From: Practitioner-Researcher [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
On Behalf Of Jean McNiff
Sent: Saturday, December 18, 2010 12:20 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: How do i~we explain our educational influences in learning to improve our educational influences as practitioner-researchers within the social and other formations that dynamically include us?
Dear Brian,
It’s good to hear you. I have only just seen your email today from Maria’s response to you – for some reason I seem
to have only intermittent access to the list-serve and I must check it out – so here I am emerging from the brackets.
I agree with you that it is important to focus on the social situation we find ourselves in. I think many of us do this
consistently. I try to do this wherever I work, whether in Israel, China, Ireland, the UK, Iceland, Qatar, Bahrain, and elsewhere.
A main context for me is South Africa. I have been working in South Africa for six or seven years now, with a range
of institutions, including schools and universities, and have done lecture tours and presentations around the country; and some time back I negotiated also for Jack to visit the country, on one of these lecture tours. It was on that visit that we worked with
teachers, managers and medics (very useful as I got bitten by mini-spiders and came up in a rash), and also met Joan Conolly, who is proving to be so influential in the region; and all strength to her as she creates opportunities for others to shine.
As part of the work in South Africa I worked with groups of teachers in Khayelitsha, a massive township near Cape Town.
I have written about this story many times – you can see some of the writings at
http://www.jeanmcniff.com/items.asp?id=1 and
http://www.jeanmcniff.com/items.asp?id=16; and you can see a picture of the teachers and myself on the moving headline banner of the website. The experience was, in my understanding, educational for the
teachers and myself, as we learned together about ourselves as Other, within a context of all trying to help one another influence the social situations we were in, in different ways. We were trying to influence the learning situation we were occupying with
one another, as we learned together, initially, how to tolerate one another, and later, how to respect and love one another.
And we also learned how to influence the social contexts in which we worked; the teachers tried to influence policy
makers and school managers to understand learners better; they tried to engage the students more in their own learning; and they tried to encourage people in their urban settings how to live together peaceably. I remember well one colleague saying to me, ‘I
would like to get them to stop killing each other.’
For my part, I was trying to influence the UK accrediting institution to support the initiative; many times the sustainability
of work was threatened, and I had to engage seriously with the politics of higher education to find ways to keep the programme going. It did keep going, and was successful. Ten teachers got their masters degrees, teachers who did not stand a chance before
of getting onto a higher degree programme.
High points were when two teachers went to AERA to present their papers – see
http://www.jeanmcniff.com/kayelitsha.asp; and when we held an end-of-programme conference – see
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LIhn5WZJmr8 and
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2HzXNwsmOI&feature=related – which the teachers planned and delivered, within the supportive context of sympathetic South African institutions who knew
what we were doing and thought it was good. This entire masters degree took as its epistemological basis the key idea of creating understanding and knowledge of oneself and one’s practice, inasmuch as ‘I’ am ‘my practice’. This was not done in a self-centred
way – if anything, it was the opposite; it was hard emotional, intellectual and physical work. I remember how I sat on the plane after the first study session, saying, ‘I am never going back!’, and yet I did go back.
The teachers are now exercising profound influence in their social contexts. Because of their masters degrees, as well
as their improved self-confidence and capacity, all have been promoted in their workplaces, and all are having significant influence in their different work settings. There is a large database around this; and virtually the entire programme is on video. It
is my own fault that I have not made this database more public: lack of time mainly, although some of it is on my website, and in books and papers written for South African journals – see the pdfs below.
However, the present correspondence now motivates me to make the database more public, and show how, with support and
encouragement to consider what is meaningful to themselves and how they can influence their own social contexts, the teachers working individually and collectively really are exercising considerable agency for social change.
On having his masters degree awarded, one of the teachers wrote to me saying: ‘We are now people among other people.’
It took me a long time to work out what he meant by this, but those words are now among the most meaningful of my life. I will continue to focus on how I can encourage people to develop the same kind of understanding, that we are people among other people.
The visit to Nigeria will, I trust (and if it happens), develop the work initiated in South Africa. I hope Jack and
I, working together and with others, can develop ideas and encourage others to see that we can all create our lives as we wish and not as other people would wish for us.
I am not an active participant on this list-serve, mainly because I do not have time to participate; but I read what
I can and I know what I would like to read. I would like to read the real-life stories of people around the world who, aware that they are in vulnerable yet powerful positions to initiate processes of social change, actually did so, and continue to do so.
I am a firm believer in the power of theory, but I would also like to read the stories in which the theory is embedded and through which the theory is generated. I would like to read those stories, because I think it is through sharing our stories, and theorising
our practices in a narrative form, that we can find strength from one another and learn better how to work together for everyone’s benefit.
Best wishes,
Jean
From: Practitioner-Researcher on behalf of Brian
wakeman
Sent: Fri 17/12/2010 10:55
Subject: Re: How do i~we explain our educational
influences in learning to improve our educational influences as practitioner-researchers within the social and other formations that dynamically include us?
Hello Jack,(and Jean),
I've just been reading Michael Buerk's 'The Road Taken', 2004, London, Hutchinson, and blogging elsewhere about the researcher
as journalist, and 'narrative enquiry'.
When I recall the awful events of the famine in Ethiopia and at Korem in particular, and the impact of Buerk's film report creating
a wave of compassion I feel it is not so much the "I" of educational influences, but the "it" of the situation that is prior in importance; not so much the "me" and "my" but the "us" and "them", real change that should be the focus.
Of course Korem, Band Aid and the like seem lost in history now, but Martin Bell "In Harm's Way" (1995. London. Penguin. Last
month's reading ) reminded me that the unspeakable events of Nazi Germany were repeated in Bosnia, and even now in Iraq thousands of Christian families are been driven out of their homes in a new ethnic (religious) cleansing, according to Barnabus reports.
All the above may seem over dramatic, ................
so in classrooms my particular action-research in HE can be focused in 'my' educational influences on trainee teachers, and
'my' impact on their teaching and students' learning, or it can be on "their" learning with them, on "developments in teaching" rather than on "Brian" and his influences.
The urgency for interventions has not diminished, and as time passes I wonder if my attention would not be better directed
toward actions that are motivated by 'agape' and bring about human flourishing, rather than being centred in the "I".
I only know what I read about Africa, having no current direct experience.... but is it possible with this wonderful opportunity
for you and Jean to only slightly adjust the focus of your input to transmitting understanding and skills for local people to research, and plan interventions that will make a difference to lives and learning: the "it", the "we", the "us", the "them", rather
than the prime focus on the "I"?
Are the priorities "me" and "my", the "I", or rather situations, the quality of learning, life chances?
It's only a minute shift, but maybe I have misunderstood your emphasis and preoccupation?
As ever thank you for the help and inspiration from you both.
Peace at this Advent season,
Brian