Dear Jack,
Thank you very much for the mail!! It is very interesting for my work on AR on my own classroom :teaching AR and Curriculum Development !! I am trying to find the theory on the learnning activities I applied from a learnning plan and the reflexions my Pregraduate students teachers send me through FACEBOOK , also taking my own reflexions from my Diary and a final conversation of the students as a focus group at the end of the course. Also, I have their work done during the semester. With all these I am in the situation of trying to develop my own living theory of what went own during the encounters and what we cocreated,and what we learned !!
So I am trying each encounter analisis to find out what theory develops !!! Is this wright according to the Living Theory Paradigm or does it look too positivistic ??? I feel many doubsts, I must say, as I see each encounter as a thesis to develop .However, I will try !!
On the other hand we are now one month on a strike !! All the Universityes are now on the same situation. Yes, it is dangerous,some teachers and students are on a hungry strike and there is no an answer from the government so far. The claim is that in addition to better salaryes, students scholarships, etc., to upgrade University Education quality and that means more investment !!
Again thank you and take care, greetings, g.

Date: Mon, 10 Jun 2013 15:14:40 +0100
From: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Researching Our Own Practice
To: [log in to unmask]

Dear Geisha - very good to hear from you. I did enjoy our meeting at the inaugural conference of ARNA in San Francisco in May.

Part of your e-mail was cut off about your experience of living and researching in Venezuela at the moment. I do hope that you will complete it for us (see your note below).

I put my notes for the ARNA workshop on What could the Action Research Network of the Americas contribute to and learn from the learning of others?

at http://www.actionresearch.net/writings/aera13/jwarnawork2013.pdf

and hope that they are of interest to participants in the seminar.

Geisha - I've been hoping that you will share your action research with the e-seminar because of the significance of sustaining your values in a context of serious conflict.

You ask about developing theory from practice. This isn't an easy question to answer because many practitioners and researchers like myself were schooled in schools and universities to think of theory as:

A set of determinate relations between a set of variables in terms of which a fairly extensive set of empirically verifiable regularities could be explained.

These theories were always presented in abstract generalities that could be applied to explain particular cases.

Having understood this kind of knowledge from my first degree in the physical sciences and the knowledge from disciplines of education such as the philosophy, psychology, sociology and history of education, from my study of educational theory, I came to see in 1971, from reflections of my educational influences with my pupils in my science classes, that this kind of theory/knowledge could not generate adequate and valid explanations of my educational influence with my pupils. Hence I coined the phase 'living educational theories' to mean the explanations that individuals produced to explain their educational influences in their own learning, in the learning of others and in the learning of the social formations in which we live, work and research.

You can access one of my papers, published in 2009 in Action Research, on this approach to theory generation at:

http://www.actionresearch.net/writings/aera13/jwarnawork2013.pdf . There are other papers on this at:

http://www.actionresearch.net/writings/writing.shtml

I'm hoping that you will share your stories of your learning as you explore (with safety and prudence) the implications of living values that carry hope for the future of humanity, as fully as possible, within your present context.

Love Jack.

On 7 Jun 2013, at 20:03, geishac wrote:

Hi!,
Nice to hear this beautiful news.Congratulations.I wanted to write to you in relation to the excelent discussion at ARNA S on how to develop theory from practice.Please send me information I could read!
Also I wanted to share what we are living in Venezuela at themomment .We are on a University Strike for