i) Using action reflection cycles as a method
My understanding of action reflection cycles emerged from my practical question, ‘How do I improve what I am doing?’ The method emerged before my awareness of its significance as a research question. I asked this question on my first day in 1967 as a science teacher in Langdon Park School, a London Comprehensive School. I felt a passion to help my students to improve their scientific understandings. In my first lessons I could see that my pupils were not comprehending much of what I was saying and doing. However, I did not feel my concern to be grounded in a ‘deficit’ model of myself. I felt a confidence that while what was going on was not as good as it could be, I would be able to contribute to improvements. My imagination worked to offer possibilities about improving what I was doing. I chose a possibility to act on, acted and evaluated the effectiveness of what I was doing in terms of my communications with my pupils. This disciplined process of problem‑forming and solving is what I call an action reflection method.
ii) Developing an understanding of a living theory methodology
A methodology is not only a collection of the methods used in the research. It is distinguished by a philosophical understanding of the principles that organize the ‘how’ of the enquiry. A living theory methodology explains how the enquiry was carried out in the generation of a living theory.
For example, my awareness of the importance of improving practice is grounded in my passion to see values of freedom, justice, compassion, respect for persons, love and democracy lived as fully as possible. Hence, in my living theory methodology, you should expect to see the meanings of these values emerge in the course of my practice. Because the expression of energy in the meanings of these values cannot be communicated using only words on pages of text, I will use video-data in a visual narrative to help with the public communication of these meanings.
One of the distinguishing characteristics of action research from action learning is that the researcher must make public the story of their research in a way that is open to others to evaluate its validity. A living theory methodology includes the processes of validation.
I work with Michael Polanyi’s (1958) decision about personal knowledge. This is a decision to understand the world from my own point of view as an individual claiming originality and exercising judgment responsibly with universal intent. I know that the local identity of my ‘I’ is influenced by the non-local flows of space and energy through the cosmos. Yet I do work with a sense of responsibility for the educational influences I have in my own learning. I also recognise myself as a unique human being with this responsibility and I do exercise a sense of personal responsibility in validating for myself my claims for what I believe to be true. In doing this I take account of responses from a process of social validation I have developed from the ideas of MacDonald and Habermas.
Since 1976 I have used a process of democratic evaluation, described by MacDonald (1976), together with the four criteria of social validity proposed by Habermas (1976), to strengthen the personal and social validity of living theories. By this I mean that I submit my explanations of educational influence to a validation group of peers with a request that they help me to strengthen the comprehensibility, truthfulness, rightness and authenticity of the explanation. Within comprehensibility I include the logic of the explanation as a mode of thought that is appropriate for comprehending the real as rational (Marcuse, 1964, p. 105). Within truthfulness I include the evidence for justifying the assertions I make in my claims to knowledge. Within rightness I include an awareness of the normative assumptions I am making in the values that inform my claims to knowledge. Within authenticity I include the evidence of interaction over time that I am truly committed to living the values I explicitly espouse.
The social sciences have influenced what counts as educational research. Some researchers believe that educational research is distinguishable as a social science. I do not share this belief. My reasons are related to my meanings of educational and social where my meanings of educational cannot be subsumed within my meanings of social. Here are my meanings of social and educational to explain my understandings of some differences.
My meanings of ‘social’ in social validity, social action, social behaviour and social formations are influenced by the ideas of Habermas (1976) as described above, Schutz (1967) and Bourdieu (1990). I am most influenced in my meanings of social, social action and social behaviour by the work of Alfred Schutz in his Phenomenology of the Social World:
Following the logic of our own terminology, we prefer to take as our starting point, not social action or social behavior, but intentional conscious experiences directed toward the other self. However, we include here only these intentional experiences which are related to the other as other, that is, as a conscious living being. We are leaving out of account intentional Acts directed only to the other person’s body as a physical object rather than as a field of expression for his subjective experiences. Conscious experiences intentionally related to another self which emerge in the form of spontaneous activity we shall speak of as social behavior. If such experiences have the character of being previously projected, we shall speak of them as social action.(Schutz, 1967, p. 144)
What I take from this is that a social action can be distinguished from social behaviour by the spontaneous activity in behaviour and the previous projection in an action.
In using the idea of social formations in such phrases as the ‘educational influences in the learning of social formations’ I want to distinguish educational influences in one's own learning and in the learning of others from the educational influences in the learning of a social formation such as a university. Because of cultural and historical influences in the social contexts in which we live and learn I want to acknowledge the importance of having an educational influence in the learning of such social formations. I know that the nature of meaning is complex, but I think we can work with the idea of educational influences in the learning of social formations as being highly significant. For example when the University of Bath changed the regulations governing its social formation in 2004 to allow the submission of e-media I refer to this as an educational influence in the learning of a social formation. I think of it as an educational influence because it has extended the cognitive range and concerns of the forms of representation that can be used in the public communication of living educational theories.
I take the form of something to be fundamental in making sense of it. I need form to make sense. If something doesn't have a form I find that I cannot comprehend it. I use social formation in the sense used by Bourdieu in his point about the analysis of social formations in relation to the habitus:
The objective adjustment between dispositions and structures ensures a conformity to objective demands and urgencies which has nothing to do with rules and conscious compliance with rules, and gives an appearance of finality which in no way implies conscious positing of the ends objectively attained. Thus, paradoxically, social science makes greatest use of the language of rules precisely in the cases where it is most totally inadequate, that is, in analysing social formations in which, because of the constancy of the objective conditions over time, rules have a particularly small part to play in the determination of practices, which is largely entrusted to the automatisms of the habitus. (Bourdieu, 1990, p. 145)
I want to be clear that I do not subsume the experience and expression of the life- affirming energy in my explanations of educational influences in learning to meanings of ‘social’. My educational relationships are social in the sense that they can be distinguished as intentional conscious experiences directed toward the other self (Schutz, 1967, p. 144). However my explanations for my educational influences include the non-social flows of life-affirming energy that distinguish my social relations as educational.
Whilst expressing this life-affirming energy in my social relations I want to emphasise that I bring energy that flows from outside the social through the cosmos into my educational relationships. I use the expression of this energy in my accounts to distinguish what is educational from social relations. Hence I do not subsume my understanding of what is educational to a concept of ‘social’ in the improvement of practice and in the generation of knowledge. At the same time I recognise the importance of social relations in influencing my educational relationships.
