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Dearest List members, I have had great pleasure reading these postings, and regret not being able to take part. My mind is too slow, and I am constantly diverting myself into doing rather than reflecting. To those who may not recognise my name - hallo - I am a recent postgraduate student and Jack was my supervisor at Bath. But I just wanted to share a bit of my history with this List. 13 December is an important anniversary, and marked a new begining in my life. 22 years ago I came clear of the prescription drugs to which I had been addicted for the previous 15 years. I am not sure why I am anouncing this now - something to do with educational influence triggered the conjunction of memories. Within 3 weeks of being 'clean' I took up meditation, and this practice has been the source of my capacity for learning since then. For me, it is a loving educational relation , between peers, between teacher and student, or inwardly in spiritual practice, that enables my learning. The inclusional flowing relation crossing between boundaries becomes an educational influence, opens my mind, opens my eyes to see what I did not see before, creates confidence to grasp the new. Seeking to establish ways of judging educational influence across cultural boundaries - doesn't that involve representing what it means to be human in ways that will be inevitably culturally specific unless there is also a shared sense of community as well as a shared language? Wasn't this demonstrated in the video clip of Yacub and Jack, as well as in the November postings to this list when the air was thick with the resonance of shared feeling and thinking across national, racial, gendered, religious boundaries. Perhaps judgements about educational influence arise by finding ways to describe the qualities of particular relations which might sometimes be enacted and therefore evidenced (but not always) in new thinking and joint action - demonstrated on this List by joint submissions to the BERA conference perhaps? With love, Eleanor