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Jack, hello! A quick point to start. I wonder about the part of the question in which you write: 'that dymanically include us' strikes me as restrictive. I think we also create the parameters that become/are our contexts too.I see the word dynamic, but it only seems to be working one way. And I don't think that's how you're actually meaning it, but do correct me if I've misunderstood something. OK, now to more pressing matters! You wrote: ... have contributed to the generation of a knowledge-base of practitioner- researchers that has been legitimated in the Academy and has established a new epistemology for educational knowledge. I think that's undoubtedly true. It's true in the sense that going back some years now, living theory and other approaches to educational knowledge have accumulated momentum and gained legitimacy in the Academy. This is an incontrovertible fact - one look at: http://people.bath.ac.uk/edsajw/living.shtml should be enough to see how a collection of such rigour (Winter, 1989) takes its place in the annals of educational research knowledge and theory and cannot reasonably be gainsaid. I sense, however, you're looking for a different kind of enquiring response than that. Showing influence is such a wily, slippery playmate - here now and gone tomorrow. Showing influence has to contend with circumstances, personalities, systemic influences, politics, history, geography, faiths, religions, gender, adult/child, oh and so on and so on.And so on! If we take the stance that we are individuals - and I see you are using i- we not I, which knowing you is highly significant - but for argument's sake, if we take that stance of individualism, then the permutations of influences upon us before we seek to influence - are incaluable. If we take the stance that we are conjoined as human beings and as aspects of the cosmos all together, then again the influences are still beyond our scope to include in what we present of ourselves and our work and our contexts and so on. So, I suppose I'm saying that influence becomes what we can render perceptible in some way, both within the processes of development and then at one step removed as we present it to others.Which is why, I believe, we (I mean people who develop their own living theories) concentrate on values, because such a concentration highlights those aspects of the complexities that otherwise remain invisible (imperceptible is perhaps a better word).It also explains the contending schools of representation (Eisner, 1993) with those wishing to provide an evidential basis for any necessary claims about having 'improved' something (McNiff & Whitehead, 2006). And these values are perhaps what Alan is writing about in terms of the flow of energies, which unite i with we. I think the theses you have pointed to show how individuals have come to know their influence and to improve the quality of it through their living standards of judgement (values), and I'm thinking of Marion Naidoo's thesis: 'I am because we are: (a never-ending story):The emergence of a living theory of inclusional and responsive practice,' which contains a DVD of her practice, and was admissable as evidence. To a lesser extent, I see Pat D'Arcy's 1998 thesis in which she wrote about engaged and appreciative responses, which, in short, encourage feedback in ways that connect author and respondent in a seamless web of creativit - to be along the lines we are talking about here. It all seems to me to be leading towards an integration of values,with actions and philosophies in order to enable a more dynamic interaction with the life-force, in ways that stimulate creativity and originality (ironically two of the standards levied by the Academy for Ph.D. theses). I am beginning to understand conceptually - something I was much quicker at emotionally and spiritually - the confluence between the work you're doing in Bath with living theorising and inclusionality. I think, whether consciously or not, your work has been developing towards confluence rather than divergence. I think you're a connecter, rather than an anatomist. You ask the question, how can i~we... and I wish you'd asked the question, how do I...because I think I understand quite a lot about how you do what you do as, or example, a supervisor for these theses you quote from. You have the capacity to sense the future, much, I suspect with the same uncanny power that a salmon has in tracing its route to its spawning place.It's the salmon's connection with the life-force. That's not a flippant point. It's simply what I've seen of you over nearly twenty years. No, not as a salmon, Jack. Pay attention! You have this really quite uncanny ability to enter into the insights of others and help them find their life-force, their way of doing it, creatively and originally, to influence something for the good in their lives and the lives of others. That's one of the things that these theses attest to. But this isn't about saying how brilliantly you supervise, because that doesn't really get us to the how. Or does it? Isn't real-education (as we might term, real-ale) - in other words antithetical to training - in the ways that we talk about it anyway (see the 'we' above), that enabling of human knowledge into ways of enfranchising others, to promote the vulnerable into greater freedom, to equip our young people (and all of us throughout life) to think for themselves, to rejoice in the gift of life and to see what they can bring to it and transform it generatively for the good of themselves and others? If that is the case, then explaining our educational influences in learning to improve our educational influences as practitioner researchers should perhaps become at the same time a greater immersion in what it is that motivates us, i.e. our values. There is, of course, no single or simple answer to your question. Our lives are not singularities (at least I don't see them as that) but impinge, I believe - and I think, Alan (Rayner) you're saying the same - on everything else. I believe that in communities there is hope to understand more of what it is that generates us and sustains us and enables us to improve our practical values. If we seek freedom, then we need to live in freedom, because in my understanding it is only ourselves we can change. As Gandhi said. hence, I suppose your use of the word 'influence', rather than 'change'.I guess we can only explain our influences by walking the talk. Explanation isn't a discrete aspect of a process, is it? As we seek to improve our educational influences within the contexts we're working in, as I remember Jean (MnNiff) saying once, the way to freedom is freedom itself. I'd like to illustrate this with a short aside into my time in China in which i~we has evolved quite differently from our ways in the West. I became starkly aware during my time in China that not only was I contending (a harsh word, but it felt so hard at first) with differences between a sense of community and a sense of a personal I (there seemed little sense of it in China, which really threw me at times), but the power/knowledge one was incalculably large for someone so steeped in Western democracy as I was. When I asked a junior colleague a question she (usually) would dart her eyes to the authority figure in the room (if there was one) and then give her answer. I had no real way of knowing what was actually going on in those quick glances but it wasn't something I had been aware of in England. Thus understanding (let alone explaining) my educational influences in such a context was incredibly difficult. My standpoint was skewed for a start - culturally, historically, religiously, linguistically, economically, racially: each aspect vie-ing for a space in my deliberations until I sometimes felt I knew nothing.How coudl I promote democracy, for example, or freedom, in such a context? What did freedom mean? Where could we find a confluence? I think that's where the notion of Action Research with Chinese characteristics came in - and tallies with Pip's earlier discussion with RI about indigenous ways of knowing. I believe I learned, however, how crucial to understanding anything - again let alone explaining - evolved within community. It doesn't solve the bias, the assumptions and so on that are honed in communities, but it gives us scope to try and to try again. It was only when I first mooted the idea of AR with Chinese Characteristics, I realised that this could be potential a source of freedom rather than shackling their insights and experiences to something grafted on. So, and I apologise for the length of this - but I think as I write - I abhore planning as you know, Jack! I feel any answers we're going to get, anything valuable that we will learn will come from communities in which we have a stake, in which belonging to (although I'm not quite happy with that word) offers us greater freedom (and responsibilities). Jack, those theses didn't happen jsut between you and the Ph.D. colleague - I know you know this, but the point needs to be made, I feel. These theses grew as the community grew - just as values grow as we grow. Just as cells grow. How can we explain.... and so on. We're doing it. In communities, because we are both ourselves and each other on so many profound levels. If we take the path of rigid individualism, then we are left with the universe someone like Richard Dawkins describes (The God Delusion, 2006) - don't get me wrong, I LOVE his work because he makes me think, but I don't want to live in his deterministic universe and I shan't! To me 2 + 2 sometimes, just sometimes, makes 5. When I look at a sunset, say, or see a child delighting in something or a baby laughing - to me that latter example is the most glorious sound in the universe. If someone tells me that the baby is copying, finding ways to attract attention, or whatever other deterministic view of baby-development - I realise they are all true, but they are not the whole truth. I am motivated by particular values, like love, compassion, freedom, democracy - they move my being into a better place. They move me and change me and by fully engaging with such values in the world - in community, everything subtly changes. And I embrace the fact that human beings have a capacity to perceive many forms of knowledge. All simultaneously of value. How can i~we improve our educational influences... By relishing the joys and responsibilities of freedom, within communities for the benefit of communities and individuals.And it seems to me that you're doing that. You, refers to you, Jack; but it also refers to the Bath Action Research communities and to so many other communities in the world dedicated to those values. O.K., it's getting on and I feel I have exhausted anything useful to say. I may return to these letters again tomorrow. It's been a pleasure, Jack. Love from,