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Hello Yakub and All,


I know you may have signed off, but I've copied you
in!

There are a couple of points I wish to make about your
last posting:

I feel it's important to clarify BERA's role, in 
responding to your question about BERA
objectives.......

1.  Here is a quote from the SIG's statement:
DESCRIPTION
"This SIG focuses upon issues arising from carrying
out , supporting others in carrying out , and
theorising about , practitioner research. We promote
the publication and dissemination of practitioner
research studies and methodological approaches to
practitioner research, bring together those with a
special interest in all  those (closely
related)methodologies in which research is an integral
part of practice: e.g. action research , teacher
research, evidence -based practice, research into
personal and professional change, and research in the
developmental/critical paradigm. Practice is very
broadly defined as any form of professional work or
community activity or individual endeavour in which
action is informed by values, belief an experience.
Research in this context is defined as any form of
systematic enquiry whose design, method, analysis and
interpretation are open to peer review."
AIMS
"The SIG contributes to the generation of theory,
knowledge and expertise about practitioner research
and the exploration of different purposes and
conceptualisations of 'practitioner research'. We
provide 'critical friendship' to those engaged in
practitioner research with the intention , inter alia,
of establishing broadly agreed 'fitness for purpose'
quality criteria for such research . In addition we
promote links between practitioner research,academic
research and local and national decision-making. The
SIG plays a role in the the development of national
policies for practitioner research through active
engagement with policy makers and bodies that have a
leadership role in practitioner research"

2.  Secondly the e-seminar organised by Jack has been
promoting these BERA aims in general terms and more
specifically been addressing "standards of judgement
in relation to the RAE criteria".
Living Theory and Self-Study have been the
pre-dominant emphasis of the e-seminar due to Jack's
world-leading expertise in this approach. 
However many other approaches to practitioner research
are practised by SIG members, and have been reflected
in the postings from time-to-time. e.g. my own
understanding is more akin to Elliott and Somekh than
to the Bath network.
My interest in action-research  has arisen out of
practical professional problems and issues in my work
as a classroom teacher, curriculum developer, and
leader in secondary schools, and more recently as an
advisor and support tutor in ITT, and as an adult
education tutor of watercolours.
The heart of my enquiry has not been self-study or
Living Theory, but more focused on  improving pupils'
and students' learning, promoting staff development,
and in addressing management and leadership issues in
a more inclusive and human way.(for me relating
insights from my Christian faith to professional
practise). Far from being only focused on "I" or local
issues,  my action research has taken on a much wider
circle of concern and effects e.g. through
publication, and work with a major moral education
project in post-communist Slovakia, and more recently
on relating theology to curriculum development in
China.

Here's wishing you real 'eirene', 'peace', 'shalom',
'salaam'

Brian 



--- Paul Murray <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> I have some questions and then I'll go and leave
> your 'locality' in peace
> (piece) - dismiss me as the 'overly deterministic'
> Muslim terrorist. 
> 
> But even Muslims have compassion, loving charity,
> care of the present and
> future, and responsibility and the questions below
> represent mine, and my
> expression of Said's speaking truth to the power of
> this BERA list:  
> 
>  
> 
> How can practitioner-research that has as its aim
> individual and social
> transformation qualify as world class research when
> it focuses only on the
> local experience of 'I' distracted from analyses of
> the larger picture of
> the social, economic, political and militaristic new
> world order?  
> 
>  
> 
> How can I sustain a claim with my Masters students
> that the
> practitioner-research on this list is world class
> when it only seems to want
> to take into account the local space in which 'I' is
> relationally situated
> with other without critically accounting for the
> dynamic relationship in
> which the local is mediated by the non-local global
> world that I refer to
> here for my purpose as social, and in which power
> relations flow, as
> Foucault points out? 
> 
>  
> 
> How can reflexive work on the self that is
> particular and local (and does
> not account for its social non-local situation)
> counter the reasonable
> critique that its distraction from the non-local
> social structures in the
> world that mediate local lived experience renders it
> partially helpful and
> impartially unhelpful?  [Bearing in mind my premise
> that
> practitioner-research is seeking individual and
> social transformation, and
> not individual transformation alone - I could be
> mistaken in this premise.
> What are the BERA objectives for
> practitioner-research?)
> 
>  
> 
> How can local chattering, however sweet, about love,
> relational experience,
> and uniquely personal knowing convince academic
> cynics and critical realists
> that such local chattering is a vital discourse for
> shining heuristic light
> on social transformation? (I'm using discourse here
> in its Foucauldian
> relationship with power and knowledge)
> 
>  
> 
> How can reflexive research and personal theory
> become more inclusional of
> propositional analyses and theories without
> expressing paranoia about the
> 'colonizing' nature of propositional theories that
> seems to get in the way
> of a reasonable consideration of the value of
> propositional analyses for the
> scholarship of getting to grips with enduring social
> patterns of oppression?
> 
> 
>  
> 
> How can practitioner-research craft 'good knowledge'
> (after Saukko, 2003)
> that is truthful, self-reflexive, and polyvocal
> (i.e. has dialogic validity)
> while embracing the importance of analyses of the
> global and social world
> for understanding the very quality and nature of
> truthfulness,
> self-reflexivity, and polyvocality that is being
> claimed in first and second
> person 'local' accounts? 
> 
>  
> 
> How can practitioner-research achieve world class
> status through
> demonstrating inclusionality of the esoteric (inner,
> 'in here', local) and
> the exoteric (outer, 'out here', non-local) in
> research and knowledge
> crafting?  
> 
>  
> 
> Why is it that people who craft 'local theory'
> appear to uncritically eschew
> the very reasonable idea that the way we describe
> the 'local' is influenced
> by the way 'non-local' dynamics impact our life
> chances and choices at the
> intersections of economics, politics and state
> violence? (after Joy James)
> 
>  
> 
> Why has my critical interrogation from a perspective
> of difference in this
> list that generates the crucial dynamic of
> disagreement been greeted with
> 'sorry' by Eleanor as if this response is
> intellectually and relationally
> sufficient? 
> 
>  
> 
> I don't own these questions, so please don't throw
> them back at me.  These
> are questions that I have generated from my local
> awareness of a non-local
> world. I bring these non-local questions into a
> particular 'habitus'. You
> don't have to co-habit them but I wouldn't inhibit
> them, either.  
> 
>  
> 
>  
> 
> These questions could be helpful for a consideration
> of what it takes to
> achieve the recognition that what is being generated
> in this
> practitioner-research list can be counted - by those
> with the clout to count
> in the academy and public policy circles - as world
> class research deserving
> of funding. 
> 
>  
> 
> Let's first-off name all of those
> practitioner-researchers who produce
> 'local accounts' distracted from non-local dynamics
> who are recognised,
> universally within the non-local academy as 'world
> class' researchers. As
> this is not my field, I'm out of my depth here.
> 
>  
> 
> But I can have a go at naming those in educational
> research who report
> brilliantly on the 'non-local' - while showing their
> local colours so to
> speak - and who are also considered to be world
> class educational
> researchers in the global academy because of the
> educative influence and
> impress of their practice upon others:
> 
>  
> 
> Stephen Rowland, Mike Cole, Peter McLaren, Patti
> Lather, Don Macedo, Paula
> Allman, Gloria Anzaldua, Basil Bernstein, Richard
> Peters, John Dewey, Paulo
> Freire, Seyla Benhabib, Edward Said,  Mark Olssen,
> Linda Tuhiwai-Smith,
> Gloria Ladson-Billings, bell hooks, Carlos Torres,
> Michael Apple, Henry
> Giroux, Geoff Whitty, Glen Rikowski (take a look at
> Glen's humanistic
> website for evidence of the local in his non-local
> theorizing), Amartya Sen,
> Kwame A. Appiah, Cornel West,  Perry Anderson, Dave
> Hill, Terry Eagleton
> (who is not usually considered an educational
> theorists but who has written
> most impressively about how the dynamics of the
> non-local impact on the
> local conditions of the teacher in British higher
> education), Joe Kincheloe,
> Doug Kellner (who is similar in his intellectual
> project to Eagleton, and
> has an impact on those of us who work in HE) and
> Jack 
=== message truncated ===


Brian E. Wakeman
Education adviser
Dunstable
Beds