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Yakkub: To embody what you said about my writings: And in light of your 
very encouraging praise and compliment.

As someone who is deeply concerned about - as the whole point and scope 
of my research - and with, my own post-propositional applied and 
embodied ethics: I am trying to make my potentially and intentionally 
contributing points within the act/practice of taking a special care 
for my very busy and preoccupied readers/engagers to be able to spent 
as little time as possible to read or glance through.

Jack: - I suggest this as a potential standard of judgement

Taking pity of potential readers and giving succinct notes rather than 
scrolles:  Imagine 123 scroles invading our email box and replies to 
the scroles using other scroles and an infinitive regress of scroles.

Ethics for me is thinking of others - the social others - within 
the/one's embodied ontology and ethics.

Alon

Quoting Paul Murray <[log in to unmask]>:

> Assalaam Wa Alaikum All -
>
>
>
> [1] Jack: As we move towards the end of our November 06 postings and into
> our December 06 postings could you please reflect on issues that have been
>
> raised in our November postings that could help us to realise the purpose
>
> of the seminar, in our December postings.
>
>
>
> Yaakub - Yes, I believe I could try to do this, though will include an
> October roundup, too:
>
>
>
> *         Susie's amazing postings throughout her stay were like the sutures
> that mend torn skin and my mothers knitting - pearl one, knit one, and all
> that helping to integrate, synthesize and hold things together - Susie's
> capacity for integrative passion as an aspect of educative practice has been
> a remarkable feature
>
>
>
> *         Susie's mention of whiteness as an important focus for enquiry,
> which was not picked up and developed - two things remarkable about this:
> Susie's identification, and the lack of enthusiasm in the list to work with
> Susie's concern about whiteness. No other expressions of concern 'building
> on', Susie's idea were offered - I have mused, reflected, and wondered
> silently about this in respect of 'capacity building'. It reminds me of the
> question I have heard raised in a whiteness theory list I subscribe to -
> 'How should white people behave with other white people when they experience
> them to be racist?' Through the October/November postings I've been able to
> reframe this as a question of the kind, 'How should educational
> practitioners behave with other educational practitioners who they
> experience to be racist?'
>
>
>
> *         Mohsen's stunning polysemic writing, and Mohsen's Sufi-like
> wisdom-writing postings that have moved me to multiple salaams. Mohsen's
> delightful paper that has opened up in me an invitation to let in a new
> epistemology of mindfulness teaching is proving particularly inspirational
> in helping me to articulate, in my thesis writing, my purpose for writing my
> educational thesis
>
>
>
> *         Pip is living a Postcolonial Educational life and I admire her
> elegant and eloquent wise practice. Pip stimulates my desire to open my
> sphincter-like mind and learn! I have carried Pip's influence into my MBA
> classrooms this semester and into my work in my Critical issues in
> Organization Module 3039
>
>
>
> *         Barbara has brought Ubuntu into my life with a passionate clarity
> and intimacy with Alan diving headlong into Ubuntu
>
>
>
> *         Alan's white outside(r) and black inside(r) writing has pushed me
> to the limits of my own tendency to racism
>
>
>
> *         Barbara and Alan in holding me in the darkness of Ubuntu (with
> Nceku silently alongside) have enabled me to heal those wounds gathered in
> the blinding-white lightness of Bath. I can now stroll with a sense of
> peaceful collaboration through those ruins with my dear mentor and friend
> Jack and the wraiths writhing in the crumbling ruins are mere memory traces
> no longer etched in the productive narrative joys of Ubuntu
>
>
>
> *         Alon's writing has been succinct (unlike mine), clinically brief
> (unlike mine) and pregnant with multiple meanings. Such clarity of focus
> held in the repeated mean of self
>
>
>
> These are my reflections on the issues that have been raised in our
> (October) November postings that could help me to stay in this list in a way
> that might help (some of) us (some of us?) to realize the purpose of the
> seminar in our December postings.
>
>
>
> In the section below I identify those standards of judgment that could
> enhance the quality of educative relationships, educational research and
> teaching practice; and in this way help us to value what can be achieved in
> this list.
>
>
>
> Through this process I'm learning to identify (sustain clear and cogent
> personal standards of critical judgement) about what counts as quality in
> educational practice and research.
>
>
>
>
>
> Jack: I'm thinking of contributions that might help to enhance our
> understandings of standards of judgement that are appropriate for judging
> the quality of the educational knowledge and educational theories we are
> generating from our educational practitioner-research.
>
>
>
> Yaakub - That's very clear and helpful. Reflecting on the October and
> November postings that have moved me in Tadbir* I'm thinking of those
> postings that have contributed to standards of judgment that I feel are
> appropriate for guiding my educative relations with self and others as a
> non-Western teacher/researcher in a whiteness-centred society like UK:
>
>
>
>
>
> [i] The enhancement of respectful difference (living pluralism),
>
>
>
> [ii] Holding the possibility open for the emergence of diverse and different
> educational standards of judgment (living diversity)
>
>
>
> [iii] Encouraging critical and evaluative awareness (living critical
> pedagogy)
>
>
>
>
>
> Let me untie these a little for you with Pip's ideas of 'knots' and
> intentional invitation in mind.
>
>
>
> [i] By respectful difference I mean the living standard of judgment of
> Ubuntu that has flowered in the list.
>
>
>
> [ii] By diverse and different standards of judgment I have in mind educative
> standards - from pedagogy to curricula arrangements - that are mune to
> influence from multicultural ways of knowing, mune to different and eclectic
> theoretical and practitioner approaches, and carry a polysemic quality that
> invites all kinds of dialogue, including agonistic dialogue( As I write this
> I have images of a silver tree bearing wonderful varieties of luscious
> fruits dripping with the nectar of enquiry and these fruits have
> multi-hemispherical names like the Mohsen fruit of polysemy, the Pip-fruit
> of Pakeha-Maori hybridity, the Barbara Star fruit of Ubuntu nourishment, the
> AlanInclusional fruit that is white outside and whose skin yields to the
> touch a beautiful black ripeness within; the Susie lets do some whiteness
> fruit of possibility and openness,  and the Alon social phenomenology fruit
> of Husserlian tartness. These fruits of the globe each bursting with sticky
> standards of fruity educational judgment could have been lost in a less
> 'inclusional' list than this BERA list and so grateful appreciation goes to
> Jack and Brian for this possibility. Without them these standards might not
> have emerged, and without them, and you and me, other standards may have.
> These diverse and different educational standards of judgement militate
> against a 'teacher false consciousness' in whiteness. This is so important
> for [a] how I judge the quality of practitioner research, and [b] how I
> evaluate and appreciate the quality of my educative relationships and
> curricula arrangements, and [c] how I judge the quality of the educational
> future we are contributing to here.
>
>
>
> [iii] By this standard of judgment I have in mind my postings that have
> sought to challenge a suspected presumption in this list of the primacy of
> self in practitioner research by pointing out, critically, that even the
> Western priapic 'I' assumed by some approaches to Action Research will
> always be  mediated by some form of socio-politically harsh, ugly, brutal,
> and pretty immovable hegemonic practices that crimp individual agency, if
> not altogether determine human choice, and these hegemonic arrangements
> actually do exist beyond my inner world, they have force and impact out
> there in the social realities, multiple though they are, whose relations of
> power intersect my sense of self (Allan Johnson, 2000, Power, Privilege and
> Difference - a fabulous read).  In this BERA list I have learned that even
> if some educational researchers suffer an 'ontological failure of
> imagination' and variously fail, refuse, or reject pluralistic ontological,
> psycho-social, and cultural offerings that are diverse and different it
> doesn't mean that all educational researchers reject these, that these
> standards are anything other than vital, and that I should walk away from
> the conflict with my tail between my legs. I have learned in this BERA list
> to stay in dignity, hold and concede my ground as appropriately moved to,
> and to do this without resorting to 'slugging it out'.
>
>
>
> Incidentally, the above account points to why I value Reason and Marshall's
> approach to Action Research at Bath University.
>
>
>
> They conceptually and practically differentiate and distinguish between
> approaches to action research in three clear ways:
>
>
>
> 1.      first-person action research enquiry - As I understand their
> approach, the conceptual or theoretical unit of analysis appears to be the
> phenomenology of self, and the practice focus appears to be
> self-reflexivity,
>
> 2.      Second-person AR enquiry - As I understand their approach the
> conceptual/theoretical unit of analysis seems to be the social-psychological
> and a social system such as a group with certain dynamics and ethical
> arrangements, and the practical focus appears to be self with other
> involving a social commitment to inter-subjective sharing of meanings and
> experiences.
>
> 3.      third-person action research - In this form of action research, as I
> incompletely understand it,  there does appear to be what I refer to as a
> wider socio-political focus on self with others mediated by, and impacting
> on, wider organizational - and possibly, even societal or globalized
> arrangements. This approach appeals to me because it seems to be inclusive
> of the possibility of an Educational Action Research that has as its unit of
> analysis self, other, and organization within the alarming geo-spatial
> morphology of a violent, right-wing, neoliberal, crusading globalizing
> capitalism.
>
>
>
> An action research with these units of analysis would offer educational
> action research exciting theoretical, conceptual and practical moments of
> departure. For me, AR enquiry informed from this first to third person
> paradigm would enable a quality of living theory action research that was
> inclusive of postcolonial critical pedagogic analyses of practice and theory
> development that addressed Peter McLaren's reasonable critique of the
> desiccation of 'truth narratives' in postmodernity that fall, appropriately,
> foul of the criticism that they are examples of 'militant particularism'
> dislocated from propositional (even positivistic) analyses of race, class,
> gender and  hegemonic practices. My view is that this quality of educational
> AR is largely waiting to happen; it has yet to be sculpted by the tools of
> an inclusional educational action research that informs and enhances
> particularistic accounts of life's experience that are phenomenological
> (replete with all the quality associated with Bassey's notion of
> relatability) through propositional theoretical accounts that contain
> critical socio-political analyses of globalizing capitalism. Self-reflexive
> educational practitioner research stories that also inclusive of
> propositional analyses of hegemonic oppression have more likely of moving
> teaching practice from 'teaching to the status quo' to 'teaching to change'
> in the spirit of Patricia Hill-Collin's purpose in Fighting Words, her Black
> feminist epistemology of her educational project.
>
>
>
> My desire is to work in tadbir with those whose visions are inclusional of
> first, second and third person action research where a unique
> phenomenological self-reflexive project is vital though not presumed to have
> primacy and is complemented by an educational re-searching that sets out to
> change and influence social formations of political power relations, such as
> - but by no means only - the hegemonic politics of whiteness as privilege.
>
>
>
> Educational Action Research of this quality is urgently and keenly waiting
> to be written.
>
>
>
> My invitation in tadbir and Ubuntu in this BERA list is in the form of a
> 'call' and 'invitational plea' to friends and colleagues to join with me in
> honouring and simultaneously extending the wonderful work of Jack Whitehead
> in Living Theory Action Research by moving into the third-person unit of
> analysis for re-searching educational practitioner research.
>
>
>
> As my son, Hassan, said to me this morning from a building site in Gibraltar
> - 'Dad, Britain is fast becoming a country for rightwing Christian and White
> neoliberal activists driven by different kinds of hate whereas here in Spain
> and Gibraltar I live and work in British gangs, Dutch gangs, Spanish gangs,
> Gibraltarian gangs, and Moroccan gangs in peaceful respect..and the only
> violence here is that caused by drunken English and the people who deplore
> this in most outspoken terms are the Brit's who live and work here.'
>
>
>
> It is this third-person context of globalizing capitalism and new world
> order in which 'hate' has become the new fetish (thinking of Garrison Keilor
> singing the song for the Honda advert 'Can hate be good', which always
> worried me - no, hate can't ever be 'good'. But hate is around us. What we
> can contribute to as educators is a form of educational research that
> includes realistic propositional analyses of hate that serve the purpose of
> 'teaching dissolution of hate'.  I agree with Alan in this - one can't teach
> against hate for this kind of energy relies on hate and works in vampiric
> complicity with hate's agenda. As a Muslim I find myself saying, more then
> ever in UK, that the attack on Islam by the neoliberal right wing is also a
> doubled-edged scimitar of backlash against 'militant secularism', and sadly,
> this is a 'hate project' of the neoliberal Christian extremist right in the
> West, increasingly finding comfortable identifications in the Church
> 'proper'. I will know that equality is more than rhetoric in the UK when I
> hear government ministers asking the Church to talk to its clerical members
> about the rise of Christian 'hate' extremism. I live in terror of Christian
> 'hate' in my university college in the UK and hate has been manifesting
> against me since October.
>
>
>
> As an educator who researches my practice inclusionally - that is within a
> realistic evaluation of hegemonic practices and arrangements, and power
> relations - it feels to me 'as if' much British educational action research
> has been very slow to move into this contested, propositionally informed,
> and critically theoretical third-person territory.
>
>
>
> This is where I would like to go with educational action research (-ers) in
> tadbir and Ubuntu having enjoyed several years  exquisite benefit from
> Jack's support in helping me to give a form to my educational artistry, and
> enabling me to speak for myself in naming it as a living postcolonial
> educational theory.  By definition my polysemic appreciations of my use of
> the term postcolonial includes critical, hopeful, meaningful, just,
> pluralistic, and radicalized forms of social theory and social and political
> activism.
>
>
>
> To appreciate my earlier point about first, second and third person AR do
> take a look at the MA in Learning Change by Action Research at the
> University of Gloucestershire, (UK) because in this Masters programme the
> first, second and third person distinctions give shape and relevance to the
> curricula arrangements throughout the Masters programme
> http://www.glos.ac.uk/uogindex.cfm
>
> Click on Prospective Students Postgraduate, and then Taught Courses, and
> scroll down to Leading Change by Action Research.)
>
>
>
>
>
> Jack: At the end of each month's postings I'm hoping that
>
> this invitation will encourage anyone who wants to help to continue to
>
> focus our contributions on our purpose, to do so and to return to any
>
> issues they feel warrant further exploration.
>
>
>
> Yaakub - The notion of focus that Jack brings does seem crucial providing it
> doesn't become a focus for unitary (totalizing) norms. The educational
> standard of judgment of tadbir that I've mentioned during my October and
> November postings refers to focus. *Tadbir is an Islamic discipline of
> focused scholarship - open to anybody from any faith/belief system without
> any requirement to accept the entire Islamic package - with those who share
> your passions and energy. Tadbir is associated with the practice of the
> Andalusian philosopher and teacher Al Baja. I'm finding Tadbir to be a very
> helpful standard of judgement as I bring it, reflexively, to my often
> disorganized energies.
>
>
>
> So I'm delighted with the prospect of engaging through this list in Ubuntu
> with Alan, Barbara and now Nceku. Let the indaba flow. Jack's reminder of
> focus feels both salutary and intuitively aligned with Tadbir.
>
>
>
> I have to say that this exchange in Ubuntu has been the most moving moment
> in my life because it has taken place with ostensibly white people who are
> actually, by their are own defining 'deeds' African in spirit and cosmology
> and thus Ubuntu is our common humanity. By the phrase 'in Ubuntu' what I am
> keeping in mind is a crucial distinction - this exchange that has taken
> place in this BERA list is Ubuntu, and is not a mere representation, or
> simulacrum of Ubuntu. Thus I can say - this BERA list is Ubuntu.
>
>
>
> When I subscribed I would not have imagined me saying this: but Barbara,
> Alan, and Pip (and everybody else who has not spoken) have made this
> possible. What has taken place here is a living demonstration of the
> standard of judgement of Ubuntu that is 'grandfamily', 'we~i and i as we.
>
>
>
> For permitting this everybody in this list deserves to be held in esteem for
> this is common humanity, acceptance, and inclusion working for good.
>
>
>
>
>
> Respect
>
> Yaakub Murray
>
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