Hello, all,

Very aware that I am just about squeezing into Jack's deadline for 
submissions for the first phase of this seminar, here is my account.

I have been trying to offer explanations for my educational influence 
in my own learning for some years. You can find many of these 
explanations on my website, www.jeanmcniff.com You can also see the 
explanations I offer for what I hope is my educational influence in the 
learning of others. The data that I produce for this hopeful claim that 
I am influencing others' learning is in the accounts that people have 
put on the website. You can read the dissertations of people in 
Ireland, whose masters studies I have supported – see 
http://www.jeanmcniff.com/reports.html I also hope that what I have 
just called data can in fact be seen as evidence, because I can clearly 
relate the accounts that people have produced to the values that inform 
my work. By making this link, as Jack suggests throughout his writings 
of recent years, I can show how my values have come to act as my living 
standards of judgement as I systematically try to account for myself in 
terms of what I learn and do as I try to improve my work.

I think a striking element of the dissertations and other stories on 
the website are that they are stories of research. I encourage all the 
people I work with to make a clear distinction between stories of 
activities and stories of research. While research itself is of course 
a kind of activity, it is also the kind that generates evidence in 
support of testing a claim to knowledge. The stories you can read 
contain evidence which is linked to the authors' own articulated 
standards of judgement.

In the last few years the focus of my work has shifted, from supporting 
the professional education of teachers to supporting the professional 
education of higher education academic staffs. I still work with 
teachers, for example at the University of Limerick, where I support 
teachers' doctoral studies, and I work with other education agencies in 
Ireland in developing professional learning in workplaces. I also work 
with academic staff at St Mary's University College, London and the 
Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University in South Africa. A St Mary's 
colleague, Jane Renowden, has today sent a preliminary research report 
to an e-network that has been developed by colleagues in Ireland, 
London and South Africa. Yu can access Jane's report at 
http://www.jackwhitehead.com/monday/Jane.pdf  Next week I visit with 
colleagues at NMMU. Part of that visit will be to work with three other 
colleagues on our small 'Interrogating our colour' project. We are four 
researchers, all of different colours and different ethnic origins, and 
we are interested in how we can dismantle the ideas and practices that 
deliberately perpetuate discrimination, oppression and colonisation by 
using categories such as race, colour, ethnicity, gender and religion 
as the grounds for the colonisation. Like Pip, we do not believe that 
we are in a 'post' phase at all. We are there, and potentially 
perpetuating it ourselves. If we are to make suggestions about how and 
why other people's colonial practices should be dismantled, we have to 
begin with our own. I am hopeful that this kind of work, and also the 
work with teachers and university staffs, will contribute to what Jack 
calls the transformation of the social formations of the teaching 
profession and higher education, and also contribute to discussions 
about how social formations currently caught in the grip of normative 
imperialistic discourses can find ways of rethinking their positions 
and deciding to change their ways for the good of all.

Thanks for reading this, and best wishes to all,

Jean