Doctored

Van Manen, M. (2007) Phenomenology and Practice. Phenomenology & Practice, 1, 1. pp. 11-30.

N.B. all other references in here are secondary ones for the purpose of signposting myself to other good stuff.

Here’s what I got from Max Van Manen’s paper on furthering understanding of lived experiences through reading and writing about practice; so-called ‘pathic’ writing.

What is the point of pathic writing? 
It would appear that if you’re hoping to get something specific out of it, or to solve a particular problem with it, then you’ve got the wrong attitude. Heidegger (2000, p.12) suggests that phenomenology never makes things easier, but only more difficult. And – seemingly paradoxically – that phenomenology lacks utility if one hopes to do something useful with it. Rather, we have to let ourselves be shaped by phenomenology – to be the things being acted upon – in order to benefit from it:

You can’t do anything with philosophy…. but maybe philosophy can do something with us? – Heidegger 2000, p.13

Van Manen presents one purpose of pathic writing as the ethical correction of technological or calculative ways of being; an antidote to our preoccupation with the engineering of solutions to problems. It is driven by fascination; a desire to see into the heart of things. Writing this takes me back to the first EdD workshop we had in September when Linet and Ian asked us what we wanted to get out of the course and ultimately our research. Paul and I were both adamant that we wanted to be better teachers – to become more effective at improving our practice. I still felt rather the same on writing my RRW1 assignment. I have to admit I am now wavering… on one hand it still seems selfish and exclusive to focus on the creation of knowledge that only those with similar qualifications will be able to access and appreciate. On the other, getting to see into the heart of things sounds wonderfully exciting and I suspect becoming a happier, more fulfilled teacher is just as noble a goal as becoming a ‘better’ one (a technological/calculative notion). Maybe I will turn into a nihilist and not care about becoming either…

Another thing Van Manen seems to like about phenomenological descriptive views of practice is that they can bridge the epistemology of Husserl (based on a prereflective, impressional consciousness that incorporates retentional and protentional aspects), and the ontology of Heidegger (the idea that we have to decontextualise phenomena to experience them in their ‘bare’ or ‘pure’ state – e.g. without the meaning we would usually ascribe to them). I think what this means is that pathic writing enables us to situate our experience temporally (perhaps enriched by what came before and after?), and in a purer state, away from its existential context.

For the reader, the symbolism required in pathic texts, which refer beyond the realm of what can be said clearly and distinctly (Kocklemans 1987, p.ix) can be highly evocative; it stimulates mental imagery that can move and change us.

The characteristics of pathic writing:
This is perhaps a dangerous subheading… I am a little worried that rather than gaining a deep understanding of pathic writing I will end up mimicking it, like the reflective writing assignments satirised by Macfarlane and Gourlay in their chucklesome 1999 paper:

Macfarlane, B. & Gourlay, L. (2009) The Reflection Game: Enacting the Penitent Self. Teaching in Higher Education, 14, 4. pp455-459

So, I’ll just do a little notepad-dump of all the bits and pieces I got from Van Manen’s paper for now. Later on I will cross-reference them with the examples David gave us, in the hope that I’ll be able to see how the various characteristics correspond to specific moves in the text (that doesn’t sound strategic at all… does it?!):

Pathic writing…

• is free from theoretical, prejudicial and suppositional intoxication
• is free of calculative rationality
• does not intend to resolve problems
• constitutes sober (thoughtful) reflection on the lived experience of practice
• acknowledges emotion without being emotional
• is relational, situational, corporeal, temporal and actional <resist temptation here to scream ‘it’s like greased lightning’>
• explores the non-cognitive dimensions of professional experience; moral, emotional, personal, etc.
• uses symbolism to convey that which escapes clear definition
• does not have to be entertaining, or an ‘easy read’.

Something that does confuse me rather is that, while pathic writing seemed initially to me to be a subset of reflective writing, Van Manen describes it as pre-reflective, pre-theoretic and pre-linguistic. Being confronted by an idea of committing something to words without or before actually reflecting on it forces me to question what reflection is (or at least what I believe it to be). Over the years I’ve been blogging, typing has become part of my reflective process; for me, the two have become synchronous.
So… how do I go about doing pathic writing?
I guess the first thing is to choose a topic. Pathic writing is about:

• Sense and sensuality
• Our encounters with others
• Our responses to things, situations and relations

I could brainstorm the above categories… or start by asking myself – what am I fascinated by? What do I want to see into the heart of?

Clearly I need to avoid drawing upon calculative ideas of ‘good practice’, ‘excellence’ and ‘quality’. Maybe a nihilistic attitude will help with this… although generally it sounds like a recipe for disaster…

I was quite inspired by the paragraph about Jacques Derrida; his admission of the philosophical tensions between his personal and scholarly life, and the ides that he explores and formalises – rather than excuses – his own contradictions in his teaching; for example the idea that he desires presence and voice because they do not actually exist. I thought it might be fun to explore a tension or inconsistency between my personal and scholarly beliefs, actions, etc… if I can think of one.

Presumably it is also important that I bring retentional and protentional aspects into this pathic writing task – I will check for that in the examples too.

Finally – Van Manen describes pathic aspects as residing or resonating in the body. Bachelard (1964, p.xxii) uses the metaphor of ‘reverberation’, seemingly for similar ends. I tend to use the word ‘resonate’ a lot in my writing. It’s a way of saying that a stimulus has made me feel something strongly – perhaps unexpectedly – without having to analyse exactly what that feeling is. As a metaphor, mechanical resonance works on several levels. It is a scientific concept that is easily observed but still incredibly mysterious. It is accepted to the point where it is entirely unremarkable unless we start to think really deeply about it. Perhaps if I search for all the times I’ve claimed that something has ‘resonated’ with me, that might give me an idea upon which to base a piece of pathic writing.

I had such a nice time today at our fourth Saturday workshop. Not only was the sun shining, and I’d had a smooth trip up from London on the Oxford Tube (all the trains being screwed with the floods and all); the sessions were fun, thought-provoking and inspiring. I particularly enjoyed David Aldridge’s session; his perspective on things feels very fresh.

I’m excited about starting a new unit. In Researching the Real World Part 2 we’ll be looking at how research methods are developed from epistemologies and ontologies; learning – through deconstructing the methods of others – how to develop our own research design. The unit assignment is to develop and critique a research proposal addressing a problem or issue in the workplace – which is interesting because one of the discussions we had was on Heidegger’s critique of the ‘technological hermeneutic’ – the discourse around calculative thinking and the engineering of solutions to problems. For Heidegger, the teacher’s role is more to do with attending to what is going on in the classroom and being responsive to it. The difference between these two doesn’t seem clear-cut. On reflection – although I like the sound of the second approach and want to believe in it – I thought the difference might simply be linguistic. What does this openness and receptivity look like? I’m keen to read more about this and intend to check out the following – although the online access for this one only goes back to 2002:

Donnelly (1999) Schooling Heidegger: on being in teaching. Teaching and Teaching Education. 15 (8), pp 933–949

Heidegger had some interesting views about ‘levelling’ as well – I thought this might be relevant to the reading and thinking I did back in November about disability, WP/Inclusivity, Bhaskar, etc. He certainly seems like a complex (and in many ways contradictory) character (but perhaps no more than the rest of us…?).

So… we have a task to do for RRW2 in the discussion forums. I’m really pleased David’s making us use these and it sounds like a fun activity. We have to post up between 300-500 words of pathic writing. I’m not entirely sure I understand what that is yet – David suggested it might simply be “an anecdote about something that weirded you out.” Whatever it is, it is supposed to lean towards the poetic, and – I guess – convey emotion, whether that is suffering, passion, weirded-outness, etc.. I think I’ll start – as suggested – by looking at David’s three examples and seeing if anything resonates. Not sure whether the resonance should come from the stories themselves or the means of telling them, but watch this space I guess…!

Aside from this task, there are some readings to look at from Van Manen (2007) and Munday (2012)… and the promise/threat of more to come. David also mentioned Padraig Hogan and David Lewin – I had a quick look at their stuff on Google Books and to be honest it looked a bit theological for my taste – but that’s David’s area and I’m willing to have my mind opened 😉 I’d like to check out some of Hannah Arendt’s writings if there’s something relatively short available.

Bhaskar, R. & Danermark, B. (2006). Metatheory, interdisciplinarity and disability research – A critical realist perspective. Scandinavian Journal of Disability Research, 8, 278-297.

In this paper, Bhaskar and Danermark argue that historically dominant models of disability are reductionist. Reductionism has been tutted at in the other Critical Realist readings – Sayer and Pring – as well as being the topic of one of the early chapters of my current ‘light’ bedtime reading, Zeno and the Tortoise (a dummies’ guide to philosophy). In all these publications, critical realists are seen to embrace complexity and optimism, and argue against overly simplistic (reductionist) or fatalistic (postmodernist) world views.

The specific model proposed in this paper is that of a ‘laminated’ system; where all the possible perspectives are available to draw upon in order to enable and enhance understanding. It’s – somewhat appropriately – very inclusive 😉

The authors gave a nod to Gustavsson’s earlier attempt to develop a suitably complex model for understanding disability. I think they probably liked the complexity of it… maybe they found it too prescriptive? Gustavsson proposed two ‘non-theoretical perspectives’ – seemingly capturing different objectives relating to disability (reform and affirmation?) – and four ‘theoretical perspectives’, two of which rely on essentialism (the notion that things and phenomena have specific attributes); Individual essentialist (corresponding to the medical model), contextual essentialist (corresponding to the social model), social constructionist (the socially constructed reality of disability, e.g. cultural discourse around it), and relative interactionist (a comparative view; eg. disability versus ability/normality).

Three of these seem to fit quite neatly on a matrix of individual/social against idealist/materialist (as per my scrappy little diagram). The top-left quadrant – according to Bhaskar & Danermark – is where phenomenology comes into the frame, perhaps – it seems to me – revealing one of Gustavsson’s non-theoretical perspectives… or something else.

Bhaskar and Danermark argue that models like these need to be incorporated into a many-layered system, and that this is particularly important with disability because it is so very contingent on perspective. They explain that each model accentuates just one of many mechanisms involved in the formation and reproduction of disabilities; therefore such models are not mutually exclusive. Interestingly, they suggest that social models may actually be less valid than others because some types of disability may have social causes – a point that I didn’t understand at first but was then illustrated well in the specific example of dysphagia given in the second half of the paper.

The authors contrast critical realism with naive realist approaches; those which aim to explain ‘what happens on the ground’ through theories that describe only certain aspects of phenomena. A critical realist approach views such theories merely as co-determiners. Another contrast of note is that of ‘strong’ and ‘weak’ constructionism; the former viewing phenomena as purely socially constructed, and the latter appreciating the existence of an interpreted element in the construction of any theoretical understanding. Not that any of this is specific to understanding disability… but it’s relevant. And interesting… kind of.

Clearly critical realists believe in ‘weak’ rather than ‘strong’ or ‘radical’ constructionism. They believe that there is a mind-independent object (a ‘referent’) of ‘disability’, and that when we talk about it – as when we talk about anything – we are making ‘signifiers’ for the ideas and concepts that exist in our minds. This triad of signifier/signified/referent is illustrated in another one of my scribbles on the left using my favourite concept (‘cat’).  The authors claim that if we argue that signifiers are a social construction then we lose the real world object (the ‘referent’). I think they are just warning against getting caught up in interpretation and further away from truth.

Towards the end of the paper there is a little diversion into Marxism and Neo-Kantianism. I’m a long way off feeling comfortable with what’s going down here, particularly regarding the latter, although it seems to promote a focus on the actual and observable as a rational response to our subjectivity (e.g. ‘a non-disabled person cannot know the experience of a disabled person’).

However, the worked example of a patient with dysphagia was an excellent illustration of how the layered system might work in practice, and it is not too much of a conceptual leap to see how one could take another disability and make similar assessments across different strata with different conclusions. I am enjoying the term ‘integrated pluralism’ – the notion that a number of models can exist not merely simultaneously in a mutually inclusive way. It was really useful to see Critical Realism explained and rationalised in the context of a specific case study in a particular area of research.

In this, the second of the readings we were given with the title ‘Beyond Positivism’, Patrick Lees argues for ‘hybrid spaces’ where different ways of thinking about education and research exist for mutual benefit, and an acceptance that standardised educational models cannot lead to equity.

Lees gives a detailed explanation of the impact of narrowing research and policy trends, and the expectation from government that research will provide ‘hard answers’. He leaves it up to us to ponder why government might think this is the best approach. Are they stupid? Do they think we are stupid? Not necessarily. But I do think our government is very much under the thumb of the commercial press, and fearful of public reaction. There may also be an aspect of the government wanting to be told exactly what to do, because they haven’t a clue themselves, don’t want to mess up and/or be seen as weak. Maybe they just desperately want to do ‘the right thing’, which presupposes that a ‘right thing’ exists. Or they don’t want to be responsible for making a bad decision. Possibly a combination of the above.

I genuinely feel that the current system of democracy in this country is failing horribly. Political rhetoric is now indistinguishable from the rhetoric of the tabloids; packed to the rafters with divisive sensationalism. How is it possible to have an inclusive, respectful and collaborative public education system when our political system is exactly the opposite? What would it take to bring in sortition?… £150 to register the Sortition Administration Consortium as a political party, £500 plus ten signatures to register each candidate, then… bang! Take over the commons and bring in random selection to government. I wonder what the rationale for the £500 fee is? Assuming it’s not to cover the administration of the election, I think there are fairer hoops to make candidates jump through, especially these days when online petitioning is so efficient.

And back in the room… Given that we’re clearly stuck with our current system of government for now, what’s the best way forward? Should educational researchers start to play the policy-makers at their own game by framing the outcomes of their research in a form that government are comfortable with; inventing new statistical indexes (the community cohesion index?) and asking questions that sound like hard answers… would the policy-makers notice? Would they care? Even this approach wouldn’t achieve what we really want, which is for everyone to accept how darned complex everything is, and that one size doesn’t – and never will – fit all.

It may be the case – as implied in the Sloan 2006 reference – that nothing will ever change unless we stand together as a community and refuse to collude with the policy-makers’ demands for simplistic and standardised approaches. Which is tricky, given where the research funding is coming from.

It is somewhat depressing that this paper was written in 2007, when Michael Gove was still the Shadow Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families, and the true extent of the ‘middle class education for all’ movement hadn’t yet been revealed…

koalas have fingerprints too

This was a very persuasive article. It almost lured me into believing that human life is so very very different from everything else in the natural world – to the extent where we can claim to be separate from it. But not quite.

No, an apple can’t choose to ignore gravity, but the apple tree did evolve to produce abscisic acid that severs the connection between the stem and the fruit at an appropriate time for its seeds to be dispersed. Evolution is an incredibly complex process – almost too complex for us to comprehend – it is subject to myriad factors and pressures and is dependent on on random mutation. Sometimes I think social scientists could do with understanding a little more about the rest of the natural world; they might realise that it has more in common with the human, social world than they imagined.

The idea of ‘free will’ is taken completely for granted in this paper, but many biologists would question the extent of this freedom; they might argue that our genes are actually the driving force, and that we have simply evolved as effective hosts, alongside many other organisms, none of them perfect hosts by any means, but good enough (the insects are probably the best).

If only trees and apples and DNA could speak! Especially the latter… we’d get a hell of a story out of that double helix. Bees, as well. I’d like to talk to some bees… if we could, we might find out that they think they have free will too.

I’m not sure how we can be sure that our capacity for moral choices is unique. Presumably, like all our other characteristics, our capacity for morality would have evolved, and I’m curious as to why we would be the only ones to have it. Convergent evolution is rife in nature – hooves, for example, evolved from claws in several unrelated lineages. Perhaps morality is a ‘glitch’ that will eventually lead us into a genetic dead end along with the giant panda. Or perhaps it’s just a random quirk, like fingerprints (a trait we share with the koala bear – not many people know that).

For me, what makes us distinctly human (from a human perspective, of course) is not so much about free will as about language. Essentially, this paper is about investigating matters of free will and choice among our fellow human beings. Having a common means of communication – language – enables us to investigate matters of free will and choice more deeply than we would be able to with, say, a tree frog. So, we can go beyond observing and counting in order to make predictions, and start eliciting narratives that make explicit what is going on for people and enable us to develop a deeper understanding of the situation – and its significance. Other animals – and plants too – have their own means of communicating with one another, but it makes perfect sense that the greater the commonality in our communication, the more nuanced and delicate our awareness can become. This idea has been touched upon in readings for both units so far; in terms of what it is possible to know, and in terms of academic (and other) discourse(s).

Something that frustrates me greatly is the reporting of public health and education research in the media; projects are often over-simplified – presumably in order to generate controversy – in a way that implies a positivist perspective and approach. Take this Guardian article on Sheffield University’s study on breastfeeding, for example. Maybe I’m wrong, but I would expect that, in addition to simply adding up the numbers to see whether breastfeeding increased, there is some kind of deeper investigative work going on; talking to the participants in the study about their choices, etc.. The quotes from the researchers themselves are about the thoughts and feelings of the new mothers they have been working with, and carry the hallmark of an interpretivist perspective. So, assuming they *are* going to be doing more than just counting heads on breasts, why don’t the journalists admit to this? Is it because that would make the research sound more reasonable, and therefore not controversial enough to make it to press? Do they not understand anything beyond the scientific method? Do they think *we* won’t understand?

Education and public health are always going to be controversial; they present us with the same moral dilemma: Is it better to leave people to make their own choices, or to force them to do what we think is best for them, with all the incentives and nudges in between? The tipping point – whether one believes that this is ‘real’ or socially constructed – is always going to be in flux, and the humanistic perspective at least carries a sense of honesty about the complexity of the social world.

Buchanan, D. R. (1998) Beyond positivism: humanistic perspectives on theory and research in health education. Health Education Research. 13 (3), 439-450

Sayer, A (2000) Realism and Social Science, London: SAGE, 67 – 80

I could have moved on from critical realism now… there is other reading material I need to get through by the end of the month (on post-positivism, humanism and academic discourse), but I felt like I was on the cusp of pulling a lot of stuff together in my mind, and I was determined to reach a better place of understanding with last month’s reading before moving on. David’s comments on my last two blog posts also served to reassure and motivate me, and now I’ve finally got through the ‘pomo flips’ chapter (yes, it looks like ‘porno’ in any font, there’s no escaping it) I’m really glad I persevered.

The satisfaction I’m feeling at the moment is in part down to feeling that I really do, now, understand the last three readings, but mostly down to feeling that I have found myself in them. I am a realist. I got a eureka moment when I read about ‘fallibilism’, and this makes total sense when I think of the affinity and interest that I’ve always had for the natural sciences. Was it my studies and early career as a Biology teacher that instilled this philosophical viewpoint in me? Or did my philosophical viewpoint influence my study and career choices? I suspect possibly the latter, and then my choices reinforced it.

A key strength for me of this chapter was that it took time to explain the paradoxes that were alluded to in the other two. There was a clear point to them here (other than to bamboozle and/or entertain, depending on your existing level of familiarity with them) – in fact, the paradoxes were the point.

Here’s my attempt to summarise some of the arguments in support of a Critical Realist philosophy (I’m intending these as being revisable!):

1. If we reject the existence of ‘truth’, then we can’t get any closer to it. Rejection of truth is a paradox, because to state that truth does not exist is an attempt at stating an absolute truth. To quote Sayer – rejection of foundationalism is simply a different kind of foundationalism. This is what Pring was getting at on page 72 (the bit that really annoyed me – I get it now, he didn’t need to make it so difficult). Realism argues that, despite the social, linguistic nature of knowledge, it is still ‘capable of grasping something about the nature of the world’.
2. Critical realists are fallibilists – they believe that humans can be wrong about their understandings of the world and yet be justified in having these misunderstandings or false beliefs, provided they are open to amending their understanding in light of new evidence. Our continued progress depends on identifying and revising causation; not in an absolute, final way, but well enough to meet our needs.
3. Realists believe that there *is* a structure to reality – this is a belief based on logic rather than observation. Postmodernists tend to interpret the absence of observed regularity as an absence of structure.
4. Relativists (despite being relativists) will argue that one theory cannot be truer than another because there isn’t a common agreed standard for judgement. This is nonsensical. Why should the lack of an agreed standard stop us from arguing about what is true or right? If there *was* a common, agreed standard for judgement, there wouldn’t be any need to argue about it.
5. Idealists/relativists will argue that it is okay to believe whatever you like. While this perspective sounds inclusive and ‘fluffy’, it allows those in power (e.g. Michael Gove) to enforce their way on others even if it’s a bit, um, rubbish. Realists believe that attempting to get a ‘grand view’ is important and that tensions within that ‘grand view’ need to be acknowledged and negotiated. Different viewpoints can be entertained at the same time; in life we all have multiple identities anyway.

Another good thing about this article was that it brought in a number of other really interesting key ideas as asides (one reason why I ended up spending so long over it). I went off on a bit of a tangent exploring ‘gendered dualisms’. I know I have some masculine traits (I once did an online psychometric test that assumed I was a man), and I often find it easier to talk to and connect with men than women (not as a rule, it’s just a general trend I’ve observed), so this idea of ‘masculine instrumentalism’ versus ‘feminine expressiveness’ really interested me; not just on a personal level, it also showed me a more objective, less emotive (more ‘masculine’!) argument for feminist critical theory; one that explores the potential impact of androcentric language and thought, and different ways of thinking that aren’t necessarily dependent on one’s chromosomes.

The idea that foetuses have really good dreams, and deaf-mute people can still know a lot, blew my mind, just like it did in 1986 when my Year 7 teacher told us about Helen Keller. I distinctly remember wondering how on earth anyone could think without words… a question that my teacher couldn’t answer, and subsequently troubled me for years afterwards (it still does). Wasn’t it Vygotsky who did the experiments with the children and the candy on the high shelf (and the chair and the stick)? He found that the children who were made to stay silent – rather than being able to talk through the problem – found it harder to work out how to get the candy. Although Vygostsky emphasised the strong contingency between thought and language, he was very clear that words are merely symbols for things. Things still exist without words, and therefore epistemology shouldn’t just be restricted to the relationship between words and and things.

I work at a specialist Art & Design institution, where there is a lot of postmodernism bouncing around. I did wonder whether it was a shame that my first in-depth encounter with it has been a stinging critique of the risks inherent in the postmodernist approach, rather than something more positive, but, me being me, I think all that deconstruction – without reconstruction – would have got me down. I mentioned defeatism in the first paragraph of my response to Chapter 1 and it was reassuring to see my instincts explicitly echoed in this chapter. Both Paul and I have been vocal from the start of the course about our belief that educational research should have a practical purpose; that it should aim to get closer to the truth and to inform the choices we make, and I can see the resonance between this belief and the critical realist perspective.

“Maybe the distinction will seem clearer on reading the other introduction to Critical Realism we’ve been given (Pring 2000).” – Me, November 1st.

…No, it didn’t really help, not yet. I understood the conclusion fine, but found myself getting really angry at various points in the middle (especially on p72), when I felt the author was just wantonly throwing paradoxes at me, possibly to deliberately confound me for fun, maybe to put off anyone with an IQ lower than 200 from daring to dip their toes in the water of educational research, or maybe just because this is how they actually think on a day-to-day basis and they just wanted to get it out before they went insane.

I’m pretty upset about it actually. I mean, why postpone the account of ‘what is meant by intelligent common sense’ until the end of the chapter? Even more incomprehensibly, why didn’t I just read the end first? The whole thing made much more sense afterwards. I feel partly responsible for this whole debacle.

If I’ve achieved anything by reading this article, maybe I’ve gained a sense of how hopeless everything is. When I first read the unit assignment on the first day, it seemed manageable – straightforward even. I wasn’t bothered at first that I didn’t feel like I had a ‘position’ on these controversial concepts – reality, truth, knowledge, etc. I guess I thought that would come through reading and writing. But I feel like I’m getting further away from it, and this is a very uncomfortable situation for me.

If I have a position, it’s something like this: I believe there *is* a reality independent of us, but it can’t necessarily be discovered or determined (because of our biases and the socially-constructed nature of what we observe)? Even if we – as sentient beings – can’t make a judgement about whether the conclusions are ‘true’ or ‘false’, that doesn’t mean they’re not one nor the other, that ‘truth’ doesn’t exist, or that there’s no point in trying to get to it. The opposing view to realism appears to deny that reality is anything but socially constructed, but to me this is a difference between what IS (ontology) and what is possible for us to KNOW (epistemology) – and why we have the two things.

…but mostly I just can’t get my head around it. I just want to be a better teacher, and to help other people become better teachers. I know all this is – deep, deep down – relevant to that. It will – presumably – help me to take a more objective approach to analysing and evaluating what takes place between me and my students, and deducing possible mechanisms through which the things I do might influence their learning. The section on causal explanation is really useful in this piece because it gives educational examples to illustrate both the complexity and the unpredictability of social mechanisms. My reaction to this chapter is probably doing a good job of illustrating that; while my intentions are to understand it so that I can draw on it in my assignment, my motives are complex; intrinsic enjoyment of learning and achievement is in there, but so are less admirable qualities. My disposition when I don’t understand something is often to be angry – it goes further than frustration – it’s genuine anger, mostly at myself. I think it comes from having high expectations of myself and then not meeting them, and I direct the anger towards myself as a kind of self-discipline, because I believe it will help me perform better. I suspect it doesn’t help at all though…!

According to the authors, this chapter (from Sikes & Potts’ Researching Education from the Inside) begins to explore ‘some of the strengths and limitations of being an insider researcher’. Strengths?! It’s a catalogue of misery; a relentless battering of challenges, problems, worry, suspicion and conflict. Where are the opportunities? Where is the passion, the sense of achievement and the joy in having made a difference?! Interestingly, Drake and Heath admit that they were – to an extent – told what the participants thought they wanted to hear. Their interview techniques – active listening and rapid interpretation – could very easily have communicated their intentions (it sounds like they only asked their subjects to elaborate on the negatives).

Provided you manage to shake off the depressive cloud that hangs over this piece, there is some interesting stuff in here – i.e. lots of stuff I found myself questioning.

My first question is whether it is necessary or useful to continue to talk about a split between ‘academics’ and ‘practitioners’; ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ the academy, etc.. Like half the participants in Drake and Heath’s study, I am a lecturer at a University. I am on an academic contract. I am a teacher and course leader and an ECR (‘early career researcher’). I am a doctoral student. If/when I produce ‘knowledge’, is this really happening outside the academy?

My second question is whether a practitioner researcher, having identified an area for development within the department’s area of work, might really be accused of being unprofessional. Why on earth would anyone think that? What other motive could you possibly have other than wanting to improve practice (especially if you are conscientious enough to undertake a doctorate – of any description). Maybe I am being naive (or wilfully ignorant, as someone called me once), but it makes little sense to me.

My third question is about the supposed tension between research and practice that professional doctorate students have to manage. Here’s another way of looking at this; research and practice actually go together very well indeed, in that enquiring deeply into teaching practice (hopefully) improves the teaching practice. For ‘pure’ researchers, who may be researching, for example, homosexuality in track and field sports, while teaching an undergraduate unit in qualitative research methods, the tension may be more problematic.

Essentially, what this chapter brought home to me was how exceedingly fortunate I am to work in an institution where I feel supported, valued and respected, and where I have space to grow. It did also, perhaps, underline the message of Anderson & Herr’s (1998) paper on the exploration of validity as a concept. What it didn’t do, in my opinion, is communicate ways of dealing with the ‘problem’ of being an active, insider participant in a study. Two of the three strategies given (changing jobs, and conducting the project elsewhere) would surely be more appropriately described as avoiding it.

As an aside, I did find this sentence amusing:

“In our study, people who had completed their doctorates recognised that managing time successfully did not just happen by chance.” (p139)

No… really?! 🙂

The later, shorter article of these two – both published in Educational Researcher – was the one on our reading list for Researching the Real World, but I ended up dragging up the earlier one in order to find out more.

The 2002 piece is a response to a special issue of the same publication which comprised four ‘thought pieces’ (all written by doctoral educators) on what and how doctoral students should be taught. Anderson objects to the authors’ unwillingness to accept practitioner inquiry from their own students, particularly given that the pieces themselves are insider accounts of practice.  Anderson argues that the insider perspective, the focus on action, the spiralling self-reflection and the intimate relationship between research and practice that are characteristic of practitioner research make it more powerful and more useful for the reader than basic (‘pure’) research. Anderson doesn’t accuse the authors of hypocrisy – he points out that none of the four authors describe their works as ‘research’ – but it is clear he sees them as being on a spectrum of sorts.

This article was very short and raised more questions than it answered. First, the intensity of the language surprised me. Anderson talks of a ‘battle’ and ‘violence’ around basic and practitioner research, the subordination of practitioner research and practitioner researchers, etc. I honestly had no idea that this kind of thing was going on; I naively thought that the vast majority of education researchers were kind, tolerant people at ease with pluralism and all that jazz. I thought the interpretivist perspective enveloped things like action research (it did according to Crotty anyway). Jack Whitehead – one of the godfathers of action research – was one of my Masters tutors at Bath, and I think I’ve probably absorbed a somewhat skewed education on the status and legitimacy of small-scale insider inquiry. This is one reason why I dug out the earlier article – I felt I needed more evidence that this was a genuine conflict. The other question I had was; if we are to allow practitioner enquiry the status of research, what are these special validity criteria that Anderson alludes to?

The 1998 article did satisfy my curiosity to an extent; I found Anderson and Herr’s arguments on institutional resistance to practitioner research persuasive and some of it resonated with my own experience – notably recently when I had to add copious notes to our institutional research ethics approval forms to enable my own students to use them for their own small-scale teaching development projects. My own Masters dissertation project was based on action research, and I remember struggling to reconcile what made sense to me in that context, and what was ‘right’ according to the ethics approval process.

The validity criteria proposed made sense as well – I thought about trying to second-guess them before I actually read the article but then decided I’d probably spent too long on this already 😉 But if I had I probably would have come up with at least a couple of these:

• Outcome validity – does it actually solve the problem?
• Process validity – is the problem framed and solved in a way that promotes ongoing learning?
• Democratic validity – extent of stakeholder collaboration
• Catalytic validity – how the process reorients, focuses and energises participants
• Dialogic validity – peer review

The question of who such guidelines and/or criteria should be developed by is a good one; I agree with the conclusions in the 1998 piece that academics and practitioners should work together, but I also wonder why people with dual roles do not feature at all in these pieces – was the researcher/teacher divide more prominent at the end of the last century? Anderson’s 2002 piece was inspired by the writings of four researchers writing as teachers. I would have thought these kinds of people would be ideal contributors to the development of quality indicators, but Anderson presents these two populations as very separate warring factions, rather than roles that may be combined.

One final point… to an extent I think Anderson’s argument is weakened by pointing out that many doctoral students are full-time educational practitioners; the implication here is that their situations preclude them from engaging in anything other than insider research, and if this wasn’t the case then of course they would be doing ‘real’ research instead. I think if he’d stuck to his guns about the intrinsic value of insider, action-focused research, it would have sounded more persuasive.

Anderson, G, L. (2002) Reflecting on Research for Doctoral Students in Education. Educational Researcher 31 (7): 22-25

Anderson, G. L., & Herr, K. (1998). The New Paradigm Wars: Is there room for rigorous practitioner knowledge in schools and universities? Educational Researcher 28 (5): 12-21

Halfway through this one I thought, “oh damn… I should have read this before the Morrison chapter…”. However, it does set the scene of social research more clearly and definitely than the first reading, and for that reason I think it was probably worthwhile to have gained a sense of the contested nature of all of this before I got too comfortable with the structure presented here. It was conceptually neat enough for me to attempt to sketch out the different layers of the model on a sheet of A3 (specially purchased along with a new set of felt-tips; I was in a very back-to-school kind of mood):

Essentially the ‘reasonably clear-cut way of using terms and grasping what is involved in the process of social research’ that Michael Crotty has presented in this chapter is a four-layered explanation; when articulating a proposal one would usually start with the methods to be used to collect and work with data, and then rationalise these by relating them to a specific methodology (which seeks to reveal a certain kind of ‘truth’ or ‘meaning’ – for example phenomenological research aims to elicit people’s lived experiences of a particular concept or phenomenon). The methodology is in turn rationalised through the theoretical perspective being taken. The clarity of connections between these two layers seems particularly variable to me at this point, and this is mainly the fault of Interpretivism, which Crotty further divides into sub-perspectives that are difficult to distinguish from methodologies. However, I see why it makes sense to subdivide Interpretivism in this way as; in rejecting the positivist view and proposing that we can’t determine truth, or fact, or whatever you want to call it, if we don’t subsequently identify what we believe can be determined, then we will lose direction.

Theoretical perspectives stem primarily from epistemologies but no doubt there are factors that pervert these connections… I’m fairly happy with the three epistemologies identified on the map, but I’m not 100% sure there is any real (or implied?!) connection between subjectivism and any of the theoretical perspectives over on the right hand side. I’m not too concerned about this though, because these perspectives – Postmodernism, Structuralism and Post-structuralism – appear to be deliberately woolly and contested… they are about wooliness and contestedness.

I have included the two ontological perspectives on the map as well, but set aside in the corner as I agree with Crotty that they’re not really relevant right now (will they ever be?) I’m just going to say that I’m definitely a Realist for the moment, although I suspect if I thought more deeply about these things I might start to waver. I’m not going to do that.

I had a useful conversation with The Lovely Brendan about the ideas on my map as I was putting the finishing touches to it and he was cooking me a delicious tea of baked trout, mashed squash and pan-fried leeks (Brendan had always thought of himself as an Idealist – who knew?!). Later, when I was assuring him that the squash was definitely NOT stringy, he suggested that it might depend on what he meant by stringy, and I pondered out loud whether ‘stringiness’ as a concept existed outside the mind of conscious beings.

We agreed we needed to start thinking outside the squash.

Crotty 1998: The digested read (in 140 characters)…

Here’s a simple explanation of all those complex words and things to do with social research. Don’t expect it to be useful for much longer.