 |
 |
Hello, all, Very aware that I am just about squeezing into Jack's deadline for submissions for the first phase of this seminar, here is my account. I have been trying to offer explanations for my educational influence in my own learning for some years. You can find many of these explanations on my website, www.jeanmcniff.com You can also see the explanations I offer for what I hope is my educational influence in the learning of others. The data that I produce for this hopeful claim that I am influencing others' learning is in the accounts that people have put on the website. You can read the dissertations of people in Ireland, whose masters studies I have supported – see http://www.jeanmcniff.com/reports.html I also hope that what I have just called data can in fact be seen as evidence, because I can clearly relate the accounts that people have produced to the values that inform my work. By making this link, as Jack suggests throughout his writings of recent years, I can show how my values have come to act as my living standards of judgement as I systematically try to account for myself in terms of what I learn and do as I try to improve my work. I think a striking element of the dissertations and other stories on the website are that they are stories of research. I encourage all the people I work with to make a clear distinction between stories of activities and stories of research. While research itself is of course a kind of activity, it is also the kind that generates evidence in support of testing a claim to knowledge. The stories you can read contain evidence which is linked to the authors' own articulated standards of judgement. In the last few years the focus of my work has shifted, from supporting the professional education of teachers to supporting the professional education of higher education academic staffs. I still work with teachers, for example at the University of Limerick, where I support teachers' doctoral studies, and I work with other education agencies in Ireland in developing professional learning in workplaces. I also work with academic staff at St Mary's University College, London and the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University in South Africa. A St Mary's colleague, Jane Renowden, has today sent a preliminary research report to an e-network that has been developed by colleagues in Ireland, London and South Africa. Yu can access Jane's report at http://www.jackwhitehead.com/monday/Jane.pdf Next week I visit with colleagues at NMMU. Part of that visit will be to work with three other colleagues on our small 'Interrogating our colour' project. We are four researchers, all of different colours and different ethnic origins, and we are interested in how we can dismantle the ideas and practices that deliberately perpetuate discrimination, oppression and colonisation by using categories such as race, colour, ethnicity, gender and religion as the grounds for the colonisation. Like Pip, we do not believe that we are in a 'post' phase at all. We are there, and potentially perpetuating it ourselves. If we are to make suggestions about how and why other people's colonial practices should be dismantled, we have to begin with our own. I am hopeful that this kind of work, and also the work with teachers and university staffs, will contribute to what Jack calls the transformation of the social formations of the teaching profession and higher education, and also contribute to discussions about how social formations currently caught in the grip of normative imperialistic discourses can find ways of rethinking their positions and deciding to change their ways for the good of all. Thanks for reading this, and best wishes to all, Jean