Sara,

I completely agree with your point on language.  My main disagreement  
with LET is with the point that verbal language cannot express  
ontology that therefore requires audio-visual youtube clips.  Then,  
the problem of course is that audio-visual clips only cover seeing and  
hearing.  What about smell, taste and touch?  I think efforts need to  
be made to express oneself verbally.  I am a member of a number of  
creative writing organisations and group, Lapidus - creative words for  
health and well-being and others.  I keep seeing the most amazing  
examples of creative writing and the most amazing creative writing  
tutors.I discuss this in my PhD thesis and am working a lot on  
creative writing in my postdoc work.

I'll read and comment on your paper.
Alon

Quoting "Salyers, Sara M" <[log in to unmask]>:

> 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.
>
> ________________________________________
> 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.
>
>
>
>