Dear Jack and everyone
In response to your invitation to:
> share your understandings of differences between national and
> international standards of practice/judgment in Australia. I think this
> will help to move on our conversations and to clarify differences
> between world leading, internationally excellent, internationally
> recognised and nationally recognised research in relation to
> originality, significance and rigour in educational
> practitioner-research.
Thank you for making this invitation - and I fear that my response is going
to be a sad tale - I welcome anyone who is familiar with the scene here in
Australia to contradict me - I am speaking from a very isolated position -
which is part of the problems that I address here. I can only approach your
question regarding "educational practitioner-research" in terms of
participatory practice as I understand it - a broad church of practices that
embrace action research, action learning, collaborative inquiry and
participatory evaluation etc... I hope that this is a close enough "fit" for
what I am about to say to be meaningful to this network.
I am on the executive of the Action Learning and Action Research Process
Management Association (this is how I know Pip) and have been - one way or
another - since the late '90's - so I have some perspective on the national
scene ... But that organisation too struggles and is largely isolated from
practitioners and the organisations that use participatory practices such as
they are. I have been working as a freelance participatory practitioner in
Australia since 1990 - I studied social ecology at university, learned about
action learning and action research, and used these methods, which later
also developed into participatory evaluation, to work in public sector
contracts addressing social and environmental issues.
I am going to discuss this matter of national standards in terms of context
- there are no national standards that I am aware of - action research for
example has to fit within the same research criteria as any other form of
research when it comes to government funded research, accredited
publications or tertiary qualifications. This too is part of the larger
contextual problem as I see it... Participatory evaluation is discussed in
the Australasian Evaluation Society, and enjoyed some popularity in early
2000's but seems to have lost its "flavour of the month" status since then.
There are government and uni web sites (a very few) that have resources for
participatory work - but largely they are local case studies or
international publications. I always include a section on epistemology in my
reports - a section which never gets published in the final publication!
Throughout this time, I was continually frustrated at:
a) the lack of academic commitment to the practitioner - even while a
student there was no engagement with the student's actual thinking,
virtually no dialogue or even feedback for written work, and no interest in
what the student was doing with the methodology in the living world - we
were virtually left to our own devices to make sense of a complete paradigm
shift and deploy such thinking in the incredibly difficult area of
commercial contracts. This is hard enough for students working in
conservative disciplines but for those of us working in a realm that
challenged the epistemological basis of any knowledge being used in the
political and commercial world, it was in my view, unethical. The kind of
engagement between "teacher" and "student" that Jack talks about and that I
have enjoyed on this network is a level of interest in each other and
commitment to the field that is unknown to me here in this country. The
understanding of "practice" as it is exercised on this network, also largely
unrealised.
Since the 1990's, starting with our previous Labour govt, and now being in
the grip of neo-conservatism, Australian universities have suffered untold
political interference with restructures, ongoing funding cuts, losses of
intellectual independence and continually mounting pressures to privatise
one way and another - so the situation is just worse. The upshot is that
when it comes to sustaining if not augmenting the depth and innovation ....
Originality, significance and rigour - of participatory knowledge in
Australia we are decades out of step with the rest of the world and slipping
fast. I understand this this is a global trend, but in Australia we have
such a small population it is hard to get critical mass for "alternative"
movements... But it is deeper than that to given the innovation that NZ is
capable of producing...
B) I am not saying that we do not produce innovators of world renown, - we
do - but they have no foothold in Australia that is reliable. We don't value
them. Only last year one of our most internationally established
practitioners attempted to set up a certificate course for action research
at a university, researching and creating a complete product on a very part
time job with no support, only to have the whole initiative closed down
after 3 years work with virtually no explanation and no opportunity for
appeal. I could tell so many similar stories - not just limited to
universities, but including the brave stances of individuals in government
departments and services, and community organisations. We are all struggling
to work participatively, we have no resources, there is virtually no
recognition of the value of the work, and our ability to connect with each
other across sectors and disciplines is also very difficult - people are
suspicious and protect their hard won patches. None of this is conducive to
developing excellence at home and it has the effect of making international
works ever more remote to our practical reach. For example, trying to get a
project up that funds participants to devise their own standards of
judgement is virtually unheard of; designing a project that does not have to
commit large parts of its budget to quantitative practices and data
generation is seen as having no value - because in the end it is all about
statistics for political game playing; trying to argue that developing
learning practices in community and organisations is seen as "soft", too
relative to a particular group of people, and not a valuable way of spending
scarce money because it cannot be converted into mass systems using
generalised data to manipulate political interests. The idea of "learning
organisation" seems to be largely met with cynicism and derision - it is
well known that most management cultures in Australia are stuck in the
1950's which is a generous way of saying the 1650's now undergoing a strange
warping in the downward drive of appalling new industrial relations
legislation and free trade agreements! Under these circumstances the idea of
innovation is limited to meet these ends, the idea of rigour locked into
unquestionable beliefs regarding positivist truth... Its that old war, and
its still not over even though the its so uncool to suggest that it isn't in
these "pluralistic" days - which are themselves in deep trouble over here...
C) we are in the grips of conservative politics and culture which is doing
its best to dum down the population from primary school up, resisting
critical stances with the introduction of really scary anti-terrorist
legislation making "sedition" an offence, closing down journalistic
independence (which is limited anyway here given the domination of our media
by Murdochs, Packers and Fairfaxes), and promoting simplistic Christian
fundamentalist ideologies in schools and across politics. Remember we do not
have human rights in our national constitution, so while these matters are
issues for many democracies we are particularly vulnerable.
This trend is only taking advantage of a tradition of conservativism in this
country which is curiously destabilised by myths of larrikinism and
anti-authoritarianism all given another twist in our leftist traditions -
which can be just as ideologically rigid and conservative as the right...
The upshot of this is that I have found Australia to be lacking a culture of
discourse (derisively referred to by the neo-cons as "the chattering
classes"), it is very difficult to find public space for radical thinking
and even harder for one that encourages action from such thinking. Even
amongst my practitioner peers there is very little reading and writing, and
the idea of getting together to practice (I attempted to set up a
participatory practitioner's co-op and it lasted a year!), is only
encountered in pretty superficial workshops which we can't afford unless our
work pays for them, which they tend not to do because they don't see the
value of participatory approaches beyond "consultation" for existing policy
positions.
I have just completed my thesis (close to finishing!) working with 12 peers
across Australia, and except for one or two people reading one paper by
Torbert and another by Reason and Bradbury, they were completely
disinterested in reading any material including the material that I was
producing as our research data. They are not even reading the draft thesis
which is about them, written to them, etc - as one person said - "I just
don't read anything anymore". This is indicative of our sorry state - and
given these conditions, there is very little awareness of what is happening
overseas, and less interest to find out, and when a person does find out the
gap between what is happening there and what can be done with it here,
becomes a starkly political stance, which few are prepared to pay for. The
is a terrible muteness, immobility, sense of individual stuckness that we
delved into in the thesis - but who has time for this in the everyday? If on
the odd occasion innovative practices are taken up, it is usually done so
with a view of "not reinventing the wheel" - so - fast tracked, with
little investment in development and learning, and cutting off the details
that make a qualitative difference - this has been done so many times with
initiatives many of which are copied from NZ or Canada, such as justice
circles, which are given nothing like the kind of embedded development and
professional rigour here that they are in the countries of their origins.
A way of understanding this situation is in the following story: a friend of
mine who is trained as an environmental scientist, took an interest in
marketing, studied it at uni surprised to discover the degree to which
current thinking about marketing is deploying participatory concepts,
graduated and moved from Sydney to Darwin and found a new job in Darwin's
marketing department. She commented to me that the Northern Territory is yet
to discover inter-disciplinary thinking - they could not get their heads
around the idea that an environmental scientist should also be into
marketing - the only way they could understand her practice was to label her
a journalist even though she had no experience as a journo. The idea of
transdisciplinarity would be even more inaccessible. People go to Darwin for
the life style and don't want to rock the boat - and the same can be said
for the rest of Australia.
This same sense of distance - of geography and time, of thinking and social
development, of cultural isolation from our Asian-Pacific neighbours
(including NZ) where so much innovative work is going on - is what I
experience in Australia relative to the rest of the world regarding
participatory practices. It is utterly crippling - and results in a
practitioners' work always being at the introductory phase unable to be
matured in the real world, or, if one wants to grow one's practice, simply
not finding the work or the people who are interested in it - they can't see
its practical application. If you make this "the edge" of your practice, it
is physically and psychologically exhausting and financially very risky.
Language (meaning, relationships etc) is seen as jargonistic because the
learning into new developments is just not done, because the political and
commercial interests that use such thinking see it as an ideological threat,
or they just don't know about it at all. In such a situation a
practitioner's judgements become very vulnerable. The cost to our culture,
our political integrity, social and individual freedom and our ecological
viability is inestimable.
When it comes to standards of excellence here, those who exhibit such
standards are balancing on the edge of excommunication - or packing their
bags to work overseas. This matter is not limited to practitioner research -
it effects all our research - including mainstream and long lived
establishments like the Commonwealth research institution (CSIRO) which has
suffered decades of defunding and lack of political and commercial
investment in its brilliant people to the cost of our economy and our
culture.
Practitioners have a phrase "working under the radar" which means doing what
we know is important but pretending we are doing what everyone else expects
without causing too many ripples (also discussed as "new wine in old
bottles"). There are many brave, brilliant and would be internationally
acclaimed people here, but they are hanging on by their teeth and have been
doing so since the 1970's. Even those who we uphold as leading lights are
still anchored in pragmatism (strong community development traditions, or,
strongly wedded to plan, act, observe type spirals) - and things don't seem
to move much beyond these old ideas. This is reflective of the battles they
are exhaustively waging simply to stay on the map.
We need international standards to provide a sense of what is possible and
to navigate us in those directions - but the distance between what would be
regarded as national standards and international ones is vast.
I apologise if my way of addressing your question Jack seems a little
tangential and a lot of whinging, I imagine that you wanted a robust
conversation about national standards and practitioner research in
educational settings - but this is as close as I can get as I think about it
on the basis of my experience. In truth I remain strongly committed to this
"field" but am starved, which is the reason why this network of people and
the ethos of reflexive dialogue is so treasured...
Susie
On 16/11/06 2:28 AM, "Jack Whitehead" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Susie - I'm focusing on your point:
>
> "... here in Australia there is a huge gap between national and
> international standards of practice".
>
> I think it would serve well the theme of the seminar if you could
> share your understandings of differences between national and
> international standards of practice/judgment in Australia. I think this
> will help to move on our conversations and to clarify differences
> between world leading, internationally excellent, internationally
> recognised and nationally recognised research in relation to
> originality, significance and rigour in educational
> practitioner-research.
>
> Love Jack.
>
>
> On 15 Nov 2006, at 15:12, [log in to unmask] wrote:
>
>> Excellent: Serper's Award for Deyakking the yakking: Only second one
>> ever to be awarded
>>
>> Quoting Marie Huxtable <[log in to unmask]>:
>>
>>> From Sarah
>>>> In my opinion, your work on assisting
>>>> teachers in China to
>>>> relate their narratives of practice is of outstanding international
>>>> significance. How's the doctorate?
>>>
>>> Sarah - what was it in your reading of Annie's work that informed
>>> your judgment that it is of outstanding international significance?
>>> Marie.
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