Jack, hello! A quick point to start. I wonder about the part of the 
question in which you write: 'that dymanically include us' strikes me as 
restrictive. I think we also create the parameters that become/are our 
contexts too.I see the word dynamic, but it only seems to be working one 
way. And I don't think that's how you're actually meaning it, but do 
correct me if I've misunderstood something.

OK, now to more pressing matters!

You wrote: 
... have contributed to the generation of a knowledge-base of practitioner-
researchers that has been legitimated in the Academy and has established a 
new epistemology for educational knowledge.

I think that's undoubtedly true. It's true in the sense that going back 
some years now, living theory and other approaches to educational knowledge 
have accumulated momentum and gained legitimacy in the Academy. This is an 
incontrovertible fact - one look at: 
http://people.bath.ac.uk/edsajw/living.shtml 
should be enough to see how a collection of such rigour (Winter, 1989) 
takes its place in the annals of educational research knowledge and theory 
and cannot reasonably be gainsaid. 

I sense, however, you're looking for a different kind of enquiring response 
than that. Showing influence is such a wily, slippery playmate - here now 
and gone tomorrow. Showing influence has to contend with circumstances, 
personalities, systemic influences, politics, history, geography, faiths, 
religions, gender, adult/child, oh and so on and so on.And so on!

If we take the stance that we are individuals - and I see you are using i-
we not I, which knowing you is highly significant - but for argument's 
sake, if we take that stance of individualism, then the permutations of 
influences upon us before we seek to influence - are incaluable. If we take 
the stance that we are conjoined as human beings and as aspects of the 
cosmos all together, then again the influences are still beyond our scope 
to include in what we present of ourselves and our work and our contexts 
and so on.

So, I suppose I'm saying that influence becomes what we can render 
perceptible in some way, both within the processes of development and then 
at one step removed as we present it to others.Which is why, I believe, we 
(I mean people who develop their own living theories) concentrate on 
values, because such a concentration highlights those aspects of the 
complexities that otherwise remain invisible (imperceptible is perhaps a 
better word).It also explains the contending schools of representation 
(Eisner, 1993) with those wishing to provide an evidential basis for any 
necessary claims about having 'improved' something (McNiff & Whitehead, 
2006). And these values are perhaps what Alan is writing about in terms of 
the flow of energies, which unite i with we.

I think the theses you have pointed to show how individuals have come to 
know their influence and to improve the quality of it through their living 
standards of judgement (values), and I'm thinking of Marion Naidoo's thesis:
'I am because we are: (a never-ending story):The emergence of a living 
theory of inclusional and responsive practice,' which contains a DVD of her 
practice, and was admissable as evidence. To a lesser extent, I see Pat 
D'Arcy's 1998 thesis in which she wrote about engaged and appreciative 
responses, which, in short, encourage feedback in ways that connect author 
and respondent in a seamless web of creativit - to be along the lines we 
are talking about here. It all seems to me to be leading towards an 
integration of values,with actions and philosophies in order to enable a 
more dynamic interaction with the life-force, in ways that stimulate 
creativity and originality (ironically two of the standards levied by the 
Academy for Ph.D. theses).

I am beginning to understand conceptually - something I was much quicker at 
emotionally and spiritually - the confluence between the work you're doing 
in Bath with living theorising and inclusionality. I think, whether 
consciously or not, your work has been developing towards confluence rather 
than divergence. I think you're a connecter, rather than an anatomist.

You ask the question, how can i~we... and I wish you'd asked the question, 
how do I...because I think I understand quite a lot about how you do what 
you do as, or example, a supervisor for these theses you quote from. You 
have the capacity to sense the future, much, I suspect with the same 
uncanny power that a salmon has in tracing its route to its spawning 
place.It's the salmon's connection with the life-force. That's not a 
flippant point. It's simply what I've seen of you over nearly twenty years. 
No, not as a salmon, Jack. Pay attention! You have this really quite 
uncanny ability to enter into the insights of others and help them find 
their life-force, their way of doing it, creatively and originally, to 
influence something for the good in their lives and the lives of others. 
That's one of the things that these theses attest to. But this isn't about 
saying how brilliantly you supervise, because that doesn't really get us to 
the how. Or does it?

Isn't real-education (as we might term, real-ale) - in other words 
antithetical to training -  in the ways that we talk about it anyway (see 
the 'we' above), that enabling of human knowledge into ways of 
enfranchising others, to promote the vulnerable into greater freedom, to 
equip our young people (and all of us throughout life) to think for 
themselves, to rejoice in the gift of life and to see what they can bring 
to it and transform it generatively for the good of themselves and others? 
If that is the case, then explaining our educational influences in learning 
to improve our educational influences as practitioner researchers should 
perhaps become at the same time a greater immersion in what it is that 
motivates us, i.e. our values.

There is, of course, no single or simple answer to your question. Our lives 
are not singularities (at least I don't see them as that) but impinge, I 
believe - and I think, Alan (Rayner) you're saying the same - on everything 
else. I believe that in communities there is hope to understand more of 
what it is that generates us and sustains us and enables us to improve our 
practical values. If we seek freedom, then we need to live in freedom, 
because in my understanding it is only ourselves we can change. As Gandhi 
said. hence, I suppose your use of the word 'influence', rather 
than 'change'.I guess we can only explain our influences by walking the 
talk. Explanation isn't a discrete aspect of a process, is it? As we seek 
to improve our educational influences within the contexts we're working in, 
as I remember Jean (MnNiff) saying once, the way to freedom is freedom 
itself. I'd like to illustrate this with a short aside into my time in 
China in which i~we has evolved quite differently from our ways in the West.

I became starkly aware during my time in China that not only was I 
contending (a harsh word, but it felt so hard at first) with differences 
between a sense of community and a sense of a personal I (there seemed 
little sense of it in China, which really threw me at times), but the 
power/knowledge one was incalculably large for someone so steeped in 
Western democracy as I was. When I asked a junior colleague a question she 
(usually) would dart her eyes to the authority figure in the room (if there 
was one) and then give her answer. I had no real way of knowing what was 
actually going on in those quick glances but it wasn't something I had been 
aware of in England. Thus understanding (let alone explaining) my 
educational influences in such a context was incredibly difficult. My 
standpoint was skewed for a start - culturally, historically, religiously, 
linguistically, economically, racially: each aspect vie-ing for a space in 
my deliberations until I sometimes felt I knew nothing.How coudl I promote 
democracy, for example, or freedom, in such a context? What did freedom 
mean? Where could we find a confluence? I think that's where the notion of 
Action Research with Chinese characteristics came in - and tallies with 
Pip's earlier discussion with RI about indigenous ways of knowing. 

I believe I learned, however, how crucial to understanding anything - again 
let alone explaining - evolved within community. It doesn't solve the bias, 
the assumptions and so on that are honed in communities, but it gives us 
scope to try and to try again. It was only when I first mooted the idea of 
AR with Chinese Characteristics, I realised that this could be potential a 
source of freedom rather than shackling their insights and experiences to 
something grafted on.


So, and I apologise for the length of this - but I think as I write - I 
abhore planning as you know, Jack! I feel any answers we're going to get, 
anything valuable that we will learn will come from communities in which we 
have a stake, in which belonging to (although I'm not quite happy with that 
word) offers us greater freedom (and responsibilities). Jack, those theses 
didn't happen jsut between you and the Ph.D. colleague - I know you know 
this, but the point needs to be made, I feel. These theses grew as the 
community grew - just as values grow as we grow. Just as cells grow.

How can we explain.... and so on. We're doing it. In communities, because 
we are both ourselves and each other on so many profound levels. If we take 
the path of rigid individualism, then we are left with the universe someone 
like Richard Dawkins describes (The God Delusion, 2006) - don't get me 
wrong, I LOVE his work because he makes me think, but I don't want to live 
in his deterministic universe and I shan't! To me 2 + 2 sometimes, just 
sometimes, makes 5. When I look at a sunset, say, or see a child delighting 
in something or a baby laughing - to me that latter example is the most 
glorious sound in the universe. If someone tells me that the baby is 
copying, finding ways to attract attention, or whatever other deterministic 
view of baby-development - I realise they are all true, but they are not 
the whole truth. I am motivated by particular values, like love, 
compassion, freedom, democracy - they move my being into a better place. 
They move me and change me and by fully engaging with such values in the 
world - in community, everything subtly changes. And I embrace the fact 
that human beings have a capacity to perceive many forms of knowledge. All 
simultaneously of value.

How can i~we improve our educational influences...

By relishing the joys and responsibilities of freedom, within communities 
for the benefit of communities and individuals.And it seems to me that 
you're doing that. You, refers to you, Jack; but it also refers to the Bath 
Action Research communities and to so many other communities in the world 
dedicated to those values.

O.K., it's getting on and I feel I have exhausted anything useful to say. I 
may return to these letters again tomorrow.

It's been a pleasure, Jack. Love from,