Dear Andrew, Alan, Alon, Branko, Brian,Chris, Harriet, Jack, Jean, Je Kan,
Kevin, Pip-Bruce, Rachel, Sarah, Yaqub-Paul and all who registered for the
e-seminar
The timetable for the BERA e-symposium 16 May – 23 July 2005 has now reached
its midway point where the actual review process starts. Each of you named
above has responded to Jack's original invitation ". . . to a discussion on
the contributions of our living educational theories and our evidence of our
educational influences in our own learning and to the future of educational
research . . ." with a further invitation ". . . to let each other know
where our educational theories can be accessed and where we can see evidence
of our educational influences in our own learning, the learning of others
and in the learning and education of social formations." (See
http://www.bath.ac.uk/~edsajw/monday/pmbera05int.html for full extracts.)
Your responses now constitute the JISCMAIL e-seminar archive and this can be
added to as the seminar proceeds.
INITIALLY . . . Jack called on me to start the review process by focussing
on the theme of the e-seminar i.e. 'The nature of educational theories: what
counts as evidence of educational influences in learning?' The idea was for
me to revisit my BERA 2000 review (see
http://www.bath.ac.uk/~edsajw/values/pmreview.doc) on 'Educational Action
Research within Teaching as a Research-based Profession' to help us to
clarify the standards of judgement we use in appraising our educational
theories and our claims to have educational influence. A number of headings
emerged from that revisitation, including Respect for evidence, The nature
of evidence, The logic of question and answer, An aesthetically engaged and
appreciative response, Taste, and Thymos. (Extracts from the 2000 review
discussing each of these points may be seen at
http://www.bath.ac.uk/~edsajw/monday/pmcritbera00.html)
HOWEVER . . . It has never been my intention to construct a set of standards
of judgement and to then hold the current content of the JISCMAIL archive up
against them. The journal Action Research, in its 'Editorial vision on
quality work for Action Research' for reviewers, notes that: ". . . we need
our concern for quality to move from 'policing' to stimulating dialogue [and
consequently] we would urge authors to be explicit about which criteria they
judge to be most significant for their work and the issues they have chosen
to explore . . . " (see
http://www.bath.ac.uk/~edsajw/monday/pmeditvision.html for the full article.)
AND SO . . . Last Friday (16 June) Jack and I revisited all of the above
points and concluded that the most appropriate way of meeting the aims of
the e-seminar would be to carry out the review through the agency of a
public conversation, initially between the two of us. Our intention is to
open the review process by discussing (via JISCMAIL) where we think the
archive points to evidence of educational influences in action and where we
think educational theory has been shown to emerge from those influences. The
hope is that, using BERA 2000 as our starting point, appropriate standards
of judgement will emerge as living forms in the course of our dialogue. If
Jack and I are able to initiate the outline of a dialectical form of
appraisal, then the ultimate hope is that each of you will find an
appropriate moment to join the discourse – until together we constitute a
dialogical community whose internal process embodies those standards of
judgement so necessary to give our activities the title of 'Educational
Research'.
Peter Mellett 18 June 2005
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