Doctored

Yikes, how I struggled with this. It was mainly the tone that flummoxed me; I could tell there was a good deal of energy in Nietzsche’s words, but what kind of energy I couldn’t tell. It might have been anger, derision, sarcasm or irony – or indeed a mixture. It actually reminded me of the bible (which I tried to read a few times in my youth, I can’t recall why).

However, I found some friendly assistance online in the form of marked-up texts and discussion forums, e.g. “Be aware what the text says does not always mean this is the opinion or thought of Nietzsche. He may be speaking ironically, exaggerating, taking one extreme side to counter the other side, etc.”

This explains it. It doesn’t necessarily make it easier to read though.

Beyond Good & Evil is a collection of aphorisms; pithy, witty observations of varying lengths that don’t at first appear to flow into one another. While reading about the aphoristic style I stumbled across a set of 80 aphorisms written or spoken by women, which I have to say I preferred. In comparison Nietzsche’s style is very male (can I say that?) – he is almost arrogant in his confidence, and his tone is often derisory. But this is Nietzsche’s very message; that philosophy and philosophers have so far been deficient; not imaginative or assertive enough. Through these 300 statements, Nietzsche deconstructs accepted morality, arguing that all human behaviour is driven by the same basic impulses, and what we see as ‘evil’ is a more direct expression of those impulses. It’s easy to see how he was taken for a Nazi sympathiser…

Thinking back to why David suggested I read Nietzsche… I think it is because my research is leaning in the direction of what universities should be, and what should be done about them. These questions are – perhaps – moral questions. Last year’s assignments took me in a particular direction (a radical one, apparently), and perhaps I could do with being shaken up a bit and having my moral assumptions challenged. I am starting to see how Nietzsche might do that, but I am considering putting his own writing aside in favour of reading what others have said about it instead. On the other hand it may be worth persisting; alongside Nietzsche I am reading Ian Leslie’s book Curious, which indicates that only the hard stuff is worth learning… 

I felt like I was starting to lose direction with my thesis plans, so last week I persuaded my academic adviser George to meet up for a pep talk in the Rusty Bicycle.

After the novelty had settled on my original thesis idea, I’d started to feel uncomfortable that it wasn’t based on a research question beyond ‘what happens if we do this?’.  I am still very attached to the idea of going out into the world and having ‘brave conversations’, but I now think this approach would best contribute to my research indirectly, rather than actually being the research.

It was reading Ron Barnett’s new book Imagining the University that made me realise there was a question underpinning my original idea – what are the possibilities for a new idea of the university (and what, therefore, is our role and scope as university educators)? I see now that my approach might be more focused on eliciting these ideas in a more direct way. I have also begun to appreciate the profound influence that working at an art & design specific university has had on me, and am recognising that art and design educators (broad-minded, critical, design-thinking, creative?) may have something particularly valuable to offer an imagination of the university. 

The essence of my research topic remains the same; I still wish to bring together educators at UAL who are interested in the possibilities for reimagining the university, and work with them to generate ideas that have the potential to inspire positive change. The approach is similar too; I am now thinking that the project may take the form of a series of participatory workshops (i.e. with different participants each time) rather than an ongoing co-operative enquiry group. This would enable larger numbers of participants to be involved and a community of sorts to grow, and provide a reflection-action cycle with its associated learning opportunities. It would also be less ethically complex than the initial plan which required the recruitment of primary and secondary participants.

George and I discussed appropriate reading material and it was reassuring that he mentioned a lot of authors whose work on conversation and co-operative enquiry I read over the summer (Zeldin, Reason, Krznaric, Pask, etc.). While clearly focused on my initial plan I’m sure this body of literature will remain of interest going forwards. I noted down some further suggestions of George’s that were directly relevant to Imagining the University; Amazon had kindly suggested many of these to me earlier as well, so I’ve duly ordered in some second-hand copies of Jon Nixon’s Interpretive Pedagogies, Maskell & Robinson’s New Idea of the University, and Stefan Collini’s What are Universities For.  I flirted with a book by Max Tegmark but have put it on the waitlist for now, and am revisiting Pask & Laurillard to check for relevance against the new plan. I may decide to incorporate some conversational tools and frameworks in my approach with the workshops.

Generally I’m feeling a lot more perky about it all, and finding it easier to focus. I’m returning to Oxford tomorrow for a chat with David, and am also hoping to meet up with Pete Thompson, whose work I encountered last term.

Shulman, L, S. 1981. Disciplines of Enquiry in Education: An Overview. Educational Researcher, 10 (6), pp5-23

I spent too long mulling over these readings on curiosity, so here’s a more punchy approach to recording my thoughts on this one:

The article, digested into three key points:

1. Education is not a discipline in itself, but a field of study that draws on rules of discovery and verification from a range of disciplines; e.g. anthropology, linguistics, psychology, genetics, various subdisciplines of sociology (e.g. demography, symbolic interaction), and philosophy.
2. Different disciplines are interested in answering different types of question, and may assume different starting points i.e. what can be assumed to be true, or ‘taken as given’. A distinctive feature of philosophy, for example, is that it takes very little as given; practically anything may be up for question.
3. Modern understandings of the aims of correlational and experimental research in the field of education are influenced by the Social Darwinism movement, which applied Darwin’s Survival of the Fittest principle to human ‘fitness’. Correlational research reveals how different variables ‘naturally’ relate to our respective ‘fitness’, while experimental research aims to identify the causality of fitness through intervention.

What here is most useful for me?
I found this a very matter-of-fact, but very open-minded overview of disciplines of inquiry. My favourite sentence: “some of the most excellent inquiry is free-ranging and speculative in its initial stages, trying what might seem to be bizarre combinations of ideas and procedures, or restlessly casting about for ideas.” (p6)

I found the link with Social Darwinism so very interesting in an explanatory/historical sense. Darwin’s conceptualisation of ‘fitness’ was inextricably linked to competition, which some might argue has no place in humanity; the morality we have developed around equality and caring for the weakest members of society counters ’natural’ competition and sets us apart from the animals! As a selfish teenager, fed up of disruptive, apathetic youths disrupting my state school education, I might have agreed with Galton’s Conservative Darwinist argument – that we need to study variations in human abilities and performance in order to focus resources on the brightest and best. Nowadays I am more aligned with Reform Darwinism – experimenting with methods of rendering more individuals more ‘fit’. However, my thesis project moves away from the Darwinian concept of ‘fitness’ altogether; it is not so much about the qualities of individuals, but about the role of the university in developing a more equal society. I wonder whether, therefore, I can call it educational research? I think it is more of a social experiment.

I have become increasingly thoughtful about how much I need to frame my thesis as educational research, and I found this paper reassuring. Shulman presents different viewpoints but highlights that, while they may be hotly debated, they may not actually contrast too starkly! He makes no value judgements but succeeds in not coming across as bland.

One of the key take-home messages for me was that, whatever research question I end up with, I am obviously trying to impact on the environment, and I’m clearly going to need highly subjective, qualitative methods. Therefore I need to ask myself – how do I ensure my findings are rigorous? That they are unquestionable? I still need to incorporate as much objectivity (checks, etc) as possible (I liked the Solow quote about conducting surgery in a sewer).

Another train of thought I should explore about my research is – given that enquiry is finding the regularities in apparent disorder, what regularities am I looking for?

Schmitt, F. & Lahroodi, R. 2008. The epistemic value of curiosity. Educational Theory, 58 (2), pp125-147

This was a funny one. Here Schmitt and Lahroodi present a theorisation of the concept of curiosity from a philosophical perspective. Like the EdD session on mind & brain we had last year, I was confronted on reading this with the very different ways we have of thinking about thinking. I have a tendency – depending on what mood I’m in – to revert to the rather one-dimensional conception of the ‘mind’ I learned during my undergraduate biology degree; synonymous with the complex physical and chemical structures that make up the brain. But I am increasingly being shown other ways of conceptualising mind and thought; this week’s Pedagogy Reading Group meeting being a case in point, where we discussed Deleuze and metaphysics (the existence of non-physical entities, such as ideas). I’ve never had an issue with seeing ideas and abstract concepts as ‘real’; I just don’t think a conception of the mind as a complex web of electrochemical signals precludes that reality. I am probably being naive (again).

Schmitt and Lahroodi describe curiosity as ‘motivationally original’. I’m not 100% sure I see what they’re getting at here. I don’t think they are suggesting here that it has no extrinsic purpose. The sociobiologist in me sees a clear purpose. A desire to know more about the world and our surroundings (provided we don’t – like the proverbial cat – die from it) leads to learning, which enables us to take advantage of our surroundings to survive more effectively. Nietzsche takes the sociobiological argument further, proposing that our Darwinian animal drives are subdued by cultural values, resulting in a physiological depression that in our societies we attempt to overcome through moral development (see Wiener & Ramsay 2008).

The authors’ metaphor of hunger didn’t sit well with me; for a start, as they point out in the footnotes, curiosity is pleasant, hunger is not. My biological understanding is that feelings of hunger are triggered by a hormone called leptin that is released when we run out of readily-available glycogen and start drawing on our fat stores. That’s what ‘hunger’ means to me; and as far as I’m concerned if you’re not hungry in that sense then you’re not hungry; you’re just stuffing a hole (which happens).

I’ve got no problem with the words appetite or appetitive. The authors state that ‘curiosity is satisfied, and ceases, when one comes to know the topic’ (p129). I think it’s important to note that curiosity may also cease if one gets distracted by something more interesting or pressing (which the authors acknowledge later), or if the topic turns out to be too difficult, so enquiring into it ceases to be enjoyable.

I wondered if, by ‘motivationally original’, Schmitt and Lahroodi meant that we have no conscious extrinsic motivation; we may not be able to explain why we are curious about something. But I struggle with that idea too. In many cases I see my own curiosity as motivated by gaining a competitive advantage, or at least being able to hold my own in an argument. Ironically, I also believe very strongly that exposing what we don’t know is a fantastic learning tool (that’s why I have this blog). So I’m constantly in conflict with myself 😉 The authors claim that babies and young children cannot be said to be curious, as they have no conception of knowledge. While a very young child may not be capable of metacognition, or have the language to justify their curiosity, I don’t think we can say their desire for knowledge is not genuine, or even that they lack something of value. We learn more quickly in our first five years than at any other stage of our lives. Therefore I prefer Dewey’s model of the value of curiosity at different levels of development, and I see the organic level, with its low susceptibility to social norms and expectation, as having a very particular value that is potentially epistemic (Ken R0binson’s TED talk on divergent thinking springs to mind).

I struggle with the passivity of ‘having our attention drawn to something’ as I believe we ultimately decide what we focus on. Consciously or not, we make an assessment of risk before we enquire; not merely risk of harm to ourselves or others (remember the cat), but also the opportunity cost; what might we, or others, miss out on if we spending our time and effort enquiring into this? The film Erin Brockovich throws this question into sharp relief. Working all her waking hours to gather the evidence to win increased her family’s financial security, but meant she hardly saw them or her partner, who decided he’d had enough and walked out. The concept of opportunity cost has implications for both teaching and research; it explains why you can’t simply draw someone’s attention to something and expect them to be curious about it too; everyone’s opportunity cost will be different. Also, it will fluctuate; hence the vast number of abandoned PhDs.

I would say that even if I’m curious about something much more straightforward like a date or definition, I generally want to look it up myself than ask someone else. Maybe because I have trust issues.

Essentially, I can see what the authors are saying about the distinctiveness of ‘intellectual curiosity’ (as opposed to organic or social curiosity). I just feel that claiming intellectual curiosity has greater epistemic value than other forms is a bit of a circular argument. The paper certainly made me think about curiosity (and tenacity), but I struggled to relate it to myself and my thesis project; the conclusion is focused on the significance for teachers who wish to ‘ignite’ curiosity in their students – or at least to retard the natural reduction in curiosity that comes with age. Is my curiosity retarded? I’d like to think I am more curious about the world than I was in my self-centred youth!

Barrett, P. A. and Taylor, B, J. 2001. Beyond Reflection: Cake and Co-operative Inquiry. Systemic Practice and Action Research. 15 (3) pp237-248

I’ve just read another methodological report on co-operative enquiry from the references on Peter Reason’s website. Like McCardle’s paper, it was both interesting and useful; focusing not so much this time on the mechanics and emotions of the setting up of the group, but on the processes the group followed, and the roles and relationships within it.

Some key points of relevance for my own project as follows:

1. The importance of cake – as a ‘gesture’ and a ‘social breaker’. I couldn’t bring myself to offer gluten or refined sugar to people, but hopefully my black bean brownies will go down just as well among academics in an enquiry group meeting as they do at my yoga class, and make them feel sufficiently ‘special’. What if they don’t though? Genuine dilemma :-/
2. The value of a ‘preliminary reconnaissance’ of the field (Kemmis & McTaggart 1988). In my case this I think this would be to get a sense of the drivers for getting involved in a project like this, and the level of contribution from participants that would be reasonable, effective and sustainable. This will help me to pitch it right when it comes to recruiting participants.
3. I wondered reading the paper whether I should seek to recruit from a particular kind of university teacher. I’m not sure I want to say more about this at this stage, but it’ll be a possibility I’ll keep in mind during initial informal conversations.
4. The need to think about how the enquiry will end, which makes me think about a sex education leaflet – ‘have you thought about how this relationship will end?’; a startling train of thought when it is no more than a twinkle. Barrett’s group continued for a total of 18 months, although at 8-10 months, changes in membership required to sustain the group influenced the nature of the interactions within it. I got the sense somehow that the Midwives Action Research Group exceeded its expected life span, though there was no mention in the paper of how long it was intended to run for.

McCardle and Barrett both speak of their commitment to feminist principles early on in their papers. This is interesting because although Annie immediately made the connection in the last workshop, suggesting I read – among others – Women’s Ways of Knowing, I hadn’t initially thought of participatory action research or co-operative enquiry as being deeply connected to feminism. I’ve been a bit shy of feminist theory in the past, for a number of reasons, one being that I’ve rarely felt particularly female. At school I had my hair short, wore trousers, sat with the boys and played football with them at breaktime. I was terrible at football – really awful – but they never told me to go away (actually maybe they did but I ignored them). I’ve always found it much harder to talk to and connect with women than men; maybe a difficult relationship with my sister is partly to blame for that. While I am very curious about this concept that women have a particular epistemology and particular voices, I am uncomfortable with the binary view of gender that it depends on.

It’s probable I’m naive or very thick-skinned, but I feel I’ve got off pretty lightly in terms of sexual oppression. In fact I feel like my sex has won me more opportunities in life than it’s denied me.

BUT… I am really interested in feminist theory. I’ve started reading Women’s Ways of Knowing and I don’t recognise myself in there but I wish I did. The authors are clearly lovely, warm people (which seems to be a common trait in co-operative enquirers). If they’d invited me on a month-long writing retreat I would have had a panic attack.

It makes me think – am I personable enough to do this thesis project? Am I comfortable enough around people? It’s certainly going to challenge me – but that’s why I want to do it.

McArdle, K. L. 2001. Establishing a Co-operative Inquiry Group: The Perspective of a ‘First-time’ Enquirer. Systemic Practice and Action Research. 15 (3) pp177-189

So, this was a lovely paper, I thought. The author Kate McArdle goes into so much detail not only about what she did to get her co-operative enquiry group together, but also what informed her decisions, and how she felt about each aspect of the process. I liked her confidence; the way she identified what she would not compromise on, and stuck to that. And I liked the way she owned and accepted her actions.

You’d have to be pretty confident in this way in order to write this kind of paper, I think. It illustrates the extent to which risking harm to participants must be balanced by the benefits of the research, and the publication of it. The participants ‘Jane’, ‘Gemma’ and ‘Helen’ would, presumably, be recognised by any of the women in the group, and I wonder how they [would?] feel about their actions being presented and reflected upon in this way. We’ve all probably ‘done a Jane’ at some point, and I would probably feel uncomfortable simply seeing my behaviour mirrored back at me like this, let alone a whole bunch of colleagues being reminded of it too. These kinds of reflections would normally remain in one’s research journal, but I’m very glad McArdle has decided to share these aspects of her story, because it demystifies the process of setting up an enquiry group. It not only gives me a technical recipe to follow, it also gives me an indication of how the process might feel. Fear of the unknown – which might otherwise be quite paralysing – is therefore less of an issue.

I do feel McArdle has been scrupulously fair throughout. She doesn’t criticise but observes, reports her own feelings, and uses empathy to surmise what others may have been feeling – for example when she writes that for a while she had feelings of blame towards her junior sponsor Anna when a list of suitable candidates didn’t appear as promised, but acknowledges that the inquiry was ‘just one small thing in [Anna’s] life’, not the massive thing it was in her own.

I particularly liked the bit where McArdle explains in painstaking detail how the room had been set up, and what happened when she asked the estates and catering staff to help her move things to how she wanted them. I thought the way she presented her observations without judgement was very clever.

Generally – I thought this was an exceptionally useful paper for me to read. It helps with motivation, I think, to have a clearer idea of what my own enquiry group will look like, the challenges I will face and the decisions I will need to make, and how I’m likely to feel about it!

I have some questions about ethics.

One is about whether I’ll need to do two rounds of Ethics approval for my thesis project; one prior to recruiting primary participants and the second prior to recruiting secondary participants – given that we won’t have nailed down the exact nature of the Conversations until I’ve recruited the primary participants. I’d like to avoid a two-stage approval process if at all possible, as I can see it slowing things down to the point of the primary participants not only losing motivation, but totally forgetting about the project, which unlike me they won’t have been living and breathing throughout.

Another issue is this blog; while literally no-one is hanging on to my every word here, I am technically laying open all my thoughts to the entire internet. I need to give some careful thought to how I’m going to continue the degree of recorded reflection that I find necessary to clarify my thoughts, while preserving the anonymity of participants.

On the subject of anonymity, I have a strong desire to capture visual artefacts to illustrate the Conversations, but need to do this in an ethical way; i.e. one that avoids any kind of harm to participants (including embarrassment) and preserves anonymity. I thought it might be possible/effective to capture images that don’t reveal identities but communicate something of the feel of the interview; spaces, places, hands, coffee cups, shoes… something like that?

Another thought that came to mind when reading what Guy Thomas says about ethics is about harm to a community. I think there is a risk with this kind of intervention that the kinds of changes it produces may not be wholly positive. I don’t think it’s a major risk, but all the same it will be important to elaborate on the likely or possible benefits in order that benefit and risk may be weighed up. Benefits might include personal advantages to participants, and/or advances in knowledge resulting from the study.

There isn’t a problem from my perspective about being open and honest in all dealings with participants; to my mind there is no need for concealment or misrepresentation as the goal is to reach a shared understanding of one another’s experience; it is not, for example, about bringing the other around to one’s own point of view. What will be interesting is the extent to which the primary participants share this aim, or at least are able to act in accordance with it!

One final thing that comes to mind is the likelihood that participants will be setting up conversations with people from non-English-speaking backgrounds, or those with unseen disabilities such as learning difficulties or mental health issues. Primary participants may even fit into those categories. I’d like some advice from more experienced researchers about whether and how to seek disclosure from participants on these matters, and how I’d need to act on that kind of information.

I started writing this post with less than two weeks to go until the wedding, soon after I’d woken up at 4am covered in hives. They were even on my face. Now, there are millions of people in the world in far more worrisome situations than having to plan a wedding – not least the 3,000 refugees in Calais who Brendan had just spent the day handing out supplies to – and it was clearly time for me to focus on something else. Fortunately my thesis lurks here in the background; a hairy skulking monster with a wide, lecherous grin.

I had a couple of days on the number 55 with Guy Thomas’s very readable how-to guide recently and it got me thinking about my research question. I really need to speak to some more worldly-wise people about this very soon because, while my thesis idea has been received quite positively so far, the question I am seeking to answer began to retreat. I couldn’t even determine which of Thomas’ four basic types of research question it is.

So let’s just bung down all the questions I noted on the bus:

• Why do we find it difficult to talk to people we disagree with?
• Are our differences reconcilable?
• What does it mean to reconcile our differences?
• As academics, how divorced from reality are we?
• How can we widen our circles of mutual influence?
• How can academics help each other to widen their circles of mutual influence?
• What happens when academics mindfully converse with those outside their usual networks?
• How does broadening our conversational networks affect academic practice?

Okay… now I’ve done that it seems clearer that what I’m looking at is a ‘what happens when’ question. The penultimate one is singing the most sweetly to me at the moment, so I’ll use that as my working title. I think the final question points too strongly towards impact on academic practice; on one hand I think that’s obviously going to be implicit in a question like what happens when you get academics to do X. On the other hand, in doing this project I do want to question the notion and boundaries of academic practice. So I want to keep it broad for now.

Of course the problem with such a broad question is precision (Guy Thomas calls this ‘preciseness’; not sure why). I think with a project like this, ‘interesting’ outcomes are necessarily and appropriately going to be identified and highlighted by the participants themselves. And of course there are only going to be ten primary participants, so my question is really ‘what happens when these academics mindfully converse with those outside their usual networks’. So this is the prima facie question that will direct my literature review. I will start with literature on conversation, perspective and interpretation, the nature and boundaries of academic practice and ‘holistic’ views of academic life, and methodological reading – e.g. reports of projects with similar research designs.

Another key question Thomas asks at this stage is about ‘doability’ (or feasibility I guess). The three biggest potential stumbling blocks as far as I can see are ethics, recruitment and the maintenance of participation. More on those later.

The next question Thomas asks is about motivation, which is relatively easy; I am intrigued by the notion of conversation as an art, by the existence of so many different points of view and the possibility of being able to understand all of them. Personally, I don’t find conversation easy; I know I can do it well when I prepare and focus, but I rarely feel the inclination to do that. In my recent observations I am finding many people (myself included) to be lazy conversationalists; killing time (and indeed the conversation) by asking basic and/or uninteresting questions. I want to get better at conversation because I believe it has the power to change us. However, Thomas warns against being committed to any position, or slipping into activism or campaigning for an issue, and this is something I really need to guard against. I need to maintain a disciplined, critical spirit.

Upcoming posts:

• Ethics questions and ideas – in time to ask tutors for advice.
• Draft introduction. The introduction should be a working document. Hence I should start writing it now, apparently. I’ve ordered Becker’s (2008) ‘how to start and finish your thesis’.
• Literature review: link to working checklist of reading material
• Responses to literature
• Gantt chart of project plan (I saw a nice one of these made of lego once, but to be honest I’ll probably just use a google spreadsheet, seeing as there’s enough crap in my flat already).