Responding to the question: What are some appropriate standards of
judgement in our educational research?
JeKan, thanks for the question. I believe it’s a fundamentally important
one for an educator to be asking. I want to respond to what you and Jack
have written because the question makes me ask myself, what is appropriate
in the development of educational standards of judgement for the
educational processes I am involved in. Here are some ideas. I hope they
stimulate some debate.
First, I want to present my ideas from my position of being a Lifelong
Professor of Educational Research at Ningxia Teachers University in
China, because I feel that the formulation of what is ‘educational’ in the
processes of developing standards of judgement in relation to education,
is crucial.
Secondly, I am writing with an understanding of Lyotard’s (1984) idea that:
“The [postmodern] artist and the writer, are working without rules in
order to formulate the rules of what will have been done,” (p.81),
which I take to be a preferment of process over outcome.
Thirdly, I am taking this opportunity to respond to the criteria offered
by Furlough and Oancea (last retrieved on 8th October from
http://www.jackwhitehead.com/bera06/furoan.jpg)as indicators of quality in
education by outlining how, in my view, a linguistic list, however
rigorously arrived at, may not capture the qualities distinctly enough to
be helpful in developing educational processes. If one of the aims of
evaluation is improvement I am not sure how set criteria can fully allow
for some of the processes qualifying as educational.
First, I hold education to be open-ended and multi-dimensional,
constituting a social and personal response to the dialectical needs of
social and personal development. As a lifelong professor of educational
research, I see my task as twofold. In my professorial inaugural lecture
(Laidlaw, 2006 – see http://www.jackwhitehead.com/china/mlinaugural.htm) I
outlined that as a professor, I was responsible for professing something.
Telling something. However, I also stressed my belief that I am also
responsible (because my title contains the word ‘educational’) for the
development of something for the good of society and individuals and
groups within that society. I believe education distinguishes itself from
training, for example, by the degree to which individuals and groups
within the process are facilitated to reach potentials not necessarily
initially conceived within the original framework, but which will,
nevertheless, contribute to personal and/or social development. The
important idea here, I think, is the necessity of education being a
dynamic between at least two people. That education occurs when the people
involved in the processes are engaged in learning something of value – for
themselves and their society. The learner connects what is being learnt
with their inner landscape in such a way that they are empowered by the
knowledge and begin the process of being able to manage that empowerment.
This it would follow, for me, to perceive as most valid, those educational
standards of judgement, which are derived by the people engaged in the
processes themselves. In 2004 I gave the inaugural lecture (Laidlaw, 2004)
for China’s Experimental Centre for Educational Action Research in Foreign
Languages Teaching on standards of judgement in educational research and
said this about the process of people themselves devising their own
standards of judgement in education:
Let’s stop a moment and consider this. People making their own standards
of judgement about the work they are doing. How can this be? How can we do
that and still produce work, which is recognised to be of value in the
wider society? (p.8)
I believe this to be one of the greatest challenges facing education.
Facing it, finding ways of trying to resolve what may be unresolvable can
deepen the educational value of the processes. I believe education exists
within a dialectic and series of paradoxes. On the one hand, education is
often conducted through socially-accepted and endorsed institutions, with
a particular set of desired social outcomes; the schooling system would be
one such example. Those qualifying parameters, often written down on paper
as performance indicators, or examination results, or job-appraisals, or,
in England, League Tables, hold a unit together, to enable it to prescribe
its future journey, and develop the language to describe it to interest
groups and to control its development. These linguistic renderings of
experience to document have tremendous power. Her Majesty’s Inspectors
(HMI) in Britain, or in China, the Provincial or State Evaluators are the
arbiters of what qualifies a school as ‘good’, and their formulations are
often rendered as written text against a set of markers designated
as ‘correct’ by those in power. However, a tabulated list of ‘qualities’
in a list can look as if they describe something, but in reality, do not
capture what it is like to be in a particular classroom, or be taught by a
particular teacher, or comprehend the quality of what has been learnt to
an individual student and so on. I believe lists can confer a belief in
quality, without ever coming near to the qualities themselves as they are
experienced, reflected on, understood and used by those in the processes
of education under review, and which are, by their very nature,
developmental.
I also think the listing of qualities under the headings of criteria,
standards, judgements etc. that may give rise to a tick-list mentality,
which deems everything to be reducible to preconceived ideas. The logical
outcome of that, as I see it, could be that what cannot be similarly be
measured, may, in time be deemed insignificant and thus be overlooked.
Thus I like your idea, JeKan, of discernment, rather than standards, as
this suggests a greater dynamic involvement with the quality of the
processes.
A paradox here, though, is that working towards criteria for judgement is
in my experience a very fruitful and educational process (Laidlaw, 1994,
1996) because the collaboration towards standards of judgement which hold
both linguistic and inner, ontological meanings to those engaged in the
process, opens the door to innovation, ownership of processes and values
and the development of mutually-agreed qualities. The process itself is
what I would term educational.
Let me give an example. The example I have chosen seems to me particularly
relevant to your concern, JeKan, about racial privilege and hegemonies,
which may be operating when someone from one culture is in a leadership
position in another culture, regardless of whether this is consciously
desired by the ‘leader’. For the years between 2002 and 2006, Dean Tian
Fengjun and I and our colleagues at China’s Experimental Centre for
Educational Action Research in Foreign Languages Teaching at Ningxia
Teachers University have been specifically looking for what might
constitute Action Research with Chinese characteristics (see Li and
Laidlaw, 2006 ; Tian and Laidlaw 2005; ed. Tian and Laidlaw, 2006). We
don’t yet know precisely what Chinese characteristics might be in our
attempts to improve our practice as we understand better how to implement
China’s radical New Curriculum. This curriculum stands more traditional
concepts of teaching and learning on their head by insisting on the
facilitation of critical thinking skills, and the building of autonomous
learning strategies. This is in distinct contrast to the old curricula,
which demanded rote-learning and the regurgitation of processed material
by students, and the application of ‘model’ methodologies by teachers and
teacher-trainers. However, in the Centre we understand that the
formulation of such a phenomenon as Chinese characteristics itself may
offer us the framework by which we will empower learning, promote
sustainability in learning and reduce the likelihood of hegemony in terms
of the power-relations surrounding conceptual criteria of quality. An
extract from our article which focuses on a conversation between the
authors – myself and Li Peidong, an experienced lecturer at the AR Centre:
Moira Laidlaw: Instead of knowing the answers, I realized that I had to
let go of certain set beliefs about process and outcome that I had come to
China with. For this process of educational development to flourish, it
had to flourish in its own image. There is something in this new idea that
doesn’t at all contradict an original value I hold, however, and that’s
about not exerting undue influence on the people around me and diminishing
their power to make decisions about aspects of life, which directly
concern them.
Li Peidong: So AR might develop here in new ways. This individually
oriented form might change into more collaborative forms of AR. We might
have, for example, people researching together in pairs: one an
experienced teacher, and the other a novice. This mentoring might help us
support a Chinese structure. Although the enquiries we are conducting here
are useful, I do wonder sometimes about the emphasis on the individual. I
think there are ways for us to work in which we create a new synthesis out
of our understandings.
Moira Laidlaw: In developing Chinese characteristics in this process, we
might render the process sustainable. It seems to work all round. We want
educational improvements. We want durability. We want the process to fit.
We want people to be motivated. We want something new, to make this AR
Centre distinctive.
Li Peidong: And it will focus colleagues in working together to build
something powerful for China. Yes, this new curriculum and the work we’re
doing on its implementation may be one facet of Chinese characteristics.
Moira Laidlaw: You might be right. But it seems to me that an action
research with Chinese characteristics is a synergetic and creative
response to the differences between us all. That in doing this, I am
saying it is not about my insights. Only you can do this. I can’t know
what makes something Chinese and how that Chineseness can be harnessed
educationally. It devolves my power in the situation. (p.343)
And later:
Li Peidong: … We exist, you and I, as individuals and as members of a
group within a changing society. Your personal predisposition is from we
to I. Mine from I to we. It is a kind of yin-yang situation. Our living
contradictions in some senses mirror the present contradictions within our
educational system. The new curriculum seeks personal as well as social
development, growth and potential. You want that too, I know that. I want
that. Our AR with Chinese characteristics grasps the reality of the
dialectic, knowing it can’t point to both momentum and destination at the
same time.
Moira Laidlaw: A bit like a quantum mechanical view of the universe…
Li Peidong: Or like Lao-zi’s belief that we use bricks to build a house,
but it is the space within that makes it liveable. We have to hold the two
together as a unity, although they are opposites and can never meet.
That’s AR with Chinese characteristics.( p.344)
This expresses my (our) belief about the paradoxical nature of educational
development, and by implication the paradoxical problem of inaugurating
educational standards of judgement to augment the processes involved. To
evaluate the processes in any form other than the original form is itself
an act of re-construction of the experience itself as Eisner (1993)
alludes to in his AERA presidential speech. He was concerned that such
a ‘reconstruction’ may distort it. I believe he was right, and I would
place the listing of standards of judgement as open to this distortion. It
is this distortion that worries me.
If education is a dialectical process (Whitehead, 1993; McNiff, 1993),
then its standards of judgement need to be dialectical. They need to point
to what Li, in Li & Laidlaw (2006 above), expresses thus:
We have to hold the two together as a unity, although they are opposites
and can never meet (op. cit.).
The two, it seems to me, are the process and the result of the process (if
indeed they can be so divided), with the third, which is bigger than the
sum of its parts. This seems to me, therefore, to require a different
approach to the setting of standards, and why I am interested in the
research being done currently at Bath University by Jack Whitehead in his
insistence on multi-media forms of representation and with his work with
Alan Rayner on inclusionality; or the work of Branko Bognar in Croatia,
whose enquiry into how he might help to facilitate AR with colleagues
working with school students infulenced a ten-year old student, Anica, in
being able to account for her own educational processes using standards of
judgement she had developed herself in the course of her research enquiry
into how she might improve her values as a member of her own family. The
multi-media forms of representation (see Whitehead 2006 :
http://www.nipissingu.ca/oar/new_issue-V821E.htm ), the organic and
developmental nature of inclusionality (Rayner, 2005) and Branko Bognar’s
video footage and explanation of the young student, Anica’s work, are
examples of the kind of developmental standards of judgement, which might
help us better to understand – and thus improve – our processes of
education. The standards they are seeking and refining in process become
the educational power of their work. (You can find more details about this
work as well in Whitehead, 2006). See also Tian and Laidlaw’s article at
AR Expeditions in which we discuss this idea.
So, let’s come back to the criteria proposed by Furlong and Oancea for
applied and practice-based research quality, by asking how the criteria
listed can be applied educationally, if this response to your question,
JeKan, is a reasonable assertion of what education might be. If education
is dynamic, multidimensional and developmental, if it is rooted in
ontology and constructed formally and informally to improve something,
then how can a flat measuring-stick be used to judge it? Let’s look at the
criteria in a bit more detail. Words like: ‘plausibility’ under ‘Capacity
Development and Value for People’ mean what? I know what the semantic
meanings are, but I don’t understand the life-energy behind those
descriptors in any way, which would enable me to use them as guidelines
for quality. They are inert tools, not living tools. I own no part of
them. They are not the summation of shared experiences. They are words on
a page.
I am not for one moment suggesting that the people using these kinds of
criteria are attempting to create a hegemony, but they are certainly
working from within one. My understanding of a hegemony is that the
rationality survives by a set of rules which become internalized and
reified, and taken for granted as correct. Anyone challenging those rules
can be subject to forms of intimidation and negative judgements. The
assumption being made by the criteria above is that (written) criteria on
their own are able to capture full meanings. This assumption affects not
only processes, but I believe also stymies people’s ability to work from
within a dialectic between process and outcome, and working within this
dialectic answers the question of finding valid criteria for individuals
and society at the same time, as well as deepening the learning associated
with the process. Our job as educators, surely, is to strip away linear
parameters, and open our eyes to the potential clarities we might find, if
we only seek together, the meanings in multidimensional realities and
representations we want to create from our lives and productive work.
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