co-presented a workshop at my request. Afterwards, a group of young teachers from UCLA came up to talk to us about the love they felt for their students - who were so similar to those represented in our writing samples, that they said they felt they knew those students personally. When they saw the transformation in voice, ownership, power and ability, they were moved to tears - "it felt as if we were seeing a miracle". As a group, they knew that the narrative about these students was false but, now, they told us the hope and belief that was in their hearts had been turned into something that they could see and read. We shared love and joy, and healing and 'ba'!, and we are going to work together, we and these wonderful teachers (who are all graduates of the stunning Dr Amina Humphry's UCLA class). She had brought them to talk about their teaching work based upon 'positionality' (an aspect of that same inauthenticity to authenticity to power dynamic that characterizes LET). They electrified the conference both in the clarity and courage of their self-disclosures and the love and community that flowed between them and Dr Humphrey. Pam and I bring that influence back with us to our own campus. Next, we will see what happens when *they* begin taking the living language approach in their classes in CA. So... Intangible, powerful, personal encounter leading to specific, measurable, propositional outcomes - a process that can *never* occur in reverse!
Perhaps one day every phrase or term that we are using today will be replaced by a better, more descriptive and useful description. But the power of LET and of every one of the distinctions- leading-to-practice that we are making in this arena lies in the fact that they are helping us as, finally, we begin to move beyond the illusion of objectivity. It is as if we begin to see not only the performance that is being played on the tiny stage of our traditionally focussed human observation, but the theatre and the stage sets, the scripts and plots, the interactions between the actors and the audience, the town and the country and the climate in, through and on which the performance is taking place. Now when we consider the play, we can begin to consider all these things as interrelated, interdependent and continuous whereas previously, we have considered merely the internal structure of the play itself - as an independent and autonomous and self contained phenomenon. And that is the real illusion.
With love
Sara
I have attached a long extract (in draft form) of my paper 'Formal English Without Tears: Rewriting the narrative of Developmental Students'. I do this in response to Jack's request and because I hope that it helps to describe the relationship between the intangible, (the context of personal LET), and measurable outcomes.
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From: Practitioner-Researcher [[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of geisha rebolledo [[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Tuesday, May 17, 2011 11:15 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: How to establish an environment that calls out the most and the best of everyone
Sarah, thank you for trying to write in Spanish. The part I understood is the point of view that also Alon mentioned : Your argument in relation to the Ambiguity of Living Theories approach.Concerning this , I had the experience of presenting those ideas to the Doctorate Students here at the Pedagogic University and the same discussion evolved.Somehow here you need to be supported by stablished theoryes in order to do research . So to end the discussion an Old Professor, refered that he saw connections of living Theoryes with Argyris and Schon and the Theory of Action.However, though we said we will meet again for more discussions , because of the difficult situation Universityes are facing in Venezuela , it never happened.
It is a pitty because through this type of discussions it is possible to clarify ideas and take different points of view .
But one aspect I find difficult to overcome is confronting discussions where both parts stay in very strong positions and there is no possibility of consensus. This I have learn thanks to Bob Dick Action Researh Course that I am taking at the moment. So I would like to find a point of agreement somewhere in this living theory discussion. Because the Hystory of Science is full with denying of good knowledge that the Academy of that time denyed as Thomas Kuhn mentioned already a long time ago.
So again thanks for letting us take part , many greetings, g.
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