A living theory is an explanation produced by an individual for their educational influence in their own learning, in the learning of others and in the learning of the social formation in which they live and work.
i) Why did I feel the need for a living theory?
In 1967, in my special study on my initial teacher education programme, on A Way To Professionalism In Education I wrote about the importance of a professional knowledge-base for education. In my later studies of educational theory between 1968 72 I began to see that the dominant view of educational theory, known as the disciplines approach, was mistaken. It was known as the disciplines approach because it was constituted by the disciplines of philosophy, psychology, sociology and history of education.
The mistake was in thinking that disciplines of education could explain the educational influences of individuals in their own and in each other's learning. The error was not grounded in mistakes in the disciplines of education. The mistake was in the disciplines approach to educational theory. The mistake was in thinking that the disciplines of education, individually or in any combination, could explain adequately an individual's educational influence in their own learning and in the learning of others.
My recognition of this mistake between 1971 1972 came midway through my studies for a Masters degree in the psychology of education. As I was conducting a controlled experiment design for my dissertation on the way adolescents acquired scientific understanding, I began to feel a tension between an explanation that assumed individual learners could be validly represented in dependent and independent variables and an explanation I constructed for my educational influence that was grounded in my conscious lived experience. I also began to see that my explanations for my educational influences in the learning of my pupils could not be subsumed within any conceptual framework in the psychology of education or any existing discipline of education. This recognition re-focused my vocation. It moved from being a school teacher, teaching pupils science in secondary schools, to becoming a university academic and educational researcher, researching the creation and academic legitimation of valid forms of educational theory. Such theories could explain the educational influences of individuals in their own learning and in the learning of others. I believed then and still believe now that the profession of education requires such a professional knowledge-base.
My move to the University of Bath in 1973 was motivated by this desire to contribute to the creation and legitimation of educational theory. I continue to identify with the Mission of the University of Bath which includes having a distinct academic approach to the education of professional practitioners.
The damage inflicted on the teaching profession by the disciplines approach to educational theory may be judged from the fact that Paul Hirst, a main proponent, acknowledged a mistake in the following two quotations from 1983 where he says that much understanding of educational theory will be developed:
… in the context of immediate practical experience and will be co-terminous with everyday understanding. In particular, many of its operational principles, both explicit and implicit, will be of their nature generalisations from practical experience and have as their justification the results of individual activities and practices. (Hirst, 1983, p. 18)
The damage can be appreciated through Hirst's understanding that the practical principles you and I use to explain our educational influences in our own learning and in the learning of others would be replaced by principles with more theoretical justification: In many characterisations of educational theory, my own included, principles justified in this way have until recently been regarded as at best pragmatic maxims having a first crude and superficial justification in practice that in any rationally developed theory would be replaced by principles with more fundamental, theoretical justification. That now seems to me to be a mistake. Rationally defensible practical principles, I suggest, must of their nature stand up to such practical tests and without that are necessarily inadequate.(ibid.)
The hegemony of the disciplines of education continues to dominate what counts as educational research. As Allender and Allender (2008) point out: The belief that educational research trumps practice, historically and still, is one of the major obstacles. The results of scholarly inquiry have managed to become the top of a top-down world. The not-so-subtle message is that there is a better known way to teach and teachers ought to change their practices accordingly. And, teachers have a way of willingly participating in this system when they persist in searching for the new trick to quickly and magically make their teaching easier. Progress depends on giving up the hegemony of scholarly inquiry. Knowledge has many sources, and they are best honored when they are used as part of a lively dialectic. The obvious shift is for teachers to give themselves credit for having an expertise that is uniquely valuable to themselves, and others.(pp. 127-128)
Allender and Allender also believe that 'somewhere in history, the status of the teaching profession lost ground - setting up teachers to be viewed as incompetent. They believe that this view handicaps every teacher, and that there is a dire need to escape this undeserved status' (ibid., p. 128). It may be, that by clearly distinguishing what counts as education research from educational research, in terms of new living standards of judgment, then valid forms of educational knowledge and educational theory could be legitimated in the Academy.
ii) Making a clear distinction between education research and educational researchI am suggesting that education research is research carried out from the perspectives of disciplines and fields of education such as the philosophy, sociology, history, psychology, management, economics, policy and leadership of education. In my view, educational research is distinguished as the creation and legitimation of valid forms of educational theory and knowledge that can explain the educational influences of individuals in their own learning, in the learning of others and in the learning of the social formations in which we live and work. This focus on the epistemological significance of what counts as educational knowledge has been highlighted by Bruce Ferguson (2008) where she notes that the increase in diverse perspectives and presentation styles in research are indicative of an epistemological transformation in what counts as educational knowledge (p. 24). Stimulated to respond to Bruce Ferguson's point I claim that this epistemological transformation will require new forms of representation and educational standards of judgment in Journals of Educational Research (Whitehead, 2008a). In this contribution to EJOLTS I am directing attention to how the evidence, showing the nature of these forms of representation and living standards of judgment, can be accessed by those with the technology to do so. The evidence includes multi-media representations of flows of energy and values in the embodied knowledges of educators and their students. I recognize that the development of such representations costs money. Access to the most advanced technology of the day, with the use of communicative power of the internet, has economic implications. My own research programme has benefited from access to this technology. I also acknowledge the influence of the economic context on my research programme in that I have held a tenured contract at the University of Bath with secure employment from 1973 to the end of the contract in 2009. I do not want to underestimate the importance of this economic security in my capacity to keep open a creative space at the University to develop my research programme. In making a clear distinction between education and educational research and acknowledging the importance of technology and economics I also want it to be understood that I value the integration of insights from the theories from education researchers into my own living theories. For example, the historical and cultural contexts of my workplace are western and mainly white. These contexts are changing with multi-cultural and postcolonial influences (Charles, 2007; Murray 2007) questioning the power relations that sustain unjust privileges and the dominant logic and languages that sustain what counts as knowledge in the Western Academies. In my early work between 1967 73 I followed this dominant logic and language. By this I mean that I used a positivist and propositional view of knowledge derived from the influence of my first degree in physical science. In my positivist phase I believed that controlled experimental designs gave access to the highest form of knowledge and that the theories generated from this approach should be presented within propositional statements about sets of variables that excluded contradictions. During the middle period of my research between 1977 1999 I extended my epistemological understandings to include dialectics (Ilyenkov, 1977) with its nucleus of contradiction. Since 2003 I have been exploring the implications of an epistemology of inclusionality (Rayner, 2004) which has much in common with African, Eastern and other indigenous ways of knowing (Bruce Ferguson, 2008). I want to stress again that this is not to imply a rejection of all my insights from propositional and dialectical theories. I continue to value insights from these theories as I deepen and extend my understandings of living educational theories and a living theory methodology with the evolution of the implications of asking, researching and answering 'How do I improve what I am doing?' I will examine below the significance of these epistemological understandings of propositions, dialectics and inclusionality when I consider the use of a living theory methodology in the processes of improving practice and in the generation of educational knowledge. In this process I follow Ryle's insight, '[e]fficient practice precedes the theory of it; methodologies presuppose the application of the methods, of the critical investigation of which they are the products' (Ryle, 1973, p. 31).
