learn, live, thrive

Philosophical Roots of (American) Anthropology

2011-12-27T16:11:00.000Z

This book, by William Y(ewdale) Adams (1998) has been on my shelves making me feel guilty. No longer. Why do anthropologists do what they do, indulging in the natural history of the human species. They don't look at themselves but leave that to sociologists. They concentrate on 'other', people different from white middle-class Americans - people in tribes, the Papua or Amazonian rain forests and so on. Is this studying humans in their raw state? (and are these people really 'primitive'?). Is the fact that they are uneducated (into western values) part of the attraction? I am not going to summarise the book, a survey of many philosophical schools. The conclusion indicates that the author doesn't know the answer either, either for the anthropology profession as a whole, or for individual anthropologists. We can't keep the 'primitive' in aspic, in a cultural museum, so many now educated descendants of classic studies may well not appreciate what has been concluded in their family name. The anthropologist goes in, observes, listens, and then describes. They have then had pet theories - evolutionism (we still talk of stone-age aboriginees and bushmen), functionalism, structuralism - most of which have now withered. The answer may be the same as why do we bother, with great discomfort for the professionals, to follow moose and snow tigers and watch them killing and having sex. Seeing rare things, admiring, the thrill of the chase, the collecting instinct perhaps. 'I have seen a trance dance, got the photos and the tea-shirt'.

An educational parallel are those who go into schools as observers, watch, listen, comment. They may use a theory or two to help find a way through the dense forest of words, gestures and transactions. They may believe people they should be more sceptical of, and seek out people whose voices might otherwise be silent. They purpose, perhaps to cast light on something that needs attention and suggest improvements. That is a political philosophy, a demand for quality, for justice, for equity, and for respect. Tom Harrisson the anthropologist did this in the 1930s in Savage Civilisation - the savages of course meaning us, the imperial powers. Others, like Napoleon Chagnon, on the Yanomami, did great damage (for status and profit) by describing the tribe as chronically violent and providing excuses for genocide by loggers. An anthropologist today has to be socially critical: in schools, this excites an interest in power and powerlessness, democracy and voice, freedom and repression, sarcasm and support, bullies and victims (adult as well as young), deception and honesty, lies and truth. An educational anthropologist with such an interest would probably not be invited into school twice.

Garden Blog

2011-12-25T12:42:00.002Z

To see our garden on Christmas morning, see
http://romancourtgardens.blogspot.com/
Christmas Greetings, Stephen

Marriage and statistics

2011-12-18T14:25:00.000Z

Nick Clegg criticises tax breaks for married couples as social engineering.

The Tory Centre for Social Justice think-tank's Gavin Poole said: "Nick Clegg's stance flies in the face of all the evidence, completely ignoring national and international data demonstrating how important marriage is to the health and well-being of children and families."Marriage is important because one in three couples who live together when a child is born split up before that child is five, compared to only one in 11 married couples."

The logic then is that if more people are bribed to marry, they will stay together longer. I am not against marriage, having been married 43 years and counting, but am against the abuse of statistics. Those couples with a deep commitment tend to stay together longer and tend to get married. Those who don't get married may have a deep commitment (2 out of 3 stay together on these figures and some would marry over time) leaving a comparatively larger number (as compared with the married group) of insecure couples in this non-married group. These are not suddenly going to become more secure because they have a marriage licence.

The argument is therefore statistical nonsense.

Children on the street.

2011-12-08T16:17:00.001Z

A long absence, my apologies. Too much other writing.

This item is about my former PhD student, Barnabe D'Souza in Mumbai. He has worked tirelessly for most of his life working with street children, attempting to rehabilitate them into jobs and worthwhile lives. This means educating them about drugs and safe behaviours, and offering them a sense of togetherness and purpose. Needless to say their lives judder from one crisis to the next. Abandoned once, society at large would continue to abandon them unless strong people get up and struggle on their behalf.
Congratulations to Barnabe. His PhD thesis is available on http://eprints.worc.ac.uk/512. His book From Ecstasy to Agony and Back: Journeying with Adolescents on the Street is available from Sage.

Visual Methods in Social Research

2011-04-28T12:07:00.001+01:00

I have found the following helpful: http://researchthatmatters.blogspot.com/2011/02/visusal-methods-in-social-research.html on

Banks, Marcus. (2001) Visual Methods in Social Research London, UK: Sage and

Collier, John, Malcolm Collier and Edward T. Hall (1986) Visual anthropology: Photography as a research method University of New Mexico Press. [New edition of Collier, John Jr., (1967) with the same title, published by Holt, Rinehart & Winston.]

The biology of religion

2011-04-02T12:10:00.000+01:00

It seems likely that homo sapiens was a religious creature - that is, religion emerged early in humanity's history. Recent scepticism by some is balanced by the wide range of orthodox and unorthodox religious views by others, views on the paranormal, the soul, magic, life force and above all evil forces and entities, so loved by pulp writers and films.

Why is this? The core reason is simple. Early humans developed language which at some point became complex enough to ask Why? Small children do this early enough. The trouble with children is that some questions are too difficult to answer at their level, or so the adult thinks. The trouble with humanity was that they had insufficient knowledge to answer accurately cosmological or existential questions. So an earthquake needed an understandable cause, and was understood as an 'act of God'; jealousy needed an explanation, so evil spirits provided good explanations, as also they did to explain disease and death. Whether personalities live on after death, and in what form, produced all sorts of theories about ancestors. Over-excited causality about the origins of the world produced creator deities and origin myths.

It is hard to test this out. Anthropology may help. The San Bushmen of southern Africa (see my paper) are modern humans who have lives wilderness lives with technology derived from nature (stone, wood, leather) whose ideas were not modernised by western education. Their stories have been paintakingly archived over the past hundred years. When they looked at the stars, they saw not the 3D with huge distances, but the 2D star pattern as presented. So too must early humans. They interpreted the sky intelligently, it the light of their own understanding; and they observed and studies landscape, prey animals and food plants. So they were systematic scientists. They studied the brain too, using the plant drugs they had tested and mesmeric dancing and rhythms, so altered mind states were part of their reality, rubbing shoulders with their dreams. Above all, life for them was a game of chance. They felt themselves caught in the cross-fire of hostile forces; the best they could do is to have enough understanding to recognize it and dodge if they could. Bushman religion is hardly a religion at all, but an interpretation of natural life with supernatural explanations for the unexplainable. There were gods and they were feared, but they were not worshipped or even respected. What ritual was observable, the trance dance, was social and anti-religious (designed to chase spirits away).

So humans are hard-wired to wanting certain answers to questions, even if they have to subconsciously invent that certainty. All questions have answers, however improbable, as Douglas Adams would have said. In evolutionary terms, this is helpful because it helps to plan safety strategies rather than being unconcerned with danger. Humans are hard-wired to be anxious, and have evolved extraordinary ways of resolving this anxiety in order to live with it. Anxiety about socially unacceptable behaviour led to in-group morality, whatever the level of out-group violence. Therefore, humans are also hard-wired to be conformist and conventional. Stanley Milgrom, a holocaust survivor set up a famous (some would say infamous, but I disagree) experiment where experimental subjects were asked to give severe electric shocks to partners (actually actors, unbeknown to them). Two thirds would not resist the demands of authority (the researcher telling them to do it and not spoil the experiment) and administered shocks that would have been lethal. Philip Zimbardo's Stanford Prison Experiments similarly showed that two thirds not only followed orders, but many did so enthusiastically and sadistically. We are hard-wired to obey, and follow the crowd. As one who has always swum against the tide, ever since my three year old campaign to discredit Father Christmas, I find this hard to comprehend, but I recognize that, in evolutionary terms, in a different society I may have been dead before adulthood, just as any American white in a former generation would have been risking his or her life by protesting against lynching a black victim. German resisters against Nazism put themselves, and their families, in great danger. The herd obeyed.

Nevertheless, we need to deal with this hard-wired obedience. Because of it, humans have been the most violent of species. Principles, standards, virtues, morals and human rights have all been tried.

For the origins, supernaturalism leading to spirits, powers and gods can be viewed as 'religion' but maybe just a set of assumptions. Where early religions (that is, 3000+ years before the present) organised themselves, such as Ra and Aton in Egypt, they were declarations of power. Assyrian gods supported military conquests. Formalised religion produced a group of 'us' who fought against 'them', as Yahweh's Elijah did against Baal, and as all Hebrew prophets did. The final editing of Hebrew Bible texts such as the Torah and histories, and the assumptions of Ezra and Nehemiah, show that after the return from exile in the 5th century BCE, a powerful elite tried to set an exclusivist agenda, even requiring foreign wives to be divorced.

Religions which followed are outside these comments, but I invite readers to consider power implications within the religions which survived, and also the resistance to power that some of them reveal. Ethical religion may be a way of taming the religious impulse which over centuries caused such damage.

Cultural capitalists and their symbolic violence.

2011-03-15T11:30:00.000Z

Reading about Pierre Bourdieu in theses and articles, you might wonder when his critical fangs were removed. This post returns to Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture by Bourdieu and Passeron (1977) to repair his bite. Reproduction means how the cultural status quo is reproduced. It has two parts, or 'Books', the first theoretical, the second an application to French society. I am focusing here on Book 1.
It is the result of a partnership in which every sentence and paragraph was poured over and constantly redrafted to produce the most rational argument they could for the science of society. At its centre is Power, held and exerted by those with influence who set all significant agendas. They control what is taken to be truth and knowledge by allowing no doubt, debate or counter voices: this is a process of symbolic violence. The education system is a site of this symbolic violence, as the curriculum is controlled formally and informally by the arbitary decisions and agendas of those in power (arbitrary is the opposite of rational). Where the link between the decision and its genesis in power is hidden, the violence is illegitimate: the imposed interpretation is claimed to be the only truth. A pedagogic action is, in objective terms, symbolic violence where it is arbitrarily imposed. The claim for privilege implies pedagogic authority and those who are allowed to exert it are carefully policed and trained so that the arbitrary conditions of privilege are reproduced in the next generation. This pedagogic work is inculcated to produce a durable internalisation of the principles and assumptions (habitus). Opposition to the habitus are subject to sanctions and punishments to police the privilege. The assumptions are declared legitimate (consecrated) and at the same time their genesis in power is obscured: the interpretations are simply declared to be true. The edifice of this privilege is built with symbolic artefacts, which combine to make a culture. These symbolic artefacts can be viewed as cultural capital using a financial metaphor. The privileged are 'rich' with cultural mechanisms to impress and gain status. Critical analysts of society need to uncover the arbitrariness and decouple truth and knowledge from power and privilege.
Applying this, the church and governments are viewed as privileged power holders; the working class and immigrants are the losers. Social justice demands that we work to overturn such privilege and expose its arbitrariness.

The Bible, research and dialogue

2011-03-13T11:39:00.002Z

Thanks to Viv for the following, not my normal reading:
"The University of Exeter lecturer told Radio Times: ‘Eve, particularly in the Christian tradition, has been very unfairly maligned as the troublesome wife.’
But former MP Ann Widdecombe, who is a Roman Catholic, said: ‘I would guess that most other theologians will demolish her theory in three seconds flat.’ "
[http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1364018/Atheist-Dr-Francesca-Stavrakopoulout-BBC-face-religion.html]
The programme is 9pm Tuesday 15th.

I wrote earlier about dialogue. Interesting that politicians (or ex politicians) cannot do dialogue, only express their unconsidered opinions as rudely as possible and do battle with anyone who dares to disagree. No wonder politics is in a constant mess. This however gives me the chance to talk a little about the Bible (and see also my blog 4004BCE). I was brought up by fundamentalist Christians, but managed during A level religious studies to begin to think critically. Their view was that human history is accurately contained in the Bible story. My view now is that the view of history was constructed by the people who wrote the Bible books, and that it was political. It may contain nuggets of historical data, but they are few and far between, and always problematic. I developed this in Creating the Old Testament.

The story of Eve was written for a purpose - a social purpose, a political purpose, a dogmatic purpose. It commented on the view of the writer(s) of relationships between the sexes. Christian use of the story helped to define the policy of the early church. That is not to say that the stories themselves are as stereotyped as my upbringing suggested. They deserve further study as we read the words of the translation too glibly: original meanings are never as straightforward as those expressed from some pulpits. People die, can distinguish between good and evil, women bear children with pain, men provide food with difficulty, and snakes are poisonous - all the ingredients are there. And the writer theologian asserts, none of this is God's fault. Not even wisdom, for then 'humans will become like one of us'. Us?? What better clue to encourage us to dig deeper.

Critical issues in visual methodology

2011-03-13T09:21:00.000Z

This is a call for papers for a journal special issues. I doubt if I will be submitting, but this is an opportunity for a few first thoughts.
Methodology is the process of conceptualising and producing evidence to support an investigation being carried out. Much of this evidence is in words, written or spoken. The emphasis on visual methodology is instead on evidence which can be seen. Ethnography is an old methodology based around observing societies and communities. Anthropologists focused on distant traditional societies (Africa, Melanesia, India) until social change gave them different agendas. Sociologists studied groups closer to home, in our own society. Observation had a number of drawbacks. Notes kept in field diaries were filtered through the assumptions of the ethnographers, who recorded what they decided, in the way the decided, and may well not have recorded much that was important. Men were in particular unable to obtain much data on women's lives. They wrote up their notes, often years later, in accordance with existing theories such as functionalism or structuralism. We wonder today how much credence to give their accounts.
This introduces us to issues of research on education. Much research has been based on interviews, recording what teachers in the main think about teaching. Their views need not tie closely up with what actually happens, or with what they actually do. Observation, or perhaps video recordings, can help to fill in this important gap.
The following are some fairly random thoughts on how visual methods might apply to educational research in order to broaden the perspective.
• Observation of schools and classes. The ethnographer, notebook in hand, becomes a commentator on what he or she sees. We know however that people see what they look for, and experience of Ofsted confirms the vision of some observers is very limited. Quality observations require highly trained and intelligent minds.
• Use of video to record events and participants is currently very simple, requiring little more than mobile phones. Pupils can make their own videos. The researcher is advised to encourage wider discussions of the visual material by interpreting it with a representative group of interested parties.
• Video (reflexive) diaries are now easily possible. Computers have inbuilt cameras which can record users. A reflexive diary might record regular thoughts when having to type these thoughts might discourage regularity. Better still, the research could link with a critical friend for regular online conversations which prompt reflexivity through questioning and prompting. A devil’s advocate technique could also be helpful.
• Drama and roleplay are very effective pupil activities which can be caught on video. An educational point is likely to be remembered if part of an enjoyable event, and problem-solving role-play can be part of co-constructivism of knowledge.
• Photographs can represent outdoor work/Forest School activities, displays, school and classroom environments. They can be used as stimulus for discussions.
• Wall of comments: pupils and students can explore, discuss, and make suggestions about a wide range of topics putting their ideas on pop-it notes which are then stuck onto a ‘wall of comments’. These can be sifted, sorted, ranked and reordered to form an argument. Again, this emphasises co-constructivist knowledge-building.
• Creative artifacts (pictures, sculptures) can also become stimulus for discussion..

Any further ideas, please add to Comments. How to incorporate visual data into theses is very easy in electronic academic writing, but tests the limits of the traditional paper thesis. This might encourage Universities to experiment with new forms of thesis using digital technology, thereby encouraging hyperlinks to visual and auditory material..

Dialogue

2011-03-12T18:07:00.000Z

A few things have come together to give some consideration to dialogue. But definition it is two or more people talking openly together, discussing ideas and seeking solutions. It is not one giving a monologue to the other, or each giving monologues to each other, in which minds are fixed and unchangeable. Dialogue consists of conversation partners who are happy to share and find answers together. Put one way, the topic of dialogue is something unresolved, with conversation partners wishing to compare and develop what the 'know' and think.
A long history in inter-faith dialogue throws up some questions. There are points that are not open, as the beliefs of each are not unresolved. The so-called dialogue is actually monologue, with each giving their point of view or belief system for the other to appreciate. True dialogue seeks new resolutions, insights and works to constructing new 'knowledge' (that is, shared understandings of the aspect being discussed). Dialogue therefore carries unacceptable dangers and challenges to what I will call the decided, committed and closed minded [I do not regard these as synonyms] who are unlikely to want their paradigm to shift.
In philosophical terms, dialogue describes the form of writing in which two or more characters ask questions and seek answers, the written dialogue allowing multiple voices and arguments being put, weighed and emended. Socratic questioning is a case in point. This is a process of constantly revising what we think we know and subject it to rational discussion and verification.
Dialogue emphasises external challenges to our ideas and assumptions. We also do this by reading so long as we internalise and test what we read and are prepared to be changed by it. Fiction and theatre are as important as these explore emotions and assumptions in vivid and accessible ways.
Is thinking an inner dialogue? In a way we way up pros and cons and 'talk to ourselves', but although we can challenge ourselves by cues such as "How do you know? Prove it! Suppose the opposite is true", it is not like having to respond to a real person. It is a pale imitation, and the term dialogue might not be appropriate. The inner conversation could be externalised by taking a leaf from both fiction and philosophy. If the issue for exploration is the subject of a story in which characters debate prose and cons, and the writer honestly lets the dialogue go where it wills and does not lead it in a pre-decided direction, this may be potentially mind changing for the writer, and by extension for future readers.
For educational research, the sort of dialogue in which many voices declare their interest and point of view, and a win-win solution is sort, then the result is more likely to be helpful than if this is not the case. Such a win-win conclusion is not a compromise, which is a win some lose some ending. Nor is it consensus, which is either a majority decision (with a disappointed minority), or an acceptance of the views of those who should loudest and longest, or a watered down lowest common denominator that everyone can accept. It is a different way of thinking, rejecting competitiveness and assertiveness to seek social and personal justice. Everyone is concerned about everyone else getting as much as possible from the deal which can itself expand and improve through this process. Win-win may however be seen as a defeat by the opinionated and dogmatic, including and maybe especially politicians.

So-called spirituality in nursing.

2011-03-01T11:18:00.001Z

I have written before on secular spirituality (Bigger, 2008), that is describing the deep inner selves people have. My model distinguishes this representation of the inner self from belief in [God, the supernatural] and the associated doctrinal content of religious creeds. The problem is that the term spiritual has for centuries linked with religious piety so misunderstandings are easy. Although originally the spirit was the breath, the evidence of life itself and the question is, what can life be at its deepest and fullest. Ours is the first century trying to express this in humanistic and not religious language. We have to make the choice whether to reclaim the word spiritual, or jettison it.

Wilfred McSherry (2006) applies spirituality as a practical concept to nursing and health care. He argues that nursing was a spiritual enterprise of caring (a vocation) but has become mechanistic. Spirituality contains the word ritual within it (actually this is etymologically irrelevant, a coincidence) so justifies references to religion. However he attempts a definition of everyday spirituality using a football made of hexagonal panels as his model (that is, a representation of thought map). Laying aside ‘belief in God or Supreme Being’ we are left with thinking, feeling, relating and expressing.

Thinking – self awareness, view of the world, attitudes, meaning, purpose

Feeling – hope, inner strength, security, fears, expectations, experiencing life

Relating – harmonious relationships, trust, forgiveness, love

Expressing – creativity, expressing values and beliefs

Of course these intertwine and operate together. Our attitudes and sense of meaning involves other people; our feelings are tied into our relationships with others, and we express our deep thoughts and concerns to others. So this list is well described by the philosopher John Macmurray (1961) as Persons in Relation.

This list is expressed in positive terms, what a human could be at best. It could also be described as inner psycho-social (or personal/relational) wellbeing. The list could have a negative aspect where these criteria are missing. McSherry (2006:59) calls this spiritual distress, or the lack of personal/relational wellbeing or personal/relational dysfunction.

McSherry argues that nursing should take an holistic view, and embeds his view of broad spirituality within this. This perhaps overcomplicates something which should be simple. Nursing involves caring, which includes not only caring for but also caring about. This means that doctors, nurses and all other staff aim to identify and satisfy reasonable needs, emotional as well as physical. Given the nature of ‘emotional work’, this needs to be interpreted unsentimentally. That this caring does not always take place is receiving considerable publicity at the moment. The message to care about patients is simple; clouding it with the language of spirituality just obfuscates the issue.

Reference: WIlfred McSherry, Making Sense of Spirituality in Nursing and Health Care Practice, Jessica Kingsley, 2006.

Adoption

2011-01-22T18:13:00.000Z

The children's charity Barnado comments (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-12258379) that interracial adoptions are being resisted and blocked by adoption gatekeepers, and that numbers of children being adopted has to rise dramatically. Keeping children in care is, according to research, the greatest social, educational and economic disadvantage a child can have. I have written about this at http://eprints.worc.ac.uk/872.

My wife and I tried to adopt in the 1970s, asking for any child of any ethnicity up to the age of 8. We were passed fit after a range of unreasonable demands which we bore stoically. For example, having rushed home from work and tidied up for the social worker, we were accused of being houseproud, and not to forget that children are messy.

The point of this blog is to say that despite being willing and suitable adopters, no child was found for us over a five year period. On having to move jobs and house, that would have required us to start again with a different authority, and we gave up, being then too old at 40 to be considered. So, two or three 'looked after' children in care missed out on having a caring home. We also have missed out on having grandchildren, but that is another story.

Creativity

2011-01-19T22:15:00.000Z

I am sifting and sorting books to decide which to get rid of, largely so I can by more with a clearer conscience. One was on creativity and 'creative quotient', which prompts this post.

What is creativity? The statements and definitions are scattergun, and lead me to the conclusion that creativity is seen as anything that is not boringly simple. I don't wish to summarise all the points made, but rather have some new thoughts about creativity. I would stress though that formalising these vague notions into a creativity questionnaire is a no-hope exercise.

First, creativity is not the same as artistic. Being able to draw a line and recognisable representations is a skill: doing something unexpected with it approaches what we are looking for in creativity. Creativity is about the brain making surprising associations, especially ones which are meaningful.

The route to creativity is to free the mind from conventional thinking. Ambiguity is feared by people who wish to know for certain, but ambiguity is central in creativity. Easy certainty is the enemy of creativity. However, education encourages certainty, looking for right answers, which may be simplified by the adults involved to be understood by the children. In so doing, the ambiguity is removed. The children are given a sanitised account.

The key to creativity is to allow children to be inventive; and adults also, remembering that their impulse to convention has been developed throughout their lives producing self-consciousness when doing anything unconventional. This suggests an unregimented curriculum with time for experimentation, art, drama, literature, and making things. This is exactly what we do not have currently.

Knowledge today requires creative response. Science cannot tell us what it means by real. History cannot give us answers, but can only repeat old simplifications. Geography cannot open up the problems of land ownership and empire. Land ownership not only throughout the old empires but also closer to home may have legal title but not moral title, after land grabs, dispossessions, and hegemony of the powerful. In Scotland, my own forebears, the Macmillans, where dispossessed and took refuge in Canada (from the Camerons, incidentally). Aristocracy have accumulated wealth and acres in ways neither just, proper or moral.

So, we need to open up the curriculum, develop new ways of looking at what has always been asserted. It is wrong, and the curriculum is based on and reaffirms lies.

Creativity is mental, intellectual, and spiritual. It describes new ways of interpreting the world and expressing new ideas. The status quo, the powerful, the wealthy, the vested interests have much to fear and will resist it. But our youngsters will be managing the world in 20, 30 and 40 years. We need to help them develop the sort of vision which will help them improve the world.

The Anthropology of Experience.

2011-01-18T20:12:00.000Z

edited by Victor W Turner and Edward M Bruner, with Epilogue by Clifford Geertz. University of Illinois Press (Urbana & Chicago), 1986.

These are mainly developed conference papers, tied together by the phrase 'anthropology of experience', which revealed the term 'experience' to be very pliable, or in Geertz's words, 'elusive' and 'the asses' bridge all must cross' [374]. The anthropologist/ethnographer needs to uncover people's authentic 'experience' by patiently 'scratching surfaces' (Geertz again). Turner includes a paper on 'Dewey, Dilthey, and Drama' [33-44]. Social drama, whether ritual or 'its progeny', theatre, helps to dismember, reconstruct, and refashion experience. He distinguishes between indicative mood (the description of what is) and subjunctive mood (glimpse of what might be): the latter is liminal, reflexive, experimental, focusing on and renewing meaning.

Anthropology is the study of humanity and the human condition. What people do is easy to observe and describe. How to study people's experience is more tricky. The experience of being a woman is one example, and is the basis of feminist research, normally written by women. The anthropologist rarely writes about himself or herself, but about 'other', so investigating the experience(s) or these 'others' is challenging. The ethnographer can be 'native' (i.e. an insider) but then there is no guarantee that one individual will experience life as others do. So to find the experience of 'others', much scratching the surface needs to be done (and then can we ever escape our own horizons?). Anthropology of experience focuses on authenticity, how ethnological description is 'real' to experience, whereas outsider observation is complexly filtered.

We could look therefore at instances where anthropologists focus on life as experienced, as frail, oppressed, in power or under power. There has been an emphasis on the world as experienced locally. Ethnomusicology - the study of ethnic music. Ethnogeography, place as understood locally. Ethnomathematics - maths as experienced locally. Ethnobotany, medicinal plants as understood locally. We could add new categories: ethnoreligion - religious belief as locally held. Ethnohistory - history through local eyes.

For Turner, performance (social drama) was part of the picture. How is/was social life experienced? With what tensions, strategies for power and rebellion? How is change carried out? Their solutions may be flawed, but we can ask, can we research today how life is experienced? Using in depth interviews, insider accounts, focused observations?

One historic solution was to use phenomenology, the study of how we assume life to be (the term means 'study of appearances'). We might not know but we construct our world view, and construct what we think experience means. We may be mistaken, but it is all we have. We can improve our conclusions by triangulation - that is by drawing on the opinions of others as well as ourselves. We may try this way to step into someone else's shoes and experience life as they did. But of course we may be fooling ourselves.

We might use fiction to distance ourselves from the action. Construct a scenario in which human experience (or animal experience for that matter) can be examined and explored, creating results that are generalisable to all (that is everyone can identify with it. We are here entering into creative and controversial methodological methods. We may have to eventually admit that experience cannot be understood. If we find it hard to be clear and accurate about our own experiences, being equally clear about other people's experiences is possibly impossible. Nevertheless, the task of studying subjective experience is worthwhile, as since this is where personal meaning is found. Qualitative methodologies have been developed to add rigour to how we personally deal with the chaos of our world.

Teaching, learning and psychotherapy

2011-01-18T20:01:00.001Z

George Kelly from the 1950s based his psychotherapy on ways in which people construct their sense of self, self awareness, self construct (and through these self confidence and related features). He called this Personal Construct Psychology (PCP). Children are constructing their self understanding from birth, and they are helped or hindered by those around them, especially significant adults (parents, teachers, friends, enemies). Our model of learning should first and foremost embrace self understanding. This focuses on relationships and our place in the world. The mechanisms may be literature, or drama , or art, but always to see new aspects of self. This might suggest that the main purpose of education is self understanding, producing rounded individuals. Anything else is its context.

Transaction Analysis (TA).

TA by Eric Berne provided a therapeutic solution to observations about human transactions. This can be simplified as having three Ego states:

Parent, Adult, Child.

These are modes, not age related so two adults could engage with each other in child to child mode. A transaction is a unit of interaction. Parent to Child is authoritative/ authoritarian, child to child is immature, adult to adult is mature. Every transaction can thus be codified. If one of you chided me petulantly (parent mode) and I cheeked you back (child mode), then we have a way of altering things by recognising this and each moving to adult mode. You could make a point rationally (adult mode) and I could answer seriously (adult mode). Things go wrong when inappropriate 2 way transactions take place. A teacher indulging in child to child arguments with children will fail. Equally a teacher who is able to talk to a 6 year old adult to adult is more likely to succeed.

Berne also spoke of people having a life script. We may have to take up a new script if our usual one fails us. Like a B movie, life might be bad because the script is awful.Psychotherapy, and education, can help people revise or rewrite their life scripts.

Carl Rogers is known for Person Centred Therapy, where progress can only be linked to detailed discussions between client and therapist. This replaces grand theory such as promulgated by such as Freud or Jung. In school, children present with complex individual issues, and the teacher's first task is to decode these to remove any blocks to progress. Again, teaching content is simply its context.

Paul Moustakos called this phenomenological therapy. It is in fact progress by deep discussion, getting as much information from patients as possible before diagnosis. The parallel for teaching children is patient listening to children's ideas and thoughts and interacting with them respectfully without putting them down.

The subject curriculum is not unimportant. In fact it is so important for this to be done well that we need pupils to be in good heart, motivated, comfortable with learning, curious and hungry for understanding. This is where helping children to learn how to learn is the launchpad to their later success.

Postscript, 24 hours later.
The Education Minister Michael Gove disagrees with me, which makes me think I am probably right.

Action, Research, Participation

2010-12-11T15:32:00.000Z

The Sage Handbook of Action Research: Participative inquiry and practice. Peter Reason, & Hilary Bradbury, (Eds.). Second Edition, 2008. London, Thousand Oaks, New Delhi, and Singapore: Sage.

This is a completely rewritten text from the first edition. 49 new chapters in all across 720 pages, a very full statement of where action research is at the moment. I note Kay Yang's helpful summary of key chapters, and other related reading about action research at http://researchthatmatters.blogspot.com/2010/11/sage-handbook-of-action-research.html. I focus on some thoughts for student researchers. Action research is, it declares, an orientation rather than a 'method'. The orientation is to creatively strive for improvement through rigorous use of any appropriate method. 1st person projects involve personal reflection-action-reflection cycles, 2nd person involves others, whilst 3rd person projects 'do it' to others. Ideally, aspects of all three are present: the word 'participatory' occurs frequently, that is, action research best describes a group working together. Terms like 'critical' and 'emancipatory' are often used: these show AR to be critical of power structures and status quo which keeps traditional unemancipated practice 'frozen' and unchangeable. Arrangements which benefit those in power are most difficult to change. I use this term 'frozen' to bring discussion back to Kurt Lewin, the originator of action research. Having escaped from Nazi hegemony, he was greatly interested in how people are designated 'other' and how research can assist them. He was especially interested in how organisations can improve themselves. He distinguished between task and process, focusing on the whole system to make fundamental changes. This required general participation, seeking to win hearts and minds. Lewin became interested in group dynamics, that is, how the individual is affected by the group. Self-reflection, examining our assumptions and presuppositions, is an essential ingredient. Reflective selves within a team.

AR in educational assignments is often caricatured as 'plan an intervention, carry it out, and evaluate it'. First, where is the vision of the whole organisation (be it the school or the whole education service)? What are the views of all involved, including the pupils? Where is the participation? Second, how will this intervention 'improve' things? What is mean by improve? Where is the critical slant and emancipation? Will it free the system from unfairness? How will it critique power and democratise the activity? Thirdly, does it encourage a broader vision about the community and global relationships? Fourthly, does it ask interesting questions of the change process that draws from interdisciplinary literature? One example is how 'the theatre of the oppressed' in Bangladesh drew on the work of Paulo Freire and Augusto Boal in engaging street cleaners with emancipating role playing.

It is clear from this collection of projects that AR is ethics in practice (chap. 13 explores this). It is described as activist research - research implying that wrongs are righted. It has elements of the spiritual - Peter Reason and others point to Buddhist parallels, and it is generally involved with generating better, more fulfilling knowledge. It is about transformation, vision and the transpersonal. Several writers comment that action research is the way you live your whole life, not just a methodological choice for a short-term project. In a sense then, understanding AR helps to understand research itself holistically: are multiple perspectives fairly drawn on? Does the research create a better world? Is it just? Is it liberating? Does it challenge readers to see the world differently?

Elloitt W. Eisner - Reimagining Schools

2010-12-08T22:18:00.001Z

I am re-reading a number of Eisner articles from the past 20 years in this 'selected works of' volume. Eisner is an art educationalist from Stanford University, USA. A 'reimagined school' is one where imagination and creativity is encouraged, so it is a place of excitement and wonder - and not dominated by tedious drill and exercises. I remember well his description of expertise in education as connoisseurship rather than mastery. Since education is about people and both complex and subtle, he felt it better described through the metaphor of the connoisseur of fine wine than mastery of a skill. The skillful teacher/educator has to look for small signs of success and quality and get know the good from the very good, as a matter of instinct. Connoisseurship is this an art rather than a science, a key to most of his writings. Evaluation of education, in his view, is not a matter of raw scores, results, performance indicators and such sort, but a matter of relationships between students and teachers. A successful school enthuses, motivates, excites, and causes learners to thirst for more. Moreover, he argued, learning is very broad. We praise ability in literacy and maths, privilege it, but are less likely to praise ability in art or music. A page of successful maths scores more than writing a symphony, or drawing a brilliant picture. This is wrong: we should recognize "multiple literacies". (This was before Gardner made 'multiple intelligences' popular). The arts are a way into human experience and consciousness. Art (including literature and music) images feeling, which otherwise are sidelined and education becomes only a matter of remembering stuff, not experiencing and feeling.

Throughout the period of these articles the English curriculum has become increasing stuck in the rut of assessment, testing and accountability, marginalising those aspects of the curriculum which emphasise experience, appreciation, joy and celebration. There is no longer much to celebrate. A chapter on 'the celebration of thinking' hints that education could more resemble celebration than the sort of drill that improves SATs results, but discourages children from finding education interesting.

Pierre Bourdieu

2010-11-28T16:11:00.000Z

Pierre Bourdieu was a French sociologist often cited in educational research literature. His major interest was in class and its implications. His Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture (Theory, Culture and Society Series), Sage, 1977, with Jean-Claude Passeron (in French: La Reproduction. Éléments pour une théorie du système d'enseignement, Minuit, 1970) explores how class attitudes reproduce themselves, helpfully and unhelpfully, though he was also interested in social mobility (breaking away from one's birth class). He speaks of habitus, the habitual, unchallenged social assumptions; conatus, striving towards; field (social setting); capital (social, cultural - the metaphorical class wealth). Reproduction is repressive, restricting personal choices and aspirations. He calls this social violence. He argues that class has a stranglehold over social power. A work of the 1960s, which included the 1968 student protests in Paris, we wonder how times have changed over the last four decades. Class, wealth and power do not go hand in hand now, since celebrity and high bonus jobs like banking have emerged as a major source of wealth,

The poor however still exist, the unemployed, the unqualified, the weak and sick, carers. Some strive to move out of this, others do not have the confidence or determination to do so. Engaging this difficult group in education has long been a government aspiration, but few projects have been made much difference except at the margins. Class may or may not still be with us; poverty and low aspirations most certainly are.

What causes low aspirations? Feeling powerless comes from being told you are powerless. Confidence needs to be encouraged and nurtured. This is the meaning of reproduction. Low aspirations fuel low aspirations in one's children, high aspirations likewise fuel ambition. They 'reproduce'. A high aspirational family builds up 'capital' - the evidence of social and cultural achievement. Qualifications, property, possessions. They provide the 'right' educational opportunities for their children to succeed. Poorly educated parents are content with low achieving schools.

There are exceptions. Ethnic minority families in general value education, so that their children do better than their parents. They have high status careers in mind, in law and medicine. They might not of course find their ideal in education easy to achieve.

Bourdieu headed a group of researchers interviewing the have-nots. The Weight of the World is subtitled Social Suffering in Contemporary Society. His researchers interviewed many people who qualified in some way for the label 'social suffering'. He wanted the case studies to illustrate his theory, although this book is not theory dense. The transcriptions have many examples of people finding it hard to escape from the situation they find themselves in. He described the interview as a spiritual experience, an opening up of personal agendas in ways which help to construct meaning. The interview should be a relationship, a non-violent relationship. He refers to good sympathetic interview technique (based on relationship) which attempts to get into their shoes. He contrasts this with tired questions which stem from the sociologist's project rather than from real life. He uses the phrase "induced and accompanied self-analysis" (p.615). In this style of interviewing, the interviewee is not the 'object' of the research. He adds: "True submission to the data requires an act of construction based on practical mastery of the social logic by which these data are constructed" (p.617), which involves "the uncovering of immanent structures" which reveal ideosyncrasy and complexity. Conversation analysis should look for "the invisible structures that organise it", whether these be social, or academic, or other. Research constructs something new, by asking the right questions based on a deep understanding of social processes. He calls this "realist construction" (p.618). He regards transcription of interviews (p.622) as a rewriting, an interpretation based on only a selection of audio and visual events and set out to be readable by others. Sociologists look for patterns, structures and processes which make society predictable. Reproduction/replication of class or status is one, power is another. Understanding these allows us, and those who suffer from the consequences, to be more politically aware and in a better situation to find different routes forward.

Paul Ricoeur

2010-11-17T10:02:00.004Z

Paul Ricoeur was a French philosopher who sought to find positive integrations to opposites. This process of synthesis had been well-known since Hegel but binary opposites had become a base doctrine of structuralism within postmodernism, and Ricoeur found this too simplistic and wanted ways of resolving opposites. He also wanted a way out of scepticism, since if we believe nothing, life loses its point. A key word is dialectics, the discussion and debate between opposites or different points of view. He was interested in self understanding, memory and forgetting, use of language (his original job was as translator), and religion.

This is to follow up my review of Alison Scott-Baumann's Paul Ricoeur and the Hermeneutic of Suspicion with a link to an interview with her by Theory, Culture and Society at http://theoryculturesociety.blogspot.com/2010/10/interview-with-alison-scott-baumann-on.html. The site http://theoryculturesociety.blogspot.com is itself well worth visiting.

My review will soon be on http://eprints.worc.ac.uk/1071. An edited version is on http://learnlivethrive.blogspot.com/2010/03/paul-ricoeur-and-hermeneutics-of.html

What About God?

2010-10-23T22:32:00.000+01:00

A comment (for which, thanks) on my last blog On Becoming a Person queries my views on religion and God.

I wondered there whether my teenage developing views were rational or a reaction against the fundamentalist regime of my upbringing. That certainly made me a critic of detail, since religious belief (across the religions) requires belief in miracles, magic, and the irrational generally. In the Old Testament, the sun stood still to give Joshua military victory, Lot's wife becomes a pillar of salt, the waters of the Red Sea pile up. The New Testament presents us with a virgin birth, a physical ascention to heaven, and numerous medical miracles. None of these is a problem if we can read them as folklore.

Today we have a vociferous evangelical atheist movement pursuing the demolition of myth and folklore, and denying the relevance of a concept of God. Religions need to respond by redefining themselves after such demythologising, so that belief in God does not ride on the irrational. Rudolph Bultmann applied demythologisation to the life of Jesus. Paul Tillich appealed to depth psychology to find God in (or as) the depth of personal being. This is not unlike philosophical Hinduism.The collection of articles by active Christians, called The Myth of God Incarnate was an unexpected but understandable best seller. That the New Testament, and especially the Gospels, are problematic historical documents is saying no more than that we should approach them as critically as we do Josephus, Tacitus or Suetonius. That the books were written to have an authoritative use should put us on our guard more, for that makes them socio-political propaganda, documents for contemporary people to accept without question and act on, and if required give up their lives for. All people in power try to write (and rewrite) history and it was no different in the early church. The Old Testament consists of foundation books for the origins of Judaism, written to promote the interests of a particular power group. Some off-text sections have survived which makes the archaeology of the text particularly interesting.

Religions mostly base themselves on stories of one or more deities. Theravada Buddhism alone presents their founder as human and not divine, which did not translate to Tibet, China and Japan, where deities abound in Mahayana Buddhism. People then as now varied from concrete/pictorial to philosophical. The common folk needed pictures, whether in words or icons; the more thoughtful could see beyond them to deeper principles. It is what God means in these deeper principles that concern us here.

God is pictured (described through a picture) even in the Hebrew Bible where creating images of God was forbidden. 'He' walked in the garden, was a shepherd and king, and so on. I describe this process in some detail in the chapter on symbolism in my Creating the Old Testament (1989). A picture can be demythologised. God is not really a shepherd but an aspect of care and protection is shepherd-like (the argument would go). Of course the same God who protects also destroys when in a different mood. The prophet Jeremiah focused on political disaster as a divine punishment for sin. Hindu deities are iconic (presented in the form of icons or images). Saraswati goddess of wisdom is a lady, dressed in white, crowned, with a Sitar, rosary and book. I asked children what wisdom is, and one said, "a wise person is someone who knows a lot about a lot of thiongs, but is humble and not proud and uses what they know to help others". So this is what Saraswati means. This deep inner wisdom is part of what we mean by God. This is one of many images of God that Hindus use and all can be deconstructed similarly. Ganesh, with elephant head, is the remover of obstacles: what better than an elephant to knock a wall down; but Ganesh has an untied bond (meaning to remove inhibition), a cake (meaning to maintain strength), a goad (meaning to make maximum effort) and a broken tusk (meaning to take risks). Obstacles are only overcome thus, with inner strength and conviction. Inside each of us is a reservoir of inner strength, which we need to learn to draw on. God therefore refers to these inner strengths. But again, what is created comes from the destruction of what went before. Siva is creator, but also destroyer, reminding people of the procdess of change and entropy.

Religion can make us either dependent or independent. Fatalism is to say that God has it all planned and we can do nothing. If we do nothing, disaster will happen and we will say it is God's will. Blaming God for disaster is as old as religion. Praying for help might unlock inner strengths that will succeed.

Prayer is another interesting topic. In a sense, we pray within ourselves to no external person; but the inner dialogue may be helpful. By externalising the vision (that is, thinking of an objective God) we might focus ourselves to succeed instead of fail. We all need an inner reflexive dialogue to clarify our thoughts and motivations. Contemplation is a monologue, but prayer is a dialogue. Artificial maybe, but effective. Prayer is an internal discipline which is more helpful than unhelpful.

If I think about ethics, I can visualise the apogy of ethics: perfect, positive communitarian behaviour. This is part of the conceptual cluster I call God. Similarly with justice, there is a core concept of perfect justice. And virtue, and goodness, and altruism, and fidelity, and empowerment. All these give God substance, and I cherish them, the highest of all positive values.

On Becoming a Person

2010-10-21T22:05:00.002+01:00

Carl R Rogers, in On Becoming a Person: A Therapist's View of Psychotherapy, poses two challenging questions: how have I come to think the thoughts I do? and How have I come to be the person I am? From that, he leads into a descriptive autobiography, but I will try to be more focused.

Day 1.
I have studied religion in various forms most of my life - indeed it was my first specialism. Brought up in evangelical certainties, my father taught me to question and not be afraid of standing out against the crowd. The religious community, the Brethren, were repressive in the sense that I was hauled over the coals from time to time for asking the wrong questions - for example about women's role in worship, about literal inspiration. Looking back, I was nicely hounded, but learnt to cope with it. Believing or thinking something just because everyone else does is a form of intellectual idleness. I lost detailed dogmatic beliefs as soon as I started studying. My Professor at University, FF Bruce, was also from the Brethren, but I was relieved to find that his mind was very open. Other University teachers had a range of beliefs - Sam Brandon, about Jesus being an active Zealot, John Allegro about sacred mushrooms, James Barr about the wickedness of fundamentalism. I study religion as an outsider, interested in the power of metaphor, why people express themselves in such self-deceiving ways when taking metaphor literally, but also not blind to personality gains that this provides for them. Having a conscience, for whatever reason, is socially very helpful.

Having a conscience brings me to my interest in justice, good works, and being a helpful citizen. Being helpful to others is a bit of an obsession without which my life would be simpler. Intellectually, I ask questions about social justice, implicit corruption to achieve benefit, and the unfairness of life generally. Those that achieve wealth, fame and fortune seems to do so for the wrong reasons in a society in which something deep down is rotten, where self, greed, ambition and power are drivers esteemed by gatekeepers. My politics are therefore left of centre, although I do not feel or give loyalty to political parties.

As to what sort of person I am, I leave to others ultimately. I love my own company, but also treasure the company of people I care about. I try to empower rather than disempower, give credit where credit is due, and take blame if blame is due. This is what I think I do - others may see me differently. I write with others for practical purposes, and learn much from others - but I prefer to write by myself. I also enjoy physical exercise - I could have had a career in athletics and sport generally, and now, once gardening find it hard to stop. I find pointless exercise irritating - and would much rather fit exercise into my everyday life and tasks. Although I like music, it is not important to me and a silent desert island holds no fears. Wall to wall potted music in shops drives me to distraction. I probably don't move to music either - since it has never been tested, I don't know.

Equally I don't need conversation, though enjoy it when the time is right. I communicate in writing, which means utterances are considered rather than spontaneous. Friends will probably say that this is not true, and they may be right, I may understand myself wrongly. I am probably intolerably self confident, but this hides a certain self-consciousness. Probably no one gets crosser at me than myself, and I have no illusions about my faults and failings.

If I were to write my own obituary, what would I say? Someone who has dabbled in a lot but not become known for any one field of endeavour? But I don't see breadth as a disadvantage or a failing. Someone who constantly swims against the tide? Again, not in my book a failing. I hope I am remembered as someone who has touched many people's lives in positive ways and who has not hurt too many - I wonder.

Day 2.

"First-person research/practice skills and methods address the ability of the researcher to foster an inquiring approach to his or her own life, to act awarely and choicefully, and to assess effects on the outside world while acting."

Reason PB and Torbert, W 'The action turn: a further look at the scientific merits of action research, Concepts and Transformations, 6(1):1-37, 2001:23

I am not really comfortable talking about myself. Do I think the thoughts I do as a reaction against upbringing, or do I have the freedom to think freely because I have escaped from the restrictions instilled through childhood? Is it common or rare for a person to break loose from nurture? It is sometimes said that loss of belief creates a hole that needs to be filled. In my case belief was never deep rooted, and through schooling was not something I could explain to others. Finding that it had no substance when examined was perhaps inevitable, though I note that others do not find it so, or at least take longer to find dogma wanting. So there never was a void to be filled; secular ethical standards and aspirations remained as a demythologised core reality. This is acting choicefully. The Buddhist notion of right view, intention, speech, action, livelihood, effort, mindfulness, contemplation (the Noble Eightfold Path) is a powerful menu for personal development and integrity. Whatever we think and do, there are right choices and wrong choices. Wrong choices lead to bad faith, which has consequences (karma) and when accumulated globally adds up to dukkha, unsatisfactoriness. Buddha's vision was that unsatisfactoriness is the result of wrong thinking, so instead of complaining about life and the world, we simply get on with putting our heads right. I am not a Buddhist, but this speaks to me.

Much of my work is in educational research. I have said in the past (and not so past) that many schools are not fit for purpose. Their purpose should be education, which means learning, participation, motivation, and intellectual excitement. My own schooling did not offer me that; nor did the first two secondary schools of my teaching career in the 1970s. They were about control. In teacher training, my experience of primary schools was better, with better relationships and more freedom - sometimes. But often unchallenging. The excitement of learning from experience was well articulated by John Dewey and served primary education well until the National Curriculum replaced education with assessment, but that is another story. There is much to improve, especially in the relationship between teachers and pupils, who really should be partners learning together.

I am not a great fan of fiction, though I have read professionally a great deal of fiction for children, and write some occasionally. There seems to be a modern fetish for magic, ghosts, wizards, and horrific monsters in children's literature and anything other seems hopelessly old fashioned. Why this obsession for the supernatural, and what will this do to children's thinking? Children are confused about the nature of reality, and I am always surprised at how long belief in Father Christmas persists as one who rumbled the great man when I was 3. Should we be teaching them about battles in parallel worlds, or worlds through wardrobes, of a magic hidden world alongside our own? Or can the word 'pretend' help their development? Anything non-rational is pretend - magic, father Christmas, God, monsters, heaven, hell, paradise. That would reduce nightmares anyway. Perhaps I will write a children's book called Let's Pretend and throttle all these monsters (the myths, not the children).

Day 3.
I am a human. Am I not therefore self-centred, self-serving, and self-aggrandising? Is not self-esteem my ambition? and self-reward? Do we have any ways of handling self so that community takes over from greed, and altruism from power? Or are humans bound to be what humans are - an ultra-aggressive animal capable of killing without compassion or conscience? Aggressors create victims, so this too is a natural human state, visible in anxiety and depression. Rogers first defined 'person-centred counselling', though he didn't invent it. This has to allow for the dark as well as the light. The dark pulls more powerfully than the light. Anger, despair, hostility, prejudice can simply take over. But we are thinking beings and can challenge the dark, and find a way back to the light. With help.

Ancestry

2010-09-27T12:25:00.002+01:00

Since the last post, we have toured west Scotland around Mull and Skye. This leads me to reflect on ancestry. My mother's family from Nottinghamshire mining stock I will write about later. My father came to England from Dublin in 1936 and joined the RAF. Of the Protestant persuasion, his parents came originally from Scotland. Any connections between the name Bigger and the town of Biggar in Scotland I doubt, having visited Biggar last year and talked with a local historian. But he certainly came from the Glasgow area. There were several Biggers in Ireland, including a medical family, Sir Hugh Bigger as Officer of Health for Dublin early in the 20th century, and Prof. Joseph Warwick Bigger who wrote the first Bigger's Handbook of Bacteriology, the standard text throughout the 20th century, Man Against Microbe in the 1930s, and reports such as that into diseases in Jordon just before world war 2. An Irish MP called Bigger was active in the call for home rule in the late Victorian age. Francis Joseph Bigger was a local historian and author in Northern Ireland.

My particular interest is in my father's mother, grandma Macmillan, who died probably around 1917 having born 13 children, 12 of which survived childhood. She either came from Canada, or Scotland via Canada to meet grandfather and settle in Dublin. I discovered Macmillans in Arran (the publisher and prime minister's family) but the more regular ones were in the west near Fort William. In many cases, 'were' is the right word. The Macmillans were harassed by their landlords, the Camerons in the period of Highland Clearances. Many Macmillans were cleared off lands their families had worked for centuries. Landowners in Scotland had a legal but not moral claim for land ownership, as royalty gifted lands to supporters, turning the traditional population into tenants who could be turfed out without redress. Many historic land claims today in the Highlands are based on the same inequity. By 1800 the Cameron laird thought himself as a landlord rather than a chief, and wished to create a stately home and estate, requiring him to raise funds, including rents, and clearing away unprofitable crofts and villages. In 1802, with evictions beginning, Archibald and Allan Macmillan left the Lochaber district with 450 people to make new lives, sailing in three ships, Jane, Helen and Friends. Where they settled became Glengarry County. (My thanks to James Hunter, A Dance Called America: the Scottish Highlands, the United States and Canada, 1994).
My grandmother was somehow related to the Canadian Macmillans, meeting and marrying grandfather sometime in the 1880s.

In Fort William, I looked at the statue of the Cameron chief two generations later without celebration.

Jimmy Reid

2010-08-19T21:30:00.000+01:00

Today was the funeral of Jimmy Reid, leader of the work-in on the Clyde in 1971. He was a great believer in human potential, arguing that the inequalities of society would ensure that such potential is not realised. He fought to save the Clyde shipbuilders. Here is the rat-race speech.

"Reject the values and false morality that underlie these attitudes. A rat race is for rats. We're not rats. We're human beings. Reject the insidious pressures in society that would blunt your critical faculties to all that is happening around you, that would caution silence in the face of injustice lest you jeopardise your chances of promotion and self-advancement. This is how it starts and before you know where you are, you're a fully paid-up member of the rat-pack. The price is too high. It entails the loss of your dignity and human spirit. Or as Christ put it, "What doth it profit a man if he gain the whole world and suffer the loss of his soul?".

The Bible, a Troubling Text

2010-08-07T11:22:00.001+01:00

SUGIRTHARAJAH, R.S., Troublesome Texts: The Bible in Colonial and Contemporary Culture (Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2008).

The Bible IS a troublesome text. Its interpretation has been over the centuries the cause of major conflict. It has been used to promote slavery and patriarchalism. It has been the cutural symbol of empire, the basis of education systems in non-Christian developing regions. From it identity is claimed, and land disputes are fomented. Missionaries, by translating God as Ancestor, replaced tribal histories with an over-arching Biblicist ‘history’ in which Adam and Abraham are common ancestors, so biblical violence becomes an acceptable political model, and patriarchy-with-polygamy a legitimate social means of repressing women.

This thought-provoking collection of conference papers asks uncomfortable questions about Biblical hermeneutics. In ‘Gautama and the Galilean’, Sugirtharajah uses his Sri Lankan background to explore how and why Victorian theologians constructed lives of Buddha and Jesus, revealing rampant racism. There is however another side to this: enough ‘Orientalists’ took the task seriously enough to contribute to the preservation of texts which has turned Buddhism from a local cult to a respected global world religion.
Buddhism was encountered as an indigenous religion separately in Nepal and in Sri Lanka, and gradually the similarities and differences between the two observed and the conclusion reached that these were two traditions of a single religion, which came to be named Hinayana (lesser vehicle) and Mahayana (greater vehicle). Hinayana (also referred to as Theravada) was regarded as purer than Mahayana, which was considered syncretistic with local pagan deities and spirits. Today, Mahayana belief and ritual would be treated philosophically and symbolically. The Dalai Lama (leader of Tibetan Mahayana Buddhism) is globally known and respected for his spiritual wisdom. Sugirtharajah notes that the reason for the study of Buddhism was to discredit it, and finds many quotations to support this. There is another side to the story and academic study of Pali texts began, albeit slowly. Lives of Jesus have abounded over the past two centuries, are mostly devotional in intent (some thrive on being controversial), and tell us more about the writer than about the historical Jesus. My view is that even the canonical gospels are fictional hagiography which owe more to the need to demonstrate fulfilment of scripture than to historical recollections. Unfortunately, fewer sayings of Jesus have survived than words of the Buddha.
Chapter 2 is on ‘Subjecting the Johannine Letters to Postcolonial Criticism’, concluding that the letters have a dogmatic, imperialistic tone demanding compliance, but that the new message being promulgated owes some informal debt to Buddhism. To ‘walk in the truth’ and ‘walk in love’ is likened to the Buddhism requirement to ‘walk by dhamma’, a praxis-centred practical religion by which ‘everyone who does justice is born again’ and ‘everyone who loves is born of God’ (3 Jn 4, 2 Jn 4-6, I Jn 2.29, 1 Jn 4.7). For the writer, actions not words indicate a person’s faith, salvation by works contrasting with Paul’s salvation by faith and God’s grace. Unfortunately, this worthy ideal is presented as a demand to be obeyed and not an aspiration to be taken to heart. Chapter 3 focuses on the Sermon on the Mount read in India as a basis for ethical spirituality, for example by Gandhi and Roy. He notes that after independence it was replaced by Leviticus 19-26, a ‘roadmap’ for state building, John’s Gospel (mystical), liberation theology and identity hermeneutics. Chapter 4 looks toward next steps: these are for interpreters to explore power-knowledge relevantly. It challenges the dominant hermeneutic by demanding emphases are shifted and silences are vocalised. Chapter 5 explores ideas of God after the tsunami of boxing day 2004, where images of all-powerful and compassionate deity is exploded. Chapter 6 focuses on the link between Bible interpretation and conflict, even violent conflict. Those who study and interpret the Bible from outside the powered elite risk scorn and gagging, even lynching. For Sri Lanka, this is a call for open and honest multi-faith dialogue. Chapter 7 looks at the Bible industry as a form of cultural imperialism, for repression towards a dominant view instead of being a sea of challenging and exploratory stories. Chapter 8, ‘Future Imperfect” calls for attitudes of exclusivity towards the Bible as word of God is replaced by a recognition that the Bible itself was (and is) a site of ideological battle, and has to sit beside the scriptures of other faiths as together charting the spiritual questings of humankind. Chapter 9 ends the compilation autobiographically of the writer’s journey and motivation, calling for creative and imaginative scholarship.

Take Five

2010-08-03T21:39:00.000+01:00

Five recent posts in my blog, about literature relating directly to the second world war, as a taster ... enjoy http://1930-1960.blogspot.com

Flying Officer X (HE Bates) - http://1930-1960.blogspot.com/2010/08/flying-officer-x.html
Josephine Blackstock- http://1930-1960.blogspot.com/2009/11/malta-and-greece-josephine-blackstock.html
John Pudney - http://1930-1960.blogspot.com/2009/09/john-pudney-war-poet.html
Major Charles Gilson - http://1930-1960.blogspot.com/2010/07/major-charles-gilson-1878-1943.html
Jack Heming and Eileen Marsh - http://1930-1960.blogspot.com/2010/07/heming-and-marsh-again.html

Critical Religious Education.

2010-08-03T17:13:00.000+01:00

It seems to me that the issue of religious education rather than religious instruction has never been resolved. Ninian Smart's team in Scool Council Working Paper 36 talked of critical study of religion alongside phenomenology and I think he paired these correctly. We have developed phenomenological awareness of believers' points of view, trying to see the religion through the eyes of the worshipper; but we have not cracked the issue of criticality. Examples of religious education syllabuses remind me of Sunday School. They take for granted that Jesus was/is God (I don't), that the Gospels are accurate biography (I don't), that Jesus rose from the dead and ascended to heaven (I don't), that we go to heaven on death (I don't) and that belief is more positive than disbelief/scepticism (again, I don't). I am not a Christian, but Christians vary considerably on their understanding of this particular list. RE should not oversimplify, or claim certainties that have to be overturned later.

Criticality suggests that religious education asks about what Christians mean when they call Jesus divine, whether this is rational and coherent, and what its implications are for personal understanding and social practice. Why do people believe what they believe? Why do they find argument difficult? We should make no assumptions that this is a right belief, just that it is a belief. Over history, Christian practices/beliefs have had good consequences and bad. Oxfam and the inquisition. Religious exclusivity/inclusivity is a pertinent topic for school. Diversity is important. Topic study could include population control and birth control. Christians have views on the environment, some of which campaign against sustainability, a world created for humans to use as the dominant species. Where religious be;ief is irrational or non-rational, it should be discussed. Children and young people need to understand the nature of religious belief in all its diversity, whether it is a belief they are inside of, or exterior to. They need to see the positive as well as the negative, and conversely the negative as well as the positive. RE has mainly stressed the positive, whilst the media emphasise negatives. Atheism is a strident point of view (pov) at the moment, and pupils need to know where this is coming from.

John Dewey emphasised the importance of experience and multiple perspective, building up knowledge from personal experiences. If we add up personal experiences of suffering, bullying, fear, family, affection etc, it adds up to a balanced view of life and of moral responsibilities, but not particularly of religion or Christianity. What extra does the myths and rituals of religion add? And why the need to accept them literally?

Non-literal interpretation of metaphorical language is a step forward - is there something in Paul Tillich's theology of depth which language is struggling to illustrate facets of? Or is doctrine a socially repressive instrument to prevent thinking? I argued this in some detail in Creating the Old Testament. If we look for figurative meaning, we escape from naivity.

From this you will see that my vision of what RE ought to be doing is not what it is doing. Nor do I have any confidence that current staffing/training could provide a workforce to could teach this curriculum. A movement stressing thinking skills in RE could be a way forward.

Education for responsibility

2010-07-14T14:39:00.000+01:00

The issue, What is schooling for? is narrower than the question What is education for? More education takes place outside of schools than inside, over a lifetime and not just during years of compulsory schooling. There are different models, such as

The transmission of valued knowledge (raising questions of who values it)
The inculcation of a moral viewpoint
The inculcation of ideology (and the prohibition of banned ideologies)
Motivation to learn (pupil-centred approaches).

Preparation for adulthood might be added to this list so long as we bear in mind that schooling, like childhood, is properly a ‘thing in itself’ and not just a preparation for something else. The quality of schooling is part of the quality of childhood: poor schooling can disable a child intellectually, emotionally and psychologically. Getting it right is a solemn duty.

In the UK, being responsible is a thing in itself and not just a preparation for being responsible later as adults. At first, responsibility was seen as coming from religion-based morality (specifically from Christianity). The rise of secularism transmuted this in the 1960s into moral education, though early forms of this retained their Christian ring. By the 1970s this had again been transformed into pastoral care and personal and social education: pastoral care offered pupils adult mentors to guide their social and moral choices, with some staff paid extra to do this, and others being form/class tutors or teachers. Personal and social education became a taught curriculum subject at the same time, and was called ‘Preparation for Adult Life’ in one school I taught at (Wiltshire,UK, 1970s). By the 1990s, the fashion was for Citizenship Education, exploring not only democracy but also how to be a good citizen – social and political responsibility.

The NC was organised under subjects such as history, geography and English, so these other topics had to be additional, cross curricular. One cross-curriculum theme was Economic and Industrial Understanding, which amongst other things was a preparation for adult life and work.

In the UK, education for personal responsibility has been a stable educational aim, for which many strategies have been tried. Teachers generally would pay lip service to its importance. However, the structural pressures on schooling and the curriculum have emphasised curriculum subjects, which use up the majority of school time available; very little time has been available for pastoral subjects such as personal, moral and social education, or religious education. Teachers are not trained to plan or deliver pastoral subjects. To a small extent, education for responsibility permeates curriculum subjects such as English, if the teacher wishes it to. The lack of structural time in the timetable has meant that other topics such as responsibility, morality, enterprise and understanding of work are covered in special events rather than in the daily timetable. This suggests that these topics are marginal, although sometimes special events are more memorable and enjoyable than daily grind.

Education for responsibility needs to be better planned, through special programmes and permeation throughout the subject curriculum. Every subject could develop lessons applying the subject to life. My colleagues and I suggested ways to do this, subject by subject, a decade ago in Spiritual, Moral, Social and Cultural Education, edited by Stephen Bigger and Erica Brown.

International Primary Curriculum

2010-07-11T18:47:00.000+01:00

In 1988, the Conservative Minister of Education Ken Baker launched Primary Schools into a mind-numbing and stultifying two decades of facts facts facts and tests tests tests. Those of us who expected Labour to reverse such stupidity were disappointed. Pupils have been turned off and demotivated by irrelevant material. Teachers have been overloaded, because when this error was pointed out, they were tasked to deliver in addition moral education, citizenship education, environmental education, economic and industrial understanding and anything else that hit the tabloids.
The International Primary Curriculum (http://www.internationalprimarycurriculum.com) was developed for international schools abroad with funding from Shell. A friend, a primary teacher in Pakistan, is totally enthusiastic. Whilst covering National Curriculum subjects, it organises its termly work around topics which interest young children and offer opportunities for active creative endeavour. She had just finished 'Airports'. Rainforest, Mission to Mars and Beyond, Chocolate, Fit for Life, The Olympics and Making the Newsare also available. The teacher receives a pack with information and activities which cover the different curriculum areas. The school has to plan ahead for curriculum balance. A team of advisers guide and approve the school plan. A number of English primary schools are also finding IPC useful. Primary teachers and teacher trainers from the 1970s and 1980s are chuckling. As my friend said, "Its great. This was the way I was taught."

Interviews

2010-07-09T23:40:00.002+01:00

Mark Twain once wrote about interviews, interviewing and being interviewed. This will eventually become available on http://www.marktwainproject.org. (My source: BBC Radio 4 today). There are lessons for the unwary researcher, and for those interviewed. Twain condemns the interview as an intrusion into personal life which can do damage, psychologically and socially. The interviewer has his/her own agenda, explicit or implicit, in which the welfare of the interviewee has no secure place. The interviewee is faced with a range of questions, most of which are hard to grapple with simply. The interviewer wants a soundbite answer that can be easily quoted. The interviewer moves from question to question, and before thoughts can be marshaled, has moved on to the next topic. The interview therefore ends up being unsatisfactory in human terms and unreliable in research terms. The interviewer at last finds an area of interest that the interviewee can get his/her teeth into. It is relevant, appropriate, authentic... Sorry, the interviewer says, its not on my schedule, can we move on?
There are lessons here for the qualitative researcher. Interviews are not the magic answer to data collection. The interviewee might be open and honest, and might not be. The interviewee might have a grip of the questions, and might not. The real insight offered by the interviewee might be missed by the questions asked. I have been interviewed by researchers. Once, I was misquoted (the words were on the tape but quoted without the contextual meaning). Once, the questions allowed no reflection and required soundbite answers. Interviews are only as good as the skills of the interviewer.

Interviews need to be flexible and semi-structured. A first interview may be necessary to identify areas of particular relevance that a second interview can then focus on. Informal contacts, even emails, could help to determine what an interviewee is and is not interested in. An interviewee may not tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. I would not, for this requires a depth of trust that will be hard to achieve. The interview would emphasise how the interviewee would like history to be written. The interviewer needs not to be a passive receiver of information, but an interrogator of it. "Yes, but, why did you do that? Is that ethical? is it fair?". A line of questioning that would inhibit the interviewer to open up. The interview is therefore a problematic data collection method. That is not to say it should be avoided - it may be an only way of eliciting information - but that it should be used with caution.

Values we live by.

2010-06-21T22:06:00.002+01:00

A challenging question posed by Jack Whitehead, who came over for lunch. What are the values that underpin my academic life? This post may be some time being constructed, as it is complex. My academic work ranges from Biblical studies (my PhD), the secular study of religion, engagement within education, equal opportunities, and children's literature. Other interests include growing plants, social history and heritage railways.Is all this coherent or is it the product of a butterfly mind?

First let us examine the idea of 'butterfly mind'. A standard academic career chooses a narrow topic around which a person can become a world expert for ever. In my original field of Old Testament Studies, one might do a PhD on Amos chapter 3 and study nothing but that for the next 50 years. Pretty boring, an example of a pointless life. My PhD was on Hebrew Marriage and Family, a broad field, my first book was on the whole of the Old Testament. So looking at the whole must be part of my psyche. For the secular study of religion, I look at all religions everywhere. A recent paper is on the San bushmen of the Kalahari. For inclusion and engagement within education, I am interested in the holistic question of what (in practical terms) it means to educate and be educated. We can look at the whole through many spotlights, which for someone not knowing the overall picture, might seem to be alighting on disparate subjects.

On religion, if you dig there is a layer deep down which most religious people would agree with, whatever their faith label. That is where I want to be, engaging with it as a secularist to see if this spiritual core speaks to my non-supernaturalist assumptions. The mythic and legendary elements are still interesting, but I would look for possible motives of this material. This raises the question of whether a secular (non-supernaturalist) person can be considered spiritual. This is concerned with the core values of humanity and feeds into concepts of spiritual education. My interest in multicultural education is, in addition to promoting understanding across cultures, is about building relationships at a personal level between people across the world.

On education, my chief concern is what 'proper' education is. This invites (with Ivan Illich) us drawing a distinction between education and 'schooling', schooling being about what schools do, good or bad. If schooling is (or is not) education, we want to understand what that means and implies. When in charge of research activity across the Faculty of Education, I used the strap-line 'motivating learning', assuming that education involves facilitating active learning rather than acquiescing with passive sequences and memorisation. I make a further underlying assumption that education should change lives, including the lives of the marginalised and vulnerable. Alas, the history of schooling has not done this. Professional development for teachers needs therefore to address the underlying concept of education rather than remaining compliant to a political hegemony.

Children - and people - learn in informal ways perhaps more than through the formal curriculum so my study of children's literature is interested in what children learn when reading fiction. This work has also included writing experimental children's fiction.

The world needs some serious new approaches to learning if today's children are to become the responsible and effective citizens of tomorrow. This is not within the existing school and university curricula - mostly these are barriers to real learning, somebody's empire. Encouraging teachers and pupils to be critical is a starting point - challenging all items of so-called-knowledge and exploring a varied range of ways of describing life experience. Through scepticism lies understanding and empowerment. The process is supremely important, not the recollection of so-called knowledge.

This brings me back full circle to Biblical Studies, which I explore on http://4004BCE.blogspot.com. Some will recognise 4004BCE as the date once given (and the date taught to me as a child) for the creation of the world - or more precisely, on the evening of September 23rd 4004. Most of what we think of the Bible is wrong, and sentimental. All books were political documents, with a political purpose. Most stories combine legend with fiction, much as TV series of Robin Hood do. To draw out the truth about the Bible and the religions based on it, scepticism offers new understandings of how these troubled people came to terms with their world.

So, motivated learning, sceptical learning, critical learning, problem solving all help to free people from delusion, illusion and false knowledge. Education first is about crap detection; and second about how to recycle that crap in ways that stimulate understanding and personal growth.

The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold.

2010-03-26T18:09:00.001Z

Young teenage girl Susie Salmon is murdered and her body cut in bits and only her elbow found. The readership know who did it because the girl's spirit/ghost remains closely and tells us so. We know that the same man has killed many other girls and occasionally women. Susie speaks to some of them in heaven. The police make no progress even though the girls father points the finger at the right chap. The girl's sister is more proactive and she becomes a new target. The police investigator is having sex with Susie's mother and allows the murderer to escape. He kills again, and is never caught - he dies in a freak accident trying it with another girl. Susie has appeared to her friend Ruth (and to her brother) and briefly changes places with Ruth so she can have sex with her former boyfriend Ray (now Ruth's boyfriend). They all live happily ever after (Ruth and Ray anyway, Susie finds a more distant heaven). Good grief. What ambition.

http://fiction4children.blogspot.com/2010/03/those-lovely-bones-alice-sebold.html

Children's stories as helpful sedition

2010-03-19T08:46:00.002Z

Bigger, Stephen and Webb, Jean (2010) Developing Environmental Agency and Engagement Through Young People’s Fiction. Environmental Education Research . ISSN 1469-5871 (electronic) 1350-4622 (paper) http://eprints.worc.ac.uk/788

Bigger, Stephen (2010) Literature For Learning: Can Stories Enhance Children’s Education? Almas , Vol. 11 . ISSN 1818-9296 http://eprints.worc.ac.uk/793

The first paper explores how 20th century children's stories encourage social (and environmental) action, active participation in changing and protecting the world rather than passive acceptance of adult policies. They are therefore (in a positive way) seditious, encouraging children thinking for themselves and taking action. We argue that this can be a role model for children growing up, for whom real life is anything but this.

The second paper is for a Pakistani journal, promoting informal education through story.

In children's stories, adults often lack the wisdom that children have, leaving the child characters to battle through in opposition to achieve good over evil. This is the opposite to real life in which children have to accept adult decisions as final and are taught to be dependent by the education system.

Encouraging reasoned and values driven independence of thought and action should be a priority of upbringing. This means encouraging children to be social critics, media critics and literary critics. If this sounds negative, criticism should promote appropriate counter-action - so encouraging children to be social activists, responsible media producers, and thought-provoking writers for the next generation.

The Infant Brain

2010-03-04T21:19:00.002Z

Melvyn Bragg's In Our Time today is on The Infact Brain - http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00r2cn4 (time limited, copy below).

My take on it: The current position is a combination of Piaget's constructivism, Chomski's hard wired, and brain neuro-science. Children even at 1 or 2 years old are logical, but have insufficient knowledge to tackle problems as an adult would. The solution is that we need to give them more knowledge/information quicker so that they can work things out. The worst thing we can do is to give them misinformation which will delay their rationality because falsehoods are presented to them as truth. Adult talk to children is always about fairies, father christmas and other irrational beings which will get in the way of developing rationality. Children need accurate knowledge and information from the beginning if they are to develop rationally. They do not need childish language or ideas, and lies (however good the cause) are a form of abuse. So goodbye Santa Claus.

Programme blurb (copyright BBC):

Melvyn Bragg and guests Usha Goswami, Annette Karmiloff-Smith and Denis Mareschal discuss what new research reveals about the infant brain.

For obvious reasons, what happens in the minds of very young, pre-verbal children is elusive. But over the last century, the psychology of early childhood has become a major subject of study.

Some scientists and researchers have argued that children develop skills only gradually, others that many of our mental attributes are innate.

Sigmund Freud concluded that infants didn't differentiate themselves from their environment.

The pioneering Swiss child psychologist Jean Piaget thought babies' perception of the world began as a 'blooming, buzzing confusion' of colour, light and sound, before they developed a more sophisticated worldview, first through the senses and later through symbol.

More recent scholars such as the leading American theoretical linguist Noam Chomsky have argued that the fundamentals of language are there from birth. Chomsky has famously argued that all humans have an innate, universally applicable grammar.

Over the last ten to twenty years, new research has shed fresh light on important aspects of the infant brain which have long been shrouded in mystery or mired in dispute, from the way we start to learn to speak to the earliest understanding that other people have their own minds.

With:

Usha Goswami, Professor of Education at the University of Cambridge and Director of its Centre for Neuroscience in Education

Annette Karmiloff-Smith, Professorial Research Fellow at the Centre for Brain and Cognitive Development at the Department of Psychological Sciences, Birkbeck College, University of London

Denis Mareschal, Professor of Psychology at the Centre for Brain and Cognitive Development at Birkbeck College, University of London.

Paul Ricoeur and the Hermeneutics of Suspicion

2010-03-02T09:19:00.001Z

Ricoeur and the Hermeneutics of Suspicion, by Alison Scott-Baumann, Continuum Studies in Continental Philosophy, 2009. x + 327 pages, price: £65.00.

The works of the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur (1913-2005) have become more accessible recently thanks to reasonably priced reprints by the University of Chicago Press. His Figuring the Sacred: Religion, Narrative and Imagination (1995, Fortress Press) brings his work firmly into the orbit of this journal. Living through the 20th century creates “an existential sadness” and yet “the supposedly empty space between the opposites we create is in fact teeming with our desires, fears, illusions and fantasies and our enormous potential to do good” (p.170). He opposed French imperial actions in Algeria, and opposed the rigid secularism in France that forbade hijab dress code for Muslim girls in schools and denied young people an education. The masters of suspicion were Marx, Freud and Nietzsche, declaring scepticism about economics, psychoanalysis and genealogy. Ricoeur wished to learn from this, but in a balanced way, since out of control scepticism is self defeating, as nothing thereafter can be meaningful. These three cannot make meaning for us: “we have to do it ourselves” (p.176). For Ricoeur, suspicion has to balance negative with positive. He used the term ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ for a while, but then hermeneutics and suspicion separately as ambiguities began to emerge. Suspicion is important because it is iconoclastic, it holds no hostages.

Scott-Baumann starts by way of introduction with Cartesian doubt. Then, in Ricoeur’s hermeneutics I, covers the archaeology of suspicion, Marx, Nietzsche and Freud, the “masters of suspicion”, ending with the use and abuse of the phrase “hermeneutics of suspicion”. Its abuse by other writers led Ricoeur to stop using the phrase as it had become ambiguous, whilst still focusing on the twin ideas of hermeneutics and suspicion. In Ricoeur’s hermeneutics II, Scott-Baumann covers the theory of interpretation, linguistic analysis, methodological dialectics and philosophical anthropology. Finally Ricoeur’s hermeneutics III deals with recovery, interesting not least for linking Ricoeur’s positivity with the journalism of Robert Fisk, seeking a balance between justice and forgiveness to prevent the paralysis of negativity.

This is an important book by a writer in full control of her material and with a clear and readable writing style, on a topic that is significant for both education and religious studies. It goes to the heart of Ricoeur’s thinking, the need for suspicion so that our understanding and knowledge is not subject to other people’s honest or dishonest persuasiveness. However, if that suspicion is total, its negativity will be paralysing and we are left only with despair and absence of meaning. Ricoeur sees this as a symptom of post-modernity, and argues that the only route out of this is by giving a fair place to love and justice. That he allows religion, and Christianity in particular as it is his tradition, to be part of this mix does not make him a Christian apologist. Here too, the principle of suspicion gives him a critical edge, and his theology is far from naive. In a sense he lines up with the humanistic Frankfurt School of critical studies, but with Husserl’s assistance leaves Marxism well behind, a brick in a complex philosophical edifice but not the edifice itself. Scott-Baumann’s topic in this book is an essential introduction to Ricoeur’s thinking over a long life; but Ricoeur’s work was vast, leaving her much work still needing to be done on his wide ranging and multi-disciplinary philosophy. I look forward to further volumes. Since his philosophical writing is dense, this will help us all. I fully recommend this book. It is priced as for library purchase, and well worth ordering. For further reading, I also recommend the official Ricoeur website in French and English, http://www.fondsricoeur.fr.

International Perspectives on Education.

2010-02-22T20:49:00.006Z

Other contributions to the book referred to in the previous post. Most, described here, discuss holistic education and the importance of emotional engagement (care).

Colleen McLaughlin: 'Reforming the Connections: the personal, social and cognitive in learning and young people's lives'.
We need to repair and reconnect the links between personal, social and cognitive learning - that is develop holistic strategies. Teachers' own learning about their practice has to be central in this. "It will involve us in taking seriously our relationships and the messages we send to students about themselves and the learning process" (p.39).
Kristjan Kristjansson: 'Self-esteem, self-confidence and individualized education'.
Self-esteem has been wrongly over-emphasised. Feeling good about ourselves can be counter productive and self deceptive. Self-confidence is more important and should be the teacher's goal.
John P. Miller: 'The Thinking Heart: educating for wisdom and compassion'.
Advocates holistic education with inspiration from Buddhism.
Trevor Kerry: 'The art and science of effective teaching'.
Forget skills and competence. Teaching is about being an effective communicator of an accurate message which has roots in art and science.
George Jacobs: 'Making thinking audible and visible via cooperative learning.'
The importance of building cooperation into class strategies.
Alan J Bishop and Wee Tiong Seah: 'Educating values: possibilities and challenges through mathematics teaching'.
Maths teaching should be rooted in values, and various projects are discussed to develop aspects of this.
Michalinos Zembylas: 'Practising an ethic of caring in teacing: challenges and possibilities'.
Teaching should involve caring. This is an emotional labour. The argument is rooted in the work of L. Goldstein, Reclaiming Caring in Teaching and Teacher Education (2002).

Howard Gardner.

2010-02-22T16:51:00.002Z

This is to share some thoughts on Howard Gardner from his recent paper 'Multiple lenses on the mind' in International Perspectives on Education, edited by Chau Meng Huat and Trevor Kerry (Continuum). He summarised his multiple intelligences as 8 (or 9 - his words, the ninth being existential/spiritual. The eight are: linguistic, logical mathematical, musical, spacial, bodily kinaesthetic, interpersonal, intrapersonal, naturalist. This model is to recognise diversity and to escape from the IQ test model of an umbrella intelligence.

On 'Changing Minds' (and see the book of that name), he lists seven levers of mind changing: reason,

research,
resonance,
redescription,
rewards and resources,
real world events, and
resistances overcome.

On 'Five Minds for the Future', he lists

the disciplined mind
the synthesizing mind
the creative mind
the respectful mind and
the ethical mind.

The final two of these he suggests are of greatest value.

He ends with Margaret Mead's dictum, "Never doubt that a small group of committed people can change the world. Indeed, its the only thing that ever has."

William Golding

2010-02-20T18:24:00.002Z

Readers of Lord of the Flies or viewers of the film, will remember the twins. They were real kids in Golding's class in Bishop Wordsworth School in Salisbury. One is my neighbour; the other's funeral took place on Friday. Rest in peace and love to the family.

See also http://learnlivethrive.blogspot.com/2009/11/tony-brown-and-william-golding.html

Kurt Lewin, Action Research and Changing Culture.

2010-02-19T11:45:00.003Z

Resolving Social Conflicts* was a collection of papers published together in 1948. The long tradition of action research dates from this time. Lewin was interested in social relations and conflict between national and racial groups. A German Jewish refugee in America, these cultures interested him most. And what interested him most was the possibility o and mechanisms for change. He conducted what he called experiments in social space, including a comparison between a democratic and autocratic ethos in a class, finding that much more hostility and negative reactions could be found in the autocratic class. He cites Lippitt, in whose experiments people reacting against authoritarianism did not react against the leader but against some scapegoat who they could bully with impunity. He concluded that authoritarian produces a hostile society without fellow feeling or altruism. Lewin comments, "The social climate in which a child lives is for the child as important as the air he breathes" (p.66). People are shaped by the cultures they grow up in.

His paper 'Action Research and Minority Problems' (1946) describes an experiment he made to encourage change. People were organised in groups and came to a workshop in which they discussed desired changes, planned to implement the changes, and met regularly to evaluate progress. He collected data from the three groups to plot out the processes involved. The spirit was democratic. In order to evaluate progress, the group has to know what progress might look like, or " lack of standards by which to measure progress" (p.143). He argued that new approaches were needed to study processes - interviews and surveys just could not catch the subtleties. An experiment was needed. For the research process, he gave the example of a bombing raid of a German factory. The information had to be collected through reconnaissance; a detailed plan put in place, considering all aspects and intricasies; when the mission was accomplieshed, feedback was needed, to give teeth to the evaluation. This structure was given to an experiment in inter-cultural relations.

This and similar experiences have convinced me that we should consider action, research, and training as a triangle that should be kept together for the sake of any of its corners (149)

The delegates moved from being isolated individuals to becoming cooperative teams

on the basis of readiness to face difficulties realistically, to apply honest fact-finding, and to work together to overcome them (149)

The end result was a detailed training programme owned by everyone. Lewin recognized that global solutions to problems of cultural harmonious inter-relationships are complex and require local, national and internation action over a long period.

Action Research has been used widely since then, and this workshop model is no longer a common one; but there is great value for action research to return to its roots, and seek solutions by getting practitioners to work together with stakeholders to find solutions to difficulties and differences of vision, mission and practice. Such an an action research group consisting of a teacher and the pupils could have a great impact on behaviour, achievement and ethos. Open-minded groups of politicians, practitioners and stakeholders might have made better education policy than the failed efforts of the past 22 years.

Note * published together with Field Theory in Social Science in 1951, and reprinted from 1997 onwards by the American Psychological Association.

The Authentic Person 3 Creative Tension, Openness and Morality

2010-02-18T14:45:00.007Z

Sydney J Harris's 3rd and 4th lectures encouraged keeping opposites in a creative tension within a moral framework. So the bonds of marriage involve both bondage and freedom. He uses phenomenology to explore human experience. Again, what follows are my comments and not his.

This is to replace an 'either-or' frame of mind with 'both-and'. In his example, marriage binds and restricts on the one hand, yet liberates on the other. These two need to be held by both partners in balance, in creative tension, for the marriage to be healthy. In fact, readjustments will have to be made all the time, either emphasising the need for more responsibility or more freedom. Choices and decisions balance a number of points of view, sometimes contradictory. Democracy allows people to have a vote, and to be outvoted by a majority. The majority are not always right. Achieving a consensus aims at a solution that everyone can live with. Unfortunately it takes longer and assumes compromise. One intransigent individual can wreck consensus by refusing to compromise. In some cases he or she may be wrong to do this, but they may be right, especially if it is a moral matter of significant principle. Sometimes, someone has to stand up against the crowd.

Assuming that compromise does not mean 'being compromised' (i.e. feeling that we have to do something unethical), we need to define within the continuum of legitimate opposites a comfort zone within which we are prepared to trade. If others do the same, the ground is prepared for consensus. This assumes that ethics plays a central role in defining the limits of consensus and compromise. It is not that anything goes (relativism) - that gave us the ghettos and death camps. It means that there is room for manoeuvre within an ethically defensible range of choices.

The answer to many questions is yes and no. Understanding the parts we would say yes to (the pros) and those we say no to (the cons) are the ways we operate in this marginal zone of creative tension. Openness to others is easier for some than for others. People who are self-centred and disagreeable (poles of two personality traits) will find working with others difficult, and may find it hard to change. Openness comes in both dialogue (the willingness to allow another a valid point of view) and empathy (sharing in other people's emotional ups and downs0. Not wishing to hurt other people is the beginnings of morals and ethics. It is nothing to do with obeying petty rules.

Later lectures talked of polarised confrontational politics, misbalancing individual concerns with social responsibilities, and how in future we will have to live with ambiguity. Certainty is dead, although there are moral principles which are absolute. Globally, we have a lot of listening and compromising to do.

Humankind has evolved to be rational, though this is a discipline that escapes many. That should mean escape from aggressive responses and power to the strong, and to the possibility of working for the common good. The twentieth century was the most bloody in human history. What will the 21st be? What can we each do as individuals to achieve a fairer world both for humans and for other species?

So what is an authentic person? It is a dilemma. Authentic could mean true to me, and be totally self-centred. I do what I want, true to my beliefs and desires, and blow to anyone else. Or it could recognize that authentic recognizes the network of responsibilities and relationships that the self sits within. This is MacMurray's Self as Agent and Self in Relation, that as a human I have to be actively engaged, and supportive of the networks I exist within. My cats are not capable of that choice. For me, humans exist in a global network, so being authentic means promoting world progress and harmony.

The Authentic Person 2 False Opposites.

2010-02-17T21:53:00.005Z

Sydney J Harris's second lecture challenged the use of opposites such as good-evil, love-hate. Again, these are my comments and not his. We try to make sense of human experience, and either-or is a favorite mechanism. Many questionnaires work on the same principle, with yes-no answers. That a person might wish to answer both yes and no wrecks the system. I once did a careers test to tell me what career I ought to go for. Do you like to work indoors or outdoors? Choose one. I like both. Depending on my choice they would advise me to be either a banker or a lumberjack. The verdict of the questionnaire was that it could not advise me. I liked too many things. A scale of responses is more helpful, but on occasions whether I reply 1 or 5 may depend on circumstances.

So is a person good or evil? Do I love someone or hate someone? 'Love a little' or 'hate a little' seem perverse options within polarity. How can I answer until I know what good is, or what evil is? Do I even know what love is? It is these sort of questions that push me into qualitative research, which raises a similar question - do I know what quality is, and does my view agree with everyone elses?

Good and evil have been part of the human psyche for ever. Evil spirits are still blamed for misfortunes amongst educated folk. Children are killed because they are believed to be inhabited by an evil spirit - Victoria Climbie is the most famous example. Religions have promoted the idea, and pastors have connived with the murder of children so labelled. A girl I once taught, with some emotional fragility, was exorcised by a Christian priest, with disastrous consequences. This was to objectify evil into a separate entity and to deal with it by driving it away. Evil, and exorcism are the stuff of popular films, which portray a dualistic world in which evil forces reign. Children's stories sometimes depict battles between these evil forces and the child characters. Garth Nix's The Ragwitch, and his 'across the wall' books; Anthony Horowitz's Raven's Gate; Michelle Paver's Chronicles of Ancient Darkness. The truth is that there are no evil forces. Philip Pullman shows struggles with archangels, ghasts, harpies and other monsters, and depicting fortune telling as real, but set out of this world, within the imagination, with a story which sets the mind free of these fictions by establishing a commonwealth or cooperative of individual endeavour, rather than a kingdom led by an authority - that is self help rather than dependence. This at least is an honest journey.

Evil characters in fiction and especially in computer games, can be killed. War stories exult in enemy dead. In a computer game, the child zaps aliens, or enemies, or even Indians. This is educating them to kill. The Nazis became very good at it. Few Germans in 1945 felt guilty and the victorious allies had to treat their misperceptions as a disease. People, in real life, are mixtures of good and bad. All are capable of change, given circumstances that enable them to. Equally good people are capable of becoming monsters if circumstances drive them in this direction. Madmen rule only because others permit them to. We need to cultivate those others to resist injustice and to build a fairer society.

So, there is no devil and equally no God. There are only choices, crossroads to different journeys with different consequences.

The Authentic Person 1 Humans

2010-02-17T20:22:00.008Z

These next posts come from The Authentic Person: Dealing With Dilemma by Sydney J Harris (1972). These were lectures from the 1960s for the Aspen Institute of Humanistic Studies. I intend to reflect on the issues rather than just describe the lectures.

First, the dethroning of mankind, a new self image. What do we think of humanity post Darwin, Freud and Marx? Why do humans think themselves better than animals? After all humans are animals. Humans think themselves intelligent. Of course, 95% of them are not but sit gawping at a TV screen. Most cannot put a rational thought together but guide their choices by their emotions. Those emotions can be destructive and lead to killing, mayhem and disaster. Humans are easily led - three quarters would kill if they were ordered to if it was a way of saving themselves (see my blog on Stanley Milgram). See also Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners. Look at Abu Ghraib prison, and look into Iran today. Through the ages, human achievement has been measured by the ability to kill other people or things. Humans will soon wipe out most other species, and then wipe ourselves out. So what do we do about this? A quarter of people are resisters. In Nazi Germany these were the first to be eliminated. By every possible means, education, literature, theatre, we have learn to resist the bloodlust that fills our entertainment, and our political activity. What is humankind that we are mindful of them - quite a bit lower than the angels, and often behaving worse than the demons.

But we need the spin. We must believe ourselves to be altuistic, kind, cooperative and helpful. It is a delusion, but I hope we come to believe it. Those who believe they can be a positive force for good need to become the leaven of social and political development. Am I an optimist or a pessimist about humans having a worthwhile long-term future? Probably a pessimist but there are faint glimmers that grass-roots opinion is beginning to build a degree of inter-cultural understanding. The trouble is opinion top down - the grass roots are there, but often covered in tarmac.

Deportation of a Bahai from Uzbekistan

2010-02-16T17:15:00.004Z

The Baha'i Faith is committed to advancing peace, justice, ethical conduct and human unity. Members do not propagandise and worship quietly in each others' houses. This is clearly a threat to Uzbekistan's authoritarian government. Persecution is clearly not confined to Iran. See further http://eprints.worc.ac.uk/58.

From Forum 18 (click for link)
Sepehr Taheri, a Baha'i with British citizenship who had lived in the Uzbek capital Tashkent
since 1990, is married to an Uzbek citizen and their children were all born there. In the wake of his deportation, a local news website accused Taheri of "propagandising Baha'i religious teaching" and increasing the number of "proselytes" in the country. The website's chief editor defended to Forum 18 its publication of the article, which was written by the same author who attacked the previous Baha'i to be expelled from Uzbekistan.

The deportations are part of the Uzbek government's campaign to isolate religious believers in Uzbekistan from their fellow-believers abroad, which also includes visa and entry denials to foreign citizens wishing to visit for religious purposes.

The official who answered the phone at the department that registers religious organisations at the Tashkent City Justice Department refused to discuss the deportations with Forum 18 on 12 February. Nor was any official of the government's Religious Affairs Committee in Tashkent prepared to explain why foreign citizens legally resident in Uzbekistan cannot freely practice their faith with their fellow believers. The Uzbek authorities deal especially harshly with local citizens who conduct religious activities they deem to be illegal. Among many recent cases, Muslim journalist Hairulla Hamidov was arrested in Tashkent on 21
January and is awaiting criminal trial (see forthcoming F18News article).

According to a 5 February article by Abduvali Turaev on the Novosti Uzbekistana website, Taheri was working in Tashkent as an English language teacher. He was found guilty of violating the Code of Administrative Offences and, on 17 November 2009, was deported from Uzbekistan. The author did not say which Article of the Administrative Code Turaev was accused of violating, nor which court handed down the verdict. The Baha'i community
confirmed Taheri's deportation to Forum 18 without giving details. No Uzbek official would tell Forum 18 which court had punished Taheri.

The deportation of Taheri is the latest in a series of government moves against the Baha'i community, which has been able to register its groups in Tashkent, Samarkand, Jizak, Bukhara and Navoi. More than ten officers from the police and NSS secret police, together with an official of the City Justice Department and the head of the mahalla (city district) committee raided the Baha'i centre in Tashkent's Khamza District in July 2009. Two Baha'is were found guilty of resisting the police, charges they denied, and sentenced to fifteen days' imprisonment. After that one of the two was expelled to neighbouring Kazakhstan (see
F18News 24 September 2009)
In the wake of both Baha'i expulsions, Russian-language media articles by Turaev in the local media appeared later. His article attacking the earlier expelled Baha'i was published by Gorizont.uz agency on 16 September 2009, more than five weeks after his expulsion. The 5 February 2010 article about Taheri appeared in Novosti Uzbekistana more than eleven weeks after his deportation. The delay was not explained.

Turaev's article, "Sower of Alien Ideas", claimed that Taheri had come to live in Uzbekistan in 1990 "for mercenary reasons" (which were not explained) and as a missionary. It claimed he married an Uzbek citizen "to legalise his presence in the country, to conceal his mercenary aims and to avoid being unmasked". The author alleged that "by concealing his real aims" he was able to set up nine Baha'i groups across Uzbekistan.

Turaev claimed Taheri had been arrested in August 2008 while "brainwashing" a local woman "with the aim of forcing her to change her religious views". But "on that occasion he was able to evade responsibility" (the author does not explain how). The author then claims that Taheri organised the participation of more than 200 people from Uzbekistan in an "unsanctioned" meeting of Baha'is from Central Asia in Almaty in Kazakhstan in December
2008 (he did not explain why the conference was "unsanctioned"). The author claimed that most of those who went from Uzbekistan did not know they were going to a religious conference.

The author accused Taheri of organising "illegal meetings" in private homes in Tashkent in the first three months of 2009, as well as invitations to foreign Baha'is to visit communities in the country. "It is natural that his activities were recognised as contradicting the laws of Uzbekistan," Turaev declared.

Defending media slanders

Forum 18 was unable to reach Turaev either at Novosti Uzbekistana or at Gorizont. The man who answered the phone at Novosti Uzbekistana on 15 February told Forum 18 "we don't have anyone by that name here". Pyotr Yakovlev, chief editor at Novosti Uzbekistana, also refused to pass on Turaev's contact details, but denied that Turaev was anything other than a journalist. He refused to explain why he is known to have published only two articles under his own name, both attacking Baha'is.

Yakovlev vigorously denied that his publication was a mouthpiece for the state's anti-religious campaign. "We are a private, not a state-run publication and we are independent," he insisted to Forum 18 from Tashkent on 16 February. Asked why he allowed his publication to attack the Baha'i community, and Taheri in particular, without giving them the opportunity to give their view, he declared: "I am an Uzbek. I am 64 years old and I know the Baha'is. Why shouldn't I publish this material?"

Asked why he had allowed the journalist to make unverified accusations, Yakovlev responded: "Decisions were taken by the court, not by us. You should ask them." He then put the phone down.

In addition to Turaev's September 2009 article attacking the Baha'is, Gorizont has a history of publishing other material attacking religious communities. In summer 2009 it published two articles attacking the Union of Baptists of Uzbekistan for holding children's summer camps. The author made a number of allegations which Baptists categorically denied.

The Gorizont articles appeared not long before the prosecution of three senior Baptist leaders, including Pavel Peichev, head of the Union. The three were given heavy fines (subsequently overturned), ordered to pay large sums in "unpaid" taxes and banned from positions in the Union for three years (see F18News 7 December 2009

Religion, spirituality, and challenging marginalisation

2010-02-16T11:14:00.002Z

Religion, spirituality, and the social sciences: challenging marginalisation (2008) is edited by Basia Spalek and Alia Imtoual, the former from the field of criminology, criminal justice, and victims; the latter a writer on Muslims in Australia. Unfortunately neither writes a chapter of their own, although both write the conclusion. The contrubutors are a mix of very experienced and less experienced writers. Central to the many discussions is the hegemony of secularism in the social sciences, producing tensions when examining spiritual or religious topics. After decades of relative marginalisation in the social sciences (this is the meaning of marginalisation in the title), religion and spirituality have returned as a topic worthy of research and indeed as a factor which needs to be understood as the world tries to make sense of itself. 7/11 has brought Islamic values to the fore in a contested way; the death of Victoria Climbie as an example of belief in child demons could not be grasped by the Laming Commission, but many children are abused and killed because of beliefs in spirits, demons and ancestors. Religion is an aspect of identity for some, and attacks on religion can be part of their victimisation - 'spirit injury' is a term apparently used by critical Black feminists. One sub-theme is the championing of mixed-method research (that is introducing a qualitative aspect). There are examples of quantitative nonsenses, such as a statistical grouping which puts aboriginees, bahais and scientologists in the same box, to produce meaningless statistics. One appeal is to come to terms with shamanic altered mental states, another to included emotion in the research process, not only reporting the emotions of respondants, but also allowing emotion in the researcher, who is trying to get to grips with emotions labeled spiritual of religious.
This is one part of the issue. Another is that we need to understand the place of emotions in self understanding, and in particular distinguish between helpful and harmful emotions. People can be emotional to an obsessive level about nonsense, about demon possiession (remember The Crucible?), and about angels, crystals, heaven, hell. Giving them a voice does not mean we have to accept their dangerous misunderstandings.

2010-02-14T10:25:00.005Z

Apologies for break in posts, owing to activities writing for publication. You can catch some of this, if you wish, on http://eprints.worc.ac.uk/view/author/Bigger,_Stephen.html.

See also my blog http://1930-1960.blogspot.com where I have added discussions of second world war literature.

Eco-Criticism

2010-02-04T12:18:00.004Z

This post is a consequence of a call for papers on eco-criticism (green criticism) of children's literature. It has wider relevance as a critique of many other aspects of society and politics. I am drawing this discussion by reviewing Graham Huggan and Helen Tiffin, Postcolonial Ecocriticism: Literature, Animals, Environment, Routledge 2010. The title gives the order of interest - Postcolonial critique predominates, focusing primarily of ecocritical concerns, using the three subtitles as case studies. Colonialism regarded the environment as natural resources to be exploited, assuming that land's value lies only in what can be exploited. Exploitation takes from the land rather than enriches it - mines are dug, forests are cut down - and other assumptions about the land have had little voice, assumptions about preserving the environment sustainably to hand it on to our children and our grandchildren undiminished. Where environment and habitat have been lost, this implies that some efforts are made to restore it. Although colonies are ended, colonial attitudes linger as former colonists or neocolonialists pull strings and hold influence through multi-national companies, at worst producing atrocities such as at Bhopal in India, and more generally depriving local people of land and livelihood. Regarding animals as a resource has its extreme form in the killing of elephants for ivory.

I am concerning myself in this post with Ecocriticism rather than postcolonial and neocolonial aspects. This is not to deny the latter, for which there is more than enough evidence globally that these are real issues, and that it is closely linked to issues of poverty and the unfair distribution of wealth and resources. I will return to neocolonialism in a later blog. Ecocriticism involves how we critique human environmental usage, and what attitudes to land we build up in our broad education programmes.

I start my critique with social critique which involves issues of equity, democratic collaboration and fair distribution of the world's resources. The population of the world need sufficient water and food for their needs, which has to be the start of economic and political planning. If some people have less than sufficient, and others more than sufficient, this presents an ethical problem. Waste is also an issue, especially in circumstances where others desperately need the equivalent of what is wasted. To achieve global equity, most of the assumptions of the developed world need overturning. The 'right' to have plenty, and luxuries besides, has to be set against the 'need' of others to survive. Colonialism has left a legacy of exploited land, perhaps with an over-reliance on colonial crops such as chocolate, coffee, tea or rubber which multinationals can exploit in the name of competition to keep western prices low (and in so doing keep the producers' incomes low). In short, considering all aspects of life globally through the lens of social equity will be the main thrust of ecocriticism. Land ownership, even, becomes unclear where land was unfairly taken in the past. All this is mighty unsettling to current landowners in former colonies.

Education can address issues of social equity through history, geography and science (if the science syllabus allows time to be devoted to the use of science). Children might question priorities - why are billions of pounds or dollars spent globally on luxuries for the rich rather than on resources for the poor? On the space race rather than food race, or the race for green energy? Literature might also play a part, with children's stories about the lives of the poor and disadvantaged told with a political edge rather than a patronising one. Environmental education concerns itself (at the curriculum margins, it has to be said) with sustainability, habitat, biodiversity and so on. Without wishing to play these down, it is a neocolonial agenda, seeking to ensure that we who have do not lose pleasures in the future generations. Environmental education does also emphasise global resources at the radical end, but the political agenda of redistribution of resources from rich to poor does not dominate in schools. It takes a disaster to encourage rich people to 'help', forgetting that our wealth is part of the reason for their poverty.

Scholarship on learning and teaching

2010-01-11T22:18:00.004Z

The next issue of the journal on scholarship on teaching and learning has just been posted. The articles sound very erudite but I wonder if it more of the same vacuous 'aren't I doing well' variety. So I am thinking here of what we might mean by scholarship on learning and teaching. Learning and teaching seems to me to attract big money for of insignificant papers.

Why is it 'scholarship' and not 'research'? Is scholarship work at a lower level? Scholarship is one of those nonsense words, since it refers to the low-level act of being schooled; yet to be called a scholar is an accolade, higher perhaps than being a researcher. Anyhow, we wish to examine learning and teaching rigorously to make a contribution both to evaluating whether we succeed, and to do it better.

Teaching is the act of enabling the learner to learn. It is not about crowd control, or dramatic performances. It is not about anger and temper tantrums and other controlling strategies; it is about honesty, respect, dialogue and motivation.

Research might imply that the researcher is observing some other teacher and learners, whilst scholarship might embrace rigorous evaluation of one's own practice. Research could be so defined, but can be straight-laced sometimes.

So, on learning and teaching. We are not talking about learning parrot-fashion, though I did learn things 50 years ago that I can still recite. We are talking about embedded learning, with understanding. Learning that changes me, corrects my errors, redirects my vision. It worries me that no teacher I ever had managed to do this for me. Learning had to come from within, and the most I could expect of teachers is to not get in the way. Which they invariably did. Perhaps the mistake is the word 'teacher'? Teach is something you do to someone, force information into someone, drill someone with new skills. 'Learn' must therefore be passive and not active, to do as one is instructed. This never worked for me. Learning is something I do, not something someone does to me. If someone helps me learn that is fine. Rare, but fine. Our task with the young is to turn them on to learning, to curiosity, to constructiveness. Schools are structured around the fill-and-test model, requiring memorization. So schools devalue learning and over-value teaching and its processes, of worksheets, control and tests. Billions of pounds spent on the wrong things.

So if I am to write a paper on learning, I have to be smarter. Where does learning occur? What facilitates it? What whets our critical edge? What causes us to say, 'You must be joking?'. Research into learning has to be subversive, to disbelieve the rhetoric of authority claims and expertise claims. In a sense even of truth claims?

If education is not helping our youngsters to be critical, it is a waste of time. It needs to build children up to contribute to developing the quality of their world over the next century. It is not about declaring them failures.

Auto-ethnography

2009-12-29T17:53:00.007Z

If ethnography is the patient observation, recording and interviewing about the meaning of what is observed, auto-ethnography has some difficulties. Observing our own selves and lives presents challenges. An outsider ethnographer comes with their own package of assumptions and has to put these to one side to enter into the spirit of what is happening. The assumptions of the auto-ethnographer about themselves and their own life and motivations is perhaps too entrenched to achieve this. We are not asking for objectivity to be achieved - turning one's own subjective self into an object is probably impossible. In grammar, the reflexive verb has the same subject and object (such as "I enjoy myself") so we term this way of thinking as reflexivity. Equally, we cannot observe ourselves, but can observe our reflections (through video, tape, or channeled through other people's eyes. So we call this discussion "reflective".

Ethnography built its roots on the social anthropology of far away places, quickly colonised by the sociology of the near at hand. Ethnographers were generally strangers to what they were observing, who tried to make friends to view things as though from inside. The anthropologist Hortense Powdermaker made this her title of her autobiography: Stranger and Friend (1966). 'Native' ethnographers who knew matters from the inside were likely to make fewer assumptions but had to learn how to think out of the box, and not be institutionalised by the context in which they had been brought up. Their focus may have been on their own culture, but was broader than being on their own role within it.

Auto-ethnography is sometimes used in place of autobiography or memoir, so I will clarify the difference. An autobiography attempts to record ones life, from memory, in chronological order. Details might be checked with others, and with documents. Depending on the audience, some details are likely to be censored, and others spun to shed best light on the subject. Words have social and legal consequences, which the wise autobiographer thinks through. This of course is anathema in ethnography where all detail, observed and spoken, play a part in the whole picture.

Whether auto-ethnography is possible I am putting on hold for the moment. Rather I am laying ground rules for robust study of one's own role and performance in life and in work. Then we can judge its viability.

The auto-ethnographer can remove the problem of autobiography by concentrating on those things which would be censored. The details of course are not for publication, and a mixture of anonymity and fiction could provide a comfort zone. For example, a group could discuss anonymous fictional accounts rooted in the censored incident with the ground rule that the author does not self identify. An author can feel distanced from the fictional account and even comment without embarrassment alongside fellows. The group can then draw general conclusions across the accounts discussed.

The autobiographer writes 'self' without 'other'. The ethnographer tries to study 'other' with as little self as possible. The auto-ethnographer needs to learn to treat self as other and lay on one side presuppositions, assumptions, status, self esteem etc. Some guidance may help.

it may help to arrange to be interviewed, to tape, by an experienced interviewer (experienced on the topic and in interviewing). The interview needs to be probing, hard edged, challenging. The transcript is the subject through the eyes of another.
it may help to ask others to write anonymously an account of the subject on the prescribed topic. For example, a Headteacher asked her staff for accounts of how they perceived her management style. Ensuring that these are anonymous and cannot be used managerially adds to their authenticity.
The use of an administrator to ensure texts such as emails are properly anonymised will be essential - otherwise it constitutes an ethical threat.

Phenomenology.
Much appears to be but is not necessarily so. A philosophical position rooted in not making presuppositions has been called phenomenology, the study of appearances or manifestations. Our self esteem is such a set of appearances: in making them the centre of study, we have to learn to 'bracket out' any presuppositions about ourselves and seek for an open mind. Our internalised understandings and stereotypes get in the way of having an open mind, so we need to get back to 'the things themselves', without its mental spin in our heads. So far, this strategy can have benefit in auto-ethnography when personal point of view is consistently bracketed away to leave raw data, as opposed to interpretation. In the end, it may be all interpretation, but to be able to study the way we interpret events is itself instructive. After Schutz, the study of our everyday experience of x or y became popular. It works best with phenomena without concrete existence. To study a chair requires observation. To study our experience of using a chair, or quality in chairs takes it to another level. Quality is a phenomenon that we find meaningful; but quality cannot be distilled into a test-tube. So phenomenology is highly relevant to our wish to research of everyday experiences of work, play, or domesticity. We can separate the thing itself from our interpretations of it; both offer insights.

Personality.
For auto-ethnography, we might dig a little into what kind of a person we are. Personality research has clustered its many points into five umbrella 'traits' - these might be our starting point. I use the OCEAN mnemonic:

O - am I open to persuasion? or are my ideas fixed? if I am between, what is fixed and what is open? Can I trust my judgements? or am I self-centred and over-confident (false self esteem)?
C- am I conscientious? or lazy? does conscientious mean 'doing one's duty' or 'doing as I am told'? does this leave time for personal creativity?
E - am I extroverted, or introverted? do I prefer company to being alone? in company, do I need to dominate? do I want everyone to know my opinions? do I want people to agree with me? Or am I fearful of being contradicted and prefer to keep my council? Where in between am I?
A - am I agreeable or disagreeable? If agreeable, am I prepared to disagree with another over a matter of fact or opinion? Will I stand up for truth and justice? If I am disagreeable, do I just like to argue for the sake of it? Am I cynical and dismissive of the efforts of others?
N - am I neurotic (that is, excessively anxious, worried about everything) or so laid back I never bother to get out of bed? Where in between to I plot myself - what worries me, what can I accept with reasonable relaxation? How fearful of the past and future am I? Can I enjoy the present?

Working in a team: The Belbin test
Am I a leader/organiser? content to be a follower or foot-soldier? am I the ideas person? am I pernicity about detail? Do I finish what I start? am I a saboteur? Is the balanced person a mixture of all these?

Self-definition - how do I define myself?
Identity
How do I define my identity? By nation, colour, religion, football team? Family, work, relationships? Try to summarise your identity in a sentence. Which parts give you the greatest satisfaction and self esteem? With give you the least of both?

Criticality
Am I critical of the state of the world? The injustices, the divisions between rich and poor, the haves and the have nots. Do I think the status quo should be changed for the greater good even if I am privileged in it?

Summing up
To research one's self, life and work requires us to draw on detailed observations, some of which could come from video, and some from other people. There has to be a strong 'other people' element. A critical friend can work with the individual in new schemes, the discussion becoming data. The principle of allowing no assumptions to be unexamined should be maintained throughout. This will also reveal insights into how we view and interpret our world, and what motivates our point of view.

There is a benefit. The researcher may be a teacher with 20 years of experience. This has strengths and weaknesses - an understanding perhaps about educational processes, perhaps, but assumptions that are socialised but unhelpful, parochial 'the way we do it here' attitudes which prevents change. The aim will be to distill the good whilst understanding and eliminating the unhelpful.

Epistemology

2009-12-27T11:07:00.003Z

Epistemology is the study of how we know what we know (or claim to know). It contains the roots therefore of whether knowledge and research is reliable and believable. Knowledge evolves, so is never absolute. Knowledge of science in 1900 was very different from science knowledge in 2000, and scientists are constantly updating it. This applies to all disciplines.

Skepticism lies at the heart of epistemology, constant questioning of evidence and interpretation. Knowledge claims should never be taken for granted but always doubted, tested and deconstructed in order to build a more secure version of that knowledge.
Objectivity simply means we can touch and feel the object, and can therefore measure it. Science is based on measurement, and through description searches for hypotheses. Measurements are not always meaningful, as we know too well in education - we need to be skeptical about what is measured, why and how. In quantitative questionnaires, for example, what is asked and what is not asked is important. Also, the truth is not always found in majority opinion, as Galileo once understood.
Knowledge is in fact no more than a truth claim, which may be reliable and may be not. The concept of 'truth' suffers from the same problems as 'knowledge' - it is a fallible claim that someone makes, and must be tested.
As individuals, we have a basic foundation of beliefs we believe to be true. This is called foundationalism.
Not all knowledge is measurable. You cannot measure quality, but only perceptions of quality. Research that we call qualitative looks for reliable strategies in different ways.
Perceptual knowledge tries to make sense of what we see, hear, taste, smell and feel. We see an object as a tree, an oak, a table. We can be tricked or mistaken. We can have hallucinations. We look therefore to justify our sense perception, to make absolutely sure.
A priori arguments or assumptions are things taken as true at the start. If we meet a four footed creature we make the a priori assumption it is an animal. It may be a statue, or a robot, so we are not always right. Our conceptual system labels things in order to help us make rapid identifications. Our concepts might become stereotypes which emphasise similarities but mask differences. Racism for example is rooted in negative stereotypes.
Moral knowledge. A positivist would say that there is no such thing as moral knowledge or ethics, since they are not observable or measurable. Most would hold however that this is a travesty. That genocide is morally wrong would generally be held as a meaningful statement. There is however great diversity in what counts as ethical - ranging from rational judgements to the application of moral laws in scriptures. Few today would recognize as moral demands in my own upbringing not to shop on a Sunday, and not to enter a pub.
Religious knowledge, or knowledge about God is a next step, and of course is problematic and controversial. What place do we give to religious experience? Is a phenomenology possible? And can the believers interpretation of religious experience ever be bracketed out to reveal the 'pure' experience? Probably not. Is there a link between mysticism and mental disorder? What is the link between drug-induced mysticism, fasting induced hallucinations, and other religious/psychological phenomena?
Feminist Epistemology presumes that positivism is a male obsession with black-white, where the reality is grey (or pink/green or whatever, richer and more interesting. Many qualitative approaches owe their early development to feminist research where understanding human experience is given greater value than experiment.
Social Epistemology addresses what counts as knowledge of society and social relationships.
Procedural Epistemology explores the construction of simple rational arguments as the basis of computer AI (artificial Intelligence).
Hermeneutics as Epistemology emphasises that all we have is interpretation, and we need sharp and critical tools to interpret these interpretations. In this case (and this is widely found today) epistemology is less about the absolute justification of knowledge/ what is true, and more about the refining of our rational processes. This is a stark recognition that we know little or nothing in any hard sense, and we assume a great deal. We started with skepticism, and completing the circle, this is where we end. Recognizing that we can be sure of nothing, we have to make a convincing case which persuades others to see things as we do.

Stephen Bigger, 2010

Reference:
Greco, G and Sosa, E (eds) The Blackwell Guide to Epistemology Basil Blackwell, 1999.

Muslim Pupils Empowerment

2009-12-20T16:41:00.001Z

A former student has developed this programme to educate Muslim pupils and students about Islam - it is worth a look.
http://www.dcsf.gov.uk/violentextremism/toolkitforschools/downloads/Toolkit-OMPEP-June%202009%5B1%5D.pdf

Critical Ethnography

2009-12-18T11:33:00.005Z

Just reading Critical Ethnography: Method, Ethics and Performance by D Soyini Madison from the University of North Carolina (published by Sage, 2005). She is an anthropologist ethnographer interested in human rights, traditional religious practices, myth, and performance She has done fieldwork in Ghana and Italy. Former Fulbright Scholar, and Rockefeller Foundation Fellow. All of the above themes feature in my various blogs and publications.

First thing to say, this is an excellent book, a must-read for anyone involved in qualitative research. This blog will summarise some main points which interest me. It was written with postgraduate students in mind so is clearly written and well structured. I am reviewing as I read so this post will evolve until finished over the next few days.

What is critical ethnography?
Basically it is ethnography with political intent. It combines the process of observation and data collection (anthropological ethnography) with critical studies, a process of asking questions critical of the status quo and society in general, therefore having an interest in transformational politics, human rights, equity and so on. It begins, she says, with researchers recognising their social responsibilities to address injustice. The researcher takes a position within the research. Some attempt to be 'objective' observers: whether anyone can be objective about anything is hugely problematic, so to resolve this post-positivist research focuses on understandings and human interactions instead. The critical researcher takes an ethical position on abuse of power in the status quo, exposing abuses, seeking out the voices of the oppressed, and working with all sides to propose new ways of political and social working.

Ethnography has had a long history in social anthropology and sociology, a researcher patiently observing and recording, interviewing participants to unravel different points of view. Ethnography is thus focused on 'The Other' and is non-self-centred. There should be no theory-practice divide. Critical ethnography is the performance of critical theory, or critical theory in action.

Research methods.
Chapter 2 emphasises the importance of research methods, as contrasted with "deep hanging out". She describes how critical theory involves her line of questioning (interview schedules), different kinds of questions to be asked, and how to code the transcripts. This is extremely useful for anyone learning how to research-interview well. The types of questions suggested will provide much richer data for the researcher. Chapter three illustrates using examples.

Chapter 4 deals with ethics. After a survey of the usual philosophers, she tries to get to grips with an interesting facet, based around the notion of Other. Ethnography, she holds, consists of a research studying 'Other' - other people's customs, points of view, ways of thinking. Any researcher engaging with qualitative research must take the 'other' very seriously indeed. It is too easy to impose one's own ideas on to the data and make the line of questioning too narrow. Madison emphasises the importance of voices of the researched, and the importance of asking the right questions, about rights, propriety, equity, power distribution and abuses and so on. She uses the work of Maria Lugones, on 'Loving Perception'. Lugones uses the metaphor of 'world traveller' as we travel through difference, unfamiliarity and alienation, taking us out of our comfort zone. This takes skill and understanding which is accumulated gradually. In the same way a researcher has to tune into other people's ideas and points of view and get over their unfamiliarity. We may approach these with stereotypes, even caricatures, in mind. One seeks to feel at ease, 'humanly bonded', finding some link that sparks a new relationship. We should, she says, be enough at ease to be playful, experimental, creative. Lugones contrasts arrogant perception (feeling we are superior) to 'loving perception (feeling we are bonded with the interviewees). In this love and caring should lie ethics, not a code to be followed, but a principle to honour.

Chapter 5 is about merging methods with ethics, encouraging openness, dialogue and conceptual accuracy. Chapter 6 has 3 case studies involving marginalised groups. Chapter 7, Performance Ethnography deals with performance (e.g. theatre) as experience, social behaviour, language and identity. Following Victor Turner she deals with performativity, process and cultural politics. Then a section deals with staging ethnography - the possibilities of theatre.

Chapter 8 gives examples of how to write it up. Four useful terms are writing as... relational, evocative, embodied and consequential. Relational means recognizing a relationship between writer and reader, the writer communicating with the reader and trying to enrich them. The opposite is writing to impress, egotistical writing. Evocative means that the writing evokes strong feelings, memories and associations that are powerful to readers as well as writers. Embodied recognizes that the whole body writes, and critical writing interconnects the body with others, the reader engaging with the text with all their senses feeling a sense of engagement and (non-sexual) arousal. Consequential means that writing should break through comfort zones and engage with political struggle, and thus have personal and social consequences.

Finally, chapter 9 gives 3 more case studies, one on cultural performance as fieldwork, one on oral history as performance, and the last on communitas, breach and redressive action (after Victor Turner).

A very thought-provoking book.

Post under construction. To be continued

Children learning from literature

2009-12-13T16:11:00.002Z

This is a draft of a paper accepted for publication. Any comments welcome.
http://sites.google.com/site/literature4learning/

Abstract

This article asks how children might benefit from stories in their general education. It distinguishes between story for entertainment and stories for learning. Stories not only can be memorable, but can stimulate a child reader to think intellectually, socially, morally and spiritually if they are encouraged and taught how to do this. It argues that the reading of stories is part of critical education and introduces the idea of embodied learning. We conclude by asking whether stories are valuable as just stories, or whether there needs also to be some pedagogical purpose.

Sex, maternity and paternity in Genesis

2009-12-13T14:05:00.003Z

Readers might be interested in my parallel blog, a critical conversation about the Bible. You will find a Genesis thread on
http://4004bce.blogspot.com/2009/12/sex-maternity-and-paternity.html
You might also be interested in my edited book, Creating the Old Testament: The Emergence of the Hebrew Bible (Basil Blackwell).

Liminality and Victor Turner.

2009-12-13T09:58:00.006Z

Published in the Journal of Beliefs and Values (vol 30 number 2, August 2009, pages 209-212) is a paper on Victor Turner, liminality and ciltural performance. It can be found at http://eprints.worc.ac.uk/565/ Victor Turner noticed as an anthropologist how performance marked a change of status (e.g. from childhood to adulthood), the performance itself being an in-between state. He applied this later to performance generally, where a carnival or play puts people into this liminal (=threshold) state after which they emerge changed.
See also the thread 'victor turner'.

Phenomenology.

2009-11-25T12:08:00.003Z

There has been an active interest in phenomenology among my PhD students, so here are some thoughts. Especially they are how to do it thoughts rather than charging back to the big names. We will do that later.
Phenomenon is a Greek word meaning something which appears to be, as opposed to something which has substance. There are things we hold to be real, even though we cannot touch or measure them. Respect, love, success, wonder, motivation are all such things. The question is, how do we research them? One aspect lies in the question, What do we mean by real? How do we separate opinion from reality? Beneath opinions about respect, does the word 'respect' describe something real? or is it a concept, a classification of certain behaviours. The method traditionally used is to strip off ("bracket out"] statements identified as opinion, to see what's left. Edmund Husserl, the founder of phenomenology a hundred years ago, believed that something real existed beneath the opinion: these views are labelled "transcendental phenomenology". Seeing/glimpsing reality was called eidetic vision. This conclusion is however not essential to the method.

In education, we cannot phenomenologically study a school, or a class, or anything measurable with substance within it. But we can study learning, behaviour, ethos, relationships, morals or any other significant intangible. Psychology is fond of psychometric measures, so we have seen historic attempts to measure 'intelligence', and more recently emotional intelligence using intelligence tests. Personally I have no confidence that they measure anything other than the superficial. Robert Steinberg even claims that wisdom can be measured, but only by reducing the concept of wisdom to something measurable, around the notion of balance. I agree that we can put together a crude check-list to determine whether something is balanced or not, whether other points of view have been sought, and a win-win situation sought. But I would not identify this with wisdom.

Intangible realities could apply to many aspects of everyday life. What is my everyday experience of work? of leisure, of pleasure, of value, of well-being? Much phenomenology used in research today comes from this emphasis by Alfred Schutz. But how can we do this rigorously and well?

Data collection needs to be completed in the qualitative paradigm. Much can be learnt from ethnography, with its emphasis on observation and interviewing, especially in its auto-ethnographic aspect (that is, being part of what is being observed). Normally it is important to know how a range of people react to the phenomenon, so a sample of respondants will be put together. For example, researching respect, you might first determine what a sample of people mean by respect by asking that straightforward questionnaire question. This is called phenomenography. The more the data collection focuses on the researcher herself or himself, the more care has to be taken to establish reliability. This is a triangulation question; interviewing others, keeping a long-term fieldnote diary, being interviewed by another research are all responses to the need for triangulation.

Finally, the analysis needs to keep firmly to the phenomenon, looking at it from many perspectives - psychological, philosophical, sociological, and critical. Bracketing out opinions on the phenomenon produces a body of data which can be analysed interpretively and hermeneutically, so a broad picture of the phenomenon and its various interpretations can emerge.

Phenomenology is a way of looking at everyday intangible things. The research methods and analysis I have described are mainstream qualitative, and the same concern for rigour and reliability needs to be built in.

Tony Brown and William Golding

2009-11-17T22:06:00.003Z

I came across by chance the biography of William Golding by John Carey, recently published by Faber and Faber. I rarely read literary biographies, let alone pay £25 for them, but this one was different. It was in part the biography of Tony Brown.

I worked with Tony from 1974-1977 and he welcomed me to his house just before he died from cancer. I was a teacher in a Salisbury school, where he was a part-time teacher of music. He drove an ancient Ford Popular, which looked antique even 40 years ago. We chatted in school, though what wisdom Tony received from so callow a youth I do not know. What I took from him I understand when reading this book - we were religious atheists together, socially aware communitarians before Blair made this popular. He lived in a lovely thatched cottage, near Salisbury, Wiltshire in a Bowerchalk garden, with bees. I was a gardener then, and have increasingly found this an important relaxation. I was no musician though. Tony's four children all played for famous orchestras, Iona Brown becoming a well-known conductor with St Martin in the Fields.

Tony spoke of his chess games with Golding, and his increasing withdrawal from the world and from writing. My last journey to Bowerchalk was to deliver a get well message and flowers from the school staff, but was detained for a while with conversation. After Tony died, much too soon, Golding wrote a very moving obituary for the Salisbury Times. And he began to write again.

One last thing. My neighbour but three now was a twin in the class Golding taught at Bishop Wordsworth, Salisbury as Lord of the Flies was being written, which famously includes twin boy characters. He thinks that all the boy characters in the story were recognizable as classmates. The twins later appeared as extras in the film of the book.

Sometimes, in life, our lives touch someone who makes a significant impact. We hope also that we might have an impact on others starting out on the journey we are finishing. Thanks, Tony for those chats long ago.

Maharajahs and air forces.

2009-11-16T21:54:00.003Z

This unlikely title is the product of a weekend trip to London. Sunday was a visit to thew Hendon RAF Museum, and Monday to the Maharajah Exhibition in the V&A Museum. Both were excellent, so do not be put off by anything I say here. My issues are philosophical, about the way we view and value history.

The Maharajah Exhibition first. No expense has been spared, bringing a superb range of artifacts together and linking them with a sober commentary. It is a glittering display of wealth, power and opulence. My question is, why are wealth, power and opulence valued?

The Maharajahs came out of the collapse of the Mughal Empire, with monuments such as the Taj Mahal. Yet they were tyrants and despots. Aurangzeb for example executed Sikh gurus when expanding his empire with military might. Power is won by military action, and power is kept by military action. The exhibition celebrates the careers of these men of power and their repressive regimes. True some of them claimed a philanthropic bent, but only in ways which increased their status and stature. For example, in order to give starving subjects work and income, did the Maharajah build schools, universities and hospitals? or excourage new food production techniques, and new technology? Of course not, they built new palaces in the latest taste. The Maharajahs and their families were grotesque, and their values grotesque, and their excesses of money over sense are celebrated here. Also, the British East India Company pulled strings and were the real power behind these thrones. They can be seen in processions in their top hats and red livery, failing to sit on the floor comfortably. What were the British doing in India? Aside from the usual flannel heard, they were making money and exerting power. Queen Victoria made herself Empress of India to impress her German cousins, but never bothered to go to the investiture. Their presence there was always improper, but the old Maharajahs were not a better answer.

There is another side. The artifacts made by the craftsmen and women who laboured brilliantly to achieve results of fabulous beauty and zero utility. Elsewhere in the V&A is the William Morris gallery: he asserted that all things must at the same time be useful and beautiful. That throws out most of the Maharajah 'stuff' - certainly beautiful, but of no practical purpose but to declare power and status.

The RAF Museum has links to abuse of power, despots and suffering populace. A museum of war materials is always treading a tightrope. I remember visiting a small gallery in Tottenham Court Road in the 1980s celebrating Iraqi munitions. The poison gassings took place at about the same time. The rest the world knows. That RAF Museums (and there are several) celebrate the defeat of tyranny is a bonus. Yet we are on our own knife-edge: are we celebrating killing machines? The bombers such as the Lancaster, B17, Vulcan; the 4000 lb to 12000 bombs that flattened Dresden? Are we celebrating the kills? The bomb tallies on the planes, the aces with their 20, 40, 60 or 80 'victories' (or is it 'victims'?). Presenting a war museum is tricky. In my book, it needs to show that war is ghastly (Hendon manages this well). Also that killing should be no joy (the feelings of people involved is always ambivalent as they have lost friends and want revenge). Looking forward, there should be some thought to oranising the world without aggression, war, despotism, and above all without war crimes.

The Saigon Museum of War Crimes sets the agenda well, and I have written about this before. War causes things to be done on both sides that ought not to be done. The aggressor is in no way exonerated by the fact that it is war, for it is their war. Saigon remembers "the American War" and "the French War". Defenders at least have some moral defence, within the limits of humanity. Our war musuems remember the dead who perished in defence of freedom. And this is right. If the Nazis had won, we would now live in a world without ethnic minorities, without any disabled people, without people or colour, without Jews, and without human rights. Even leaving the morals and human rights to one side, this would be a diminished world, a depleted world - and actually a pointly world. Human civilizations do need a way of policing for good, and war museums need to keep a firm hold of this. The current inclusive practice of remembering the second world war alongside the former enemy is a good tradition, so both sides together can think of the enormity of what happened, and what might have happened.

Lived Experience 3. Obsessive Compulsive Disorder

2009-11-13T21:45:00.002Z

This comes from MvM, chapter 5. It purports to be a study of Obsessive and Compulsive Disorder, and is by Mary Haase.

This issue for me in this chapter is how a phenomenological study needs to be more than superficial and descriptive (although the descriptive might be interesting if this is new to you). This chapter is based around interviews with OCD sufferers and places the accounts of disorder alongside parallel accounts of 'normality'. The details of each are specific to particular sufferers - do they have OCD only, or a more complex syndrome? Are they typical? The accounts are chosen as exotic and strange. If you consider taking 40 minutes to put your knickers on strange, and inability to drive a car without feeling you have killed someone pecular, then you will enjoy this chapter. If you have never encountered this before, you may learn from it.

The chapter is based on a very simple qualititive methodology, of interviewing and transcribing. What does it tell us about the real lived experience of OCD? The writer is a reporter, not a sufferer. The writer has to try to step into the shoes of the sufferer. She has to understand that counting fenceposts and paving slabs is normal, that adopting behaviour, however strange, that ensures your husband or wife's survival is natural, that keeping the environment scrupulously clear is essential. That is not achieved in a brief round of interviews. Everything that screams to the writer, "This is odd" has to be bracketed out. The writer has to see oddity as ordinary, as their target interviewees do.

So what is the lived experience of the OCD sufferer? We can recount the daily rituals. But why do the eyes say 'I see' and the brain depict the memory as the opposite - that the switch is on and not off, that the door is unlocked and not locked, even though it has been checked 50 times? Why does the brain see an off switch self switching to on? Or see electricity leaking out of plugs like gas? The experience of OCD is to see falsehood based on anxiety as true. That we can psychoanalyse it makes little difference, and show within childhood why this might have originated. How does it happen that the suffer knows rationally what is real but is nevertheless overcome by the conviction that their actions has caused or will cause someone's death.

This task as set is difficult. I use it only to show the danger of being satisfied by a surface description when the underlying realities are not only more interesting, but are actually the point. The task is not to paint people as crazy, but to sympathetically show part of what is going on, as a contribution to finding answers.

Lived Experience, part 2.

2009-11-13T10:54:00.002Z

The previous post explored an aspect of phenomenological research which explores lived experience. This post looks at Writing in the Dark: Phenomenological Studies in Interpretive Inquiry edited by Max van Manen, 14 case studies of this kind of research, with introduction, conclusion and commentary by MvM. We focus here on his concluding chapter (16, pp.237-252), called Writing in the Dark. It is, true to form, a phenomenological study of the lived experience of writing.

a) addressive and allusive writing.
We are talking here about writing which is not superficial and contentless but is intended to have meaning. This could apply to a novel, or to autobiography, diary, blog. It is addressive when it addresses or speaks personally to the reader. It is the intention of the writer to speak to readers (in the phenomenology of experience of reading, the same point is approached from the opposite direction). The text is allusive when it causes the reader to compare what is being read with their own experiences; the text alludes to the readers own life.

b) being self readers.
There is a danger of superficial and sentimental writing and reading. Once we start to focus on this deeper experiential level, we should go back to our own writings (and for that matter oral memories) "where meanings resonate and reverberate with reflective being" (p.238).

c) what is real?
Gazing into the dark is MvM's description of trying to find the ineffable 'real'. He uses mythology to emphasise that naming the intangible destroys it, because the words then become a substitute for the reality. The name becomes a stereotype, a typical definition rather than a dynamic (ever changing) description of reality. This is the intimate connection between the real and the interpreted.

d) 'seeing' and insight.
Reflective writing in the phenomenological mode can be a struggle, as different points of view are tossed around and worries about intention and meaning are wrestled with. The writer, says MvM, "may find an updraft and suddenly soar" (p.246), "really 'seeing' something". Such moments of insight generate the desire to 'see' more. Conversation shares interior knowing, but writing is scriptural, producing authoritative text (that is, text which is corrected, manipulated, artificial, and to some extent ambiguous). Reflective writing may more resemble conversation than corrected polished product, more hand-written text than ever editable word processed text. We may need to get back to quickly composed and unedited writing, rather like in this blog.

e) Darkness
Behind writing ( and reading) is a domain of total absorption. We read a book and get pulled into it. We write, and create a new state of being, a new environment, a new family of characters. We are delving in the unknown, in darkness. We, writers and readers, are open to what comes, receptive, but passive. We experience this new world through the minds of the characters within it, whether these are fictional or images from our past. The state of mind opened up is a form of wonder, an experience unformed by our mind, and uncontrolled by it. It is an experience we get absorbed by, and becomes part of us.

Summing up
Writing is a process that opens up a new world within us, through which we can reappraise who we are and what we are about. Reflective writing is therefore hard to do, as it makes us vulnerable; but having started it, it may be hard to stop. It is a private affair, but being able to share it with one or more empathetic yet critical others sharpens the process. Responding to reading, whether of fiction or critical studies, in a personal way can elicit new ideas and streams of thought. There is no perfect answer or solution; it is a process or journey rather than a destination.

Researching Lived Experience

2009-11-13T08:57:00.002Z

Most people need to reflect on and seek to understand their own experiences and the experiences of others. Qualitative research generally uses observations and interviews to discover the points of view of a representative range of people. However, it is easy to be superficial or to be biased.

The book Researching Lived Experience is by Max van Manen. That might refer to experience I have lived, or that others have lived, and probably both. This is to research something which is non-substantial. A chemist, physicist or biologist studies substance, things measurable and observable. This applies also to the brain-science part of psychology, where measurability is important. There are however things we hold to be true which have no substance. I would not deny that my experiences of love, anger and vulnerability are real, yet researching them requires different approaches as compared to experimental science. In my experiences, I need to distinguish between what might be real, and the ways in which I interpret experiences, a kind of level 1/level 2 approach. I remember as a 16 year old having a fleeting but seemingly everlasting experience of transcendence, being part of the universe and not a lonely individual teenager. Abraham Maslow speaks of these as 'peak experiences'. The experience was and is taken to be real. There are aspects I could discuss - what induced it? Was it a medication-induced hallucination? No, as it happens, but some transcendental experiences certainly are. Is one real and the other not? Did the experience change my life, or not? Why do I remember it still, and do I hope for another such experience? Why? Also I could ask if others have such experiences, and look for patterns. This opens up for me a research pathway of glimpsing what I might be looking for. Moving to level two, the interpretation, people had interpreted such events as religious conversion, enlightenment or transcendence depending on their culture. Though interesting, these are different concerns.

The philosophy stemming from this is phenomenology and the research therefore phenomenological research. The phenomenon being research needs to be identified or the research has no clarity. A phenomenon is something 'manifest', i.e. held to exist and be true, without having physical substance. The philosophical quest is whether we can 'see' the phenomenon or whether we can only talk about it at the level of interpretation. 'Seeing' was called by Edmund Husserl (the founder/father of phenomenology) eidetic vision from the Greek 'to know'. He believed that this is possible; hence his version of phenomenology is called transcendental. Those colleagues who emphasised the processes of interpretation embedded in it contributed to the field of hermeneutics (the word comes from theologians interpreting the Bible, but is now secularised) - Martin Heidegger for example studied how humans experience time, emphasising opinion and interpretation rather than attempting scientific proof, as Husserl was doing. Alfred Schutz emphasised experiences of everyday life, and it is this line of phenomenology that is followed by such as Clark Moustakas for Psychology (in Phenomenological Research Methods) and Max van Manen for Education.

All phenomenologists employ the strategy of bracketing, called from the Greek epoche (pronounced e-po-kay). This means putting brackets around intrusive material such as opinion and interpretation, so that the 'real' is left revealed, however elusive. There needs to be considerable and careful thought about what is bracketed, and we have to remember that the stuff within the brackets might be as interesting as the stuff outside them. In other words, bracheting is an elicitation device for discussion, and if that discussion involved several people and points of view, so much the better.

In the next post, I will explore examples from Van Menan's edited work Writing in the Dark where he encourages his students to write about particular life experiences phenomenologically, which shows the method in practice.

Faith schools.

2009-10-28T20:48:00.007Z

The question here is whether there is value in faith schools. Anglican and Catholic schools in Britain were among the first to be developed, before the state school system, and it is only recently that Muslim and Jewish schools have developed, with other religions taking an interest. Current policies have promoted these as responsive to parent needs. From the beginning, the object was the religious conversion and nurture of pupils. The parallel purpose was to make children good (that is, to enhance religious observance and moral behaviour).

I have come across two books of interest. Reflecting on Faith Schools edited by Helen Johnson of Kingston University; and For Goodness Sake: Religious Schools and Education for Democratic Citizenry by Walter Feinberg, both from 2006. Johnson balanced the views of the headteacher of Islamia School against the philosophical tirade of Roger Marples against indoctrination and for children's rights to be critically and openly educated. Other chapters (originally short conference papers) explore circumstances in war (Bogata), a comparison of a Catholic and a Jewish school, Methodism and Southlands College, Australian Catholicism, and historical-political aspects. Among the issues are, should education include religious teachings and make moral (behavioural) demands? how should education work on the attitudes of pupils? Are there benefits from a traditional framework for learning? The editor's own interest in reflection comes in two separate 'commentaries', but does not really penetrate into the book as a whole. Most chapters are descriptive rather than reflective.

The reality is that compulsion is not a lasting mechanism for developing religious convictions. Religious education may be supported by parents, but pupils (and are) not generally persuaded. The fact that Christianity is based on miracle (the virgin birth and resurrection) adds to resistance. The dilemma for the curriculum was: how should the balance be achieved between religious instruction and critical thinking? The 1944 Education Act wrestled with it, insisting on a compulsory place for religious education, which it has had ever since - but as a part of a melange of literacy, numeracy, science, humanities and the arts. The concept of the broad curriculum is still with us.

Today, curriculum balance is an issue only for private schools. A fundamentalist Christian school, or a Muslim school could, if it chose, emphasise religious teachings at the expense of critical skills and knowledge. The events of 7/11 led to many fundamentalist Muslim schools being suspected as harbouring terrorists, which systemically they were not, even if a few individuals were radicalised. Such decisions about curriculum emphasis are not inevitable; Muslim schools have made curriculum decisions which are western and secular, whilst maintaining a key but minority place for religious (Islamic) education. Some have encouraged multifaith understanding by broader curriculum encouraging visits by members of other faiths.

Education needs to prepare pupils for life in a global world. Our question however is whether this is best served by a faith school based on the beliefs of one religion, or whether open inclusive schools without religious privilege are better fitted.

Feinberg sets himself this task. He studies a range of religious schools in America and draws out in particular the issues of education for a plural society, liberalism, moral development and critical thinking. Whilst not hostile to religious schools per se, he indicates that to be educationally acceptable, these features need to be in evidence so that exclusivist bigotry does not take over. Feinberg gives examples of critical engagement within the religious community encouraging a thinking engagement with the religious tradition. He stresses the potential flexibility of interpretation and the importance of challenging authoritarianism. However, the fact that there is this latitude in belief does not irradicate the religious exclusivity of the institution.

I am not generally in favour of faith schools, but am the first to admit that secular schools can miss out on important aspects of learning if they are hostile to religious faith. Propositional scientific knowledge is important, but questions of what kind of people we are and the quality of good relationships are also vital preparations for life, and faith schools tend to be good at these. My problem with faith schools is the assertion that belief is truth, but this is not inevitable. A faith school could develop a positive criticality which examines the religion's truth claims rationally. A faith school need not have unquestioning fundamentalist assumptions and beliefs. This criticality would go a long way to help pupils disentangle the inner 'truth' from the fiction within religious belief. Pluralism should encourage and enable pupils to find common ground between faiths, through which dialogue becomes possible.

One last thought. 'Faith' schools is strange terminology. A catholic school, or a Muslim school, gives central place to its religious beliefs. My own personal faith, in the potential goodness of humanity and the possibility (but not inevitability) of global moral progress, is secular and not religious. There is an unexplained assumption that only religious people have faith. This is not so. Religious people have doctrine, so if the term 'religious' school has fallen out of favour, the accurate replacement would be 'doctrinal school'. This of course exposes the exclusivity (or lack of inclusivity) of the enterprise.

Research and past experience

2009-10-25T10:44:00.005Z

D Clandinin and F Connelly, in Personal Experience Methods in the 1994 Denzin and Lincoln Handbook of qualitative research (413-427) note: 'Experience... is the stories people live. People live stories, and in the telling of them reaffirm them, and create new ones' (415). Life history has thus become a widespread method of research of various professions. Some base generalisations on a substantial number of life history interviews (for example Goodson and Sikes, Life history research in educational settings, 2001). Researchers also look back into their own life histories in a variety of ways, reflecting perhaps on their careers, or on a particular piece of research they have completed, such as for Masters or a doctorate. There are issues of accuracy and authenticity in this: humans are capable of lying both to others and to themselves, and on other occasions do not reflect with full understanding. So the quality of looking back (retrospection), or reflecting on past experience has to be taken seriously. From a methodological point of view, reflection on a period of research, such as to a doctorate, can be helped by having a written record of one's thoughts from beginning to end. The research diary is the traditional means of achieving this, modelled on the fieldnotes used in anthropology, but being sure to note down feelings, attitudes, beliefs and suchlike as well as 'facts'. The strictures of John van Maanen, Tales of the Field: On Writing Ethnography, are helpful here, that fieldnotes are not definitive but have been affected by processes of selection, interpretations and partial observation, and maybe by the unrepresentative use of informants (interviewees). Research diaries therefore consist of material to be critiqued, and should not be supercialially accepted. Two of my students were helped by arranging to be interviewed at the beginning of research by an experienced practitioner briefed to be probing. Critiquing that transcript reveals the journey travelled, which might otherwise have become blurred. Other students write their fieldnotes using blog technology, which has the advantage that supervisers can offer guidance frequently. If this becomes a daily habit, a researcher focusing on their own professionality reflects constantly on whatever happens, or whatever thoughts and issues they are wrestling with. I deal with this more fully in Bigger, S (2009) The Potential of Blogs in Higher Degree Supervision, in Worcester Journal of Learning and Teaching issue 1 (online, full text here).

The substantive issue is how to interrogate our own past histories. In talking about reflection on action, Donald Schon (The Reflective Practioner, 1983; Educating the reflective practitioner, 1988) encourages reflection on comparatively recent history - a job that has just been completed for example. Why were certain decisions made, what conclusions have been drawn of success or failure. This encourages habits of evaluation in groups: self evaluation has some sort of control as it is tested by the views of colleagues. Once we attempt to be self-evaluative over a longer period, such dialogue with other participants becomes more difficult. Even straight-forward timelines become difficult as the years blur into each other.

We might even question the purpose of a timeline. To establish an actual factual record does not tell us much about quality. If I can be certain for example that I taught Cambridge Classical Background in 1978, it doesn't tell me whether I taught it well. Or what I might mean by 'well'. Max Van Manen distinguishes between technical rational information (stage 1), contextual reflection (stage 2) including attitudes, values and ethos, and dialectical reflectivity where quality and ethics are critiqued (Linking ways of knowing with ways of being practical, Curriculum Inquiry 6(3), 1977, 205-228).

Max van Manen is a key proponent of the use of phenomenology in pedagogy and the curriculum. A phenomenon is something which is considered real but has no substance for observation. For example, Max van Manen completed early work on tact and tone in pedagogy, and more recent work on pupil privacy. There has to be a great deal of data collection and discussion about the meaning of such words, and the claim made that they are somehow real as opposed to constructed and conceptual. Quality is another such word. What people mean by quality is one level; what is real quality is a higher level. What we assume about the phenomenon (tact, tone, quality) is an interference which we have to put to one side (or bracket out). Many of these phenomena are things in everyday life we take for granted, which means we have not thought deeply about them, our assumptions and stereotypes satisfy us.

The beginnings of analysis of our past experience might be phenomena applicable to us. Whilst tone and tact (to pupils as well as to colleagues) might get us started on pedagogy, and quality might provide roots for views of good practice and self-evaluation, we probably need to construct a matrix of phenomena relevant to us. Respect, justice, community and so on. The case for an item being a phenomenon rather than a concept may have to be debated. What is wisdom? I think it is a concept, not a reality, a judgement that something is sensible rather than foolish. And what of God? I think also a concept, a picture of the highest good, and not an entity which is real. I am sure some readers disagree, but do be sure of your grounds.

I conclude this section by inviting you to look back at your life and career using such markers as tone, tact, respect, fairness, justice, equity, community. There will be aspects in which we feel we have been treated badly, others where we feel we have treated others badly, and still more where others are acting or being acted upon. From this step, observations and recommendations will come.

# post still under construction

Children as social critics for social justice.

2009-10-08T22:55:00.001+01:00

This is the text of a lecture on education and schooling (7th October, 9.15 a.m. at the University of Worcester) recommending that the central thrust of the school curriculum is to produce pupils who are adept social critics, of television, the media, their reading and even their schooling. This critique, I hold, is social justice in action, demanding fairness for all irrespective of race, class, gender, ability or background. This is to turn children into activists, concerned with their communities, the environment, and the whole way the world is run. They will be the voters and politicians of the future, so this is akin to them becoming political activists, as Clive Chitty argued in a lecture later the same day in the University of Birmingham.
The full text of my lecture is on:
http://sites.google.com/site/sbiggervaluesineducation

The Bushmen of the Kalahari

2009-10-03T10:58:00.004+01:00

I began to be interested in the Bushmen of the Kalahari in the 1970s when reading Laurens Van Der Post's stories A Far Off Place and A Story is Like the Wind, about a friendship between white and Bushmen children. We now know not to believe as fact everything that Van Der Post said (see the biography Storyteller by JDF Jones). The Bushmen (also called the San) have been called a relic of stone age humanity, with interest taken by archaeologists. This is a typical academic gravy train with little substance: they are contemporary people, not museum pieces. That they have suffered at the hands of both white and black is incontrovertible - if you are in doubt, Sandy Gall's The Bushmen of Southern Africa: Slaughter of the Innocent is essential reading. Their hunter-gatherer lifestyle has become virtually impossible today, and their knowledge and skills are in danger of dying out completely.

My current interest is in their spirituality, thanks to an invitation to contribute to the journal Alternation of the Association for the Study of Religion in Southern Africa. A link to this paper will be added here when available. This post is to set out the agenda.

Christian missionaries have painted a picture of animistic African tribes worshipping trees and stones and indulging in blood sacrifices. None of this is true of the Bushmen/San so their traditional spirituality is of interest. Fortunately there has been high quality ethnological and anthropological research from the 19th and 20th centuries, preserving information that no longer exists. I am not, as some do, placing these in an evolutionary sequence but allowing the Bushmen the dignity of others trying to see the world through their eyes. If we in the west were stripped of our scientific explanations for things and left to make sense of the land, sea and skies, we would be in a similar position. Their understanding of their environment and the living things within it are based on observation and long communal experience (tradition). For gathering, the women developed an encyclopedic 'ethnobotanical' knowledge of the nature and properties of plants (for food and healing), and their locations and seasons. For hunting, the men had wide understanding of animals and their habits, and some understanding of internal organs from cutting up the bodies. This is the beginnings of a scientific view of their world, as Louis Lieberberg notes in The Art of Tracking: The Origin of Science. The sky and stars were invaluable for time keeping and guidance, and they recognised that there were near and far astral bodies and pictured constellations in their own way.

Some things however lie beyond understanding by observation. The weather and especially the rains. Disease, sickness and death. Social discord and jealousy. For this, no natural explanations worked, so they assumed supernatural forces. especially gods in the east and west, with the spirits of the dead living with them and working for them. These gods were not worshipped, just recognized as existing and to some extent feared. One tried not to offend them, and to try to escape their influence. A young person might die because the spirits wanted a new child or wife. Given their lack of knowledge about germs and viruses, this has had explanatory power over the centuries - and they recognize that their attitudes and social customs are those handed down by the old ones.

The trance healing dance gives an illustration of several processes. It is the central social ritual, with some but restricted significance on theology. Those, usually men, who go into trance and heal, recognise that there is an inner power which can rise up, overcome them, and give them special powers. They recognize these powers in many things around them, and they avoid certain foods and certain times. When healing, the tranced man goes from person to person healing them - the benefits are psychological and psychosomatic. Their frequency was about twice a week. When crises are felt - a big family row, for example, this is their solution. In trance the men may see the messengers of the gods, or even the gods, as surrounding the camp, and their duty is to frighten and chase them away, because they bring sickness with them.

It will be interesting to wonder whether better health education will have an impact, and whether the natural/supernatural division will continue afterwards. But it has in the Christian and Muslim worlds, so it probably will. Except the San do not rejoice in the promise of an afterlife, it is, as they see it, just how things are. When they begin to see that there are natural explanations for many of life's mysteries, my guess is that trance dances will still be felt to be socially useful.

1930-1960 Blog

2009-10-03T10:53:00.002+01:00

I have been diverted recently to my other blog on world war two history and literature (and especially children's literature) on http://1930-1960.blogspot.com. You might like to try it. This is part of a conversation with Owen Dudley Edwards, writer of the excellent book Children's Literature in the Second World War, which puts together writers, readers and global events. My current post is on Rupert, 1939-41.

Spirituality Education.

2009-09-13T21:46:00.008+01:00

Spirituality is a never-ending topic. It gets thoroughly confused with religiosity, which is not only quite different, but may well be its opposite.
I focus here on Cathy Ota's and Clive Erricker's Spiritual Education, a compilation of conference papers from 2002. The papers give me a few pegs to hang critique on, whether I like the paper or not. Some papers are wide of the mark. Christiana Welch purports to report on North American Indian (="First Nation") Spirituality but is in fact talking superficially about how the First Nations are represented in 'cowboys and indians' narratives.

David Tacey's Encountering Tradition in a Postmodern Context. Tacey admits to being religious in a generalised radical way but part of a revisionist project [176]. He balances faith with the secular, and espouses a need for prophetic revival, that is a new critique and renovation of tradition. My problem comes with 'Tradition'. Christianity fossilises a two millenia old spirituality, which was already at second hand when the New Testament was written. I have the highest regard for Jesus the 'prophet' (that is, social critic) but despair over the quagmire he has been buried in. Liberating Jesus is part of our task of liberating the dispossessed. The radical Jesus has been colonised and exploited from 30CE until today. And may I burn at the stake for showing dissent, following his example.
Judaism fossilises a spirituality which was five hundred years older. An exile to Babylon had led to a spike of nationalism from which the Hebrew Scriptures were created. All religions attempt to fossilise an historic form of spirituality, giving peacock status to this prophet or that. Our world is rather different. It cannot be critiqued by an Ezra or Nehemiah concerned with racial purity, or a Paul, who never met Jesus, obsessed with a risen spirit. This does not diminish their contribution, but it removes their authority. Authority and spirituality do not mix, for authority removes freedom of thought and belief. Tradition enshrines the authority of this person or that. Siddartha Gautama, the Buddha made it clear that worship and blind obedience were counter to his holistic humanistic (if maybe metaphysical) philosophy, and adherents should not blindly obey.
He offers a case study of 'Elizabeth', a revisionist Catholic. She rejects secular spirituality as a cop-out without resolving her need to be spiritual and religious at the same time. She suffers from the need for external authority to ease the stresses of deciding for oneself. Tacey concludes by emphasising the micro, the personal spiritual experiences of wholeness, integrity and worth. He argues that this is a back-door into religion and will help us to rediscover tradition.
The are several problems, in addition to the fragmentation that he discusses. We may find these religious traditions wanting, with discriminations and assumptions that violate human worth and dignity. Assumptions of original sin rather than original innocence, for example. The great figures of religious traditions (Jesus, Muhammad, Nanak) were reformists with spiritual insights who declared the religions around them as unworthy. They may well continue to do so if they could investigate the religions that draw on their names. 'Rediscovery and renewal' should enable the world to escape labels, and isms, sects, cults and denominations and allow the concept of unity to mean something. It will be unity in diversity - and our individual takes on what the concept of God might mean, will be part of this diversity. But it does not have to make unity impossible.

Mike Pike asks, in 'Reading and Responding to Biblical Texts' why the Bible cannot be read as literature, for personal enlightenment and as personally relevant. The short answer is that most biblical texts were written not as literature but as preaching, so that the use of these texts for personal development is problematic. The texts demand a point of view; personal development demands openness. Interpreting biblical texts requires particular skills, such as Paul Ricoeur develops in his studies of hermeneutics (not mentioned by Pike), such as Figuring the Sacred: Religion, Narrative and Imagination (1995). The use of real literary analysis on biblical texts was pioneered by Robert Alter (The Art of Biblical Narrative, and with Frank Kermode he edited The Literary Guide to the Bible, neither cited by Pike) but this did not aim at personal fulfilment and development, but was literary criticism. Of course we want children to develop their own life stances, whether they are reading the Bible, Michael Morpurgo or Philip Pullman. The problem with the Bible is its claim (and claims on its behalf) to truth and authority which demands that the point of view stated has to be accepted as the true point of view. This is not on. It is indoctrination and not education. Education is possible when such stories are actively subjected to the form of literary criticism appropriate to the age of the child. I am developing a range of discussions on this topic on http://4004bce.blogspot.com and will be happy for comments on points of detail.

Mark Halstead, writing on metaphors for spirituality, is spectacularly wide of the mark, writing that children need help in understanding that metaphors are not literal. Children are experts in pretend play and pretend story, which is all a metaphor is - to explain A I pretend it is B. Children are also deeply spiritual, responding to life, brimming with excitement, and becoming engrossed in creative activities. The trouble is that adults mess them up by asking wrong questions and, to be frank, lying to them. Remember Santa Claus? Schools despiritualise children - extending the thought that Ivan Illich so brilliantly began in 1970. They do it by having a point of view, a set of 'truths' to be imposed, and disallowing free thought in children. Children can pretend all day, and therefore make creative links and wise observations. It is adults who cannot hear what they have to say.

Wisdom and education

2009-09-08T14:16:00.006+01:00

I remember an 8 year old girl once telling me, "A wise person is someone who knows a lot about many things, but is humble and not proud and uses what they know to help other people". She must have been talking to Robert Sternberg.

Robert J. Sternberg explores (2004) the balance theory of wisdom. At heart it claims that a wise action works towards a common good.

Wisdom is the use of one’s intelligence and experienceas mediated by values toward the achievement of a common goodthrough a balance among (1) intrapersonal, (2) interpersonal,and (3) extrapersonal interests, over the (1) short and (2)long terms, to achieve a balance among (1) adaptation to existingenvironments, (2) shaping of existing environments, and (3)selection of new environments. This article discusses the balancetheory of wisdom, and how wisdom can be assessed and developed.

The phrase 'common good' can be problematic unless it is shaped democratically. The Nazi definition of common good was aimed at only part of the population, and was probably not even true for them. Sternberg describes his book (2003) as exploring perceptions of wisdom in America, and may therefore not be generalisable elsewhere. Wisdom is a concept rather than a reality - the balance sought in the definition is more effectively a tool to analyse actions - are the actions for the common good? are they based on sound reasoning and research? have people's needs and views been taken into account? is it likely to be effective long term as well as short term? does it help to improve our world/environment?

Judgements that actions are wise or not may depend on our approval or disapproval of the actions - are actions we disapprove of automatically thought of as unwise? Even if they meet all of the above criteria. The criteria may help us to reject such subjective views of wisdom, but there may be subjectivity in each of the criteria. If the only actions that can be considered wise are those which have a consensus, there is no room for the paradigm-breaking steps which will take people a while to get used to. The need for consensus will in fact hold development back, linking action to the lowest common denominator of understanding. We have to view such paradigm-breaking actions as being in the common good even if they are not so recognised. Sternberg notes elsehere (2003:180):

Whereas the wise person is perceived to be a conserver of worldly experience, the creative person is perceived to be a defier of such experience.

A wise person however it not someone who protects ancient beliefs but someone inspires people now to make a better world for tomorrow. That person is likely to be a paradigm breaker, a thinker of new thoughts, and above all a person who inspires.

[Sternberg, Robert J. (2003) Wisdom, intelligence and creativity synthesised, Cambridge University Press; Sternberg, R. J. (2004). ‘What is wisdom and how can we develop it?’. Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, vol. 591, no. 1, pp. 164-174. Online: http://ann.sagepub.com/cgi/content/refs/591/1/164.]

Old Testament Study

2009-07-31T22:32:00.003+01:00

The conference of the Society for Old Testament Study took place this week. The topic was the extent to which the Old Testament/Hebrew Bible gives us a defensible history of Israel. The general conclusions are that the Bible writers have their doctrine, ideology and theology and cheerfully rewrote history. If we are lucky, we might get a glipse of something 'truthful' (or example, king David probably was a minor warlord; but the story of his major conquests and empire are later fantasies. The Bible writers were mostly writing around 500-300 BCE and were fabricating their past history. They had emerged from exile and disaster and been sent to Palestine and were determined to forge themselves into one people. The twelve tribes comes from this time, a mighty fiction of national unity tracing the origins of this mixed group back to a single ancestor, Abraham. Before you dismiss me as a crank, this is the accepted view of scholarship, including Christian and Jewish worshippers. I explored this twenty years ago with a number of scholars, in Creating the Old Testament: The Emergence of the Hebrew Bible. Those ideas are now mainstream. It places Abraham, Moses, David and Solomon on a similar level to Robin Hood. It sounds negative, but actually it is positive, as the truth usually is. Once we understand what the writers meant, we can get on with our own lives free of deception.
Follow this thread on http://4004BCE.blogspot.com

See also on ideas about God, http://4004bce.blogspot.com/2009/08/hebrew-god.html

Dealing with death.

2009-07-08T11:21:00.007+01:00

Watching the end of the BBC TV series Robin Hood has led me to wonder about how death is approached in literature for children, and thereby in education. This is also at a time when there have been high profile celebrity deaths that created a degree of public emotionalism. In Robin Hood, Robin is wounded by a poisoned dagger which allows him a protracted and reflective death. As he eventually dies, his dead wife Marion comes to fetch him and leads him by the hand into "an even greater adventure". As they walk off screen, his body slumps. His death loses gravity. The act of murder has released him into a better world, reunited him with his heart's desire. His death is implicitly condoned.

What do children think of death, and what do we tell them when a loved one dies? Today's gun and knife culture may encourage some children to kill: could their mental model of death encourage them to depict death as a good thing, and remove a sense of guilt?

Death is becoming a common theme in writing for children. Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials is littered with child and adult deaths, and includes a visit to Hades, whose bounds were broken allowing the shades freedom in a celestial melting pot or nirvana. Part of his purpose was to remove the fear of hell and project a picture of a blissfully happy afterlife modeled on Friends Reunited.

Garth Nix has made a career writing about death in curious ways. His Abhorsen fantasy trilogy is about necromancy, the dead returning, people entering death and sometimes escaping from it. Death is greatly to be feared, and mixed up with magic and destruction. His Keys of the Kingdom cycle have a young asthmatic boy, Arthur on the point of death during a cross-country run, being taken into a fantasy house where he in declared heir and wins the keys of power which will enable him to gain control of time by removing the upstart despots who rule each day. The house is like an afterlife, in which the basic function is archiving people's lives and actions. So a companion, Turquoise Blue (from the colour of the ink) had died of black death in the middle ages. The last volume, Lord Sunday, does not appear until the new year, so we must wait to see how it all resolves, and whether the seven books have only been a dream.

Michelle Paver's six volume Chronicles of Ancient Darkness (starting with Wolf Boy, 2003) charts the life of two young people, Torak and Renn. The setting is the stone age north, where totem tribes were hunter gatherers. This was the pre-scientific world of magic, shamans ('Mages'), spirits and demons. The voice-over narrator assumes these beliefs. Torak is the world's redeemer, with special powers, but is otherwise just a vulnerable lad. Renn also has special powers, and superb personal qualities, which she uses to support, protect and manage Torak. Wolf, a real wolf, is pack brother to both of them. The world is, Tolkein style, threatened by a magic stone than needs destroying, against the greed for power of rogue Mages, the Soul Eaters. This is a world where people live by hunting, showing respect for the lives they are taking and other flora and fauna. In death, the three souls leave the body, and provided the right rituals take place, keep together. They can however be harnessed for evil means, such as made to possess animals or children. The death of anything, even for food, and even plants, is not taken lightly. However, when declared an outcast, anyone who encountered him was supposed to kill him, and killing people or animals who threaten clan security is sanctioned - usually these are declared possessed of evil. Torak, Renn and all other young people carry weapons routinely for their own safety, usually made safe by clan custom. For child readers, there are questions about the nature of the soul or souls (the eternal spiritual entity that resides within our body, and about how we should view life and death in daily life.

There are two views of death currently at odds - that our inner self will survive death and move to some other sphere, disembodied; and that our inner self is simply the accumulations of feeling and knowledge which, on death, is simply switched off and ends. Logically, what holds for a human should also hold for a dog, cow or slug, and a slug heaven is rather difficult to imagine. Religions have promoted belief in an afterlife, emphasizing the need for reward or punishment. Hinduism is more open, recognising the mystery and relegating reward and punishment to our future embodied lives. Today, the autonomous self is promoted, with self esteem, self respect and an expectation for self empowerment. That this self has an eternal future is viewed as self evident. Modern spiritualities have replaced the efforts of traditional religions, although they borrow angels, demons and other conceptual paraphernalia.

This leaves us a quite serious question, what do we teach our children about death? Given the popular media and the stories they read, they cannot be very clear.

Michelle Magorian, Just Henry.

2009-07-06T09:45:00.003+01:00

Michelle Magorian became famous for the wartime evacuee story Goodnight Mister Tom. Here in Just Henry (2008) she sets her story around 1950. It is just at the ending of ration coupons. Austerity appears everywhere - bomb sites still flattened, the family relics of war apparent, with missing fathers, dead fathers, desperate mothers. This is an 'all live happily ever after' story but the detail makes it interesting. I am not retelling the story here, it is for you to read; rather I pick out some issues to contemplate. There is an anti-discrimination theme, with treatment of an illegitimate boy and the son of an alleged deserter dominating the first third of this 700 page book. Henry has his mind poisoned by his Gran (mother of Henry's dead war hero father) who declared herself a dependent invalid at the age of 53, not only adding to Henry's mother's burden, but physically hitting her and Mollie her infant. It is painfully gradually that Henry sees her for what she really is. The heroes of the tale are the new teacher Mr Finch, and the 60 year old writer Mrs Beaumont, who teach the children actively to resist prejudice and develop a can-do attitude to life and relationships. Both adults are rebels, non-compliant, creative, putting good relationships ahead of all else. A historical job of the story lies in the detail on 1950s films and cinema, presented as a source of entertainment visited several times each week.

The children are from the first ROSLA cohort, when school leaving age was raised from 14 to 15. They are in a secondary modern school, although Henry deliberately failed the 11 plus to please his Gran. Grace is dyslexic and has been expelled from 13 schools for idleness and insubordination, Pip is illegitimate, Jefferies whose father is accused of desertion. These become an unlikely group of friends. Secondary modern kids are presented as talented artistically and vocationally. Things work for these children because of cooperation - their careers were what they wished, but only good will made it possible. It is not a meritocracy - jobs went to people who had friends and relations in the business - railway, films, drama and singing, music. The cooperation of this special group of children and adults beat off the horrendous conservatism of society generally, represented by Gran who is actively malicious, the school headteacher who is prejudiced, Grace's absentee parents who think success comes through punishment. The only part of the plot I shall give away is the irony of bigoted Gran's discomfort to find her own son to be a deserter and her favorite grandson to be illegitimate.

Similar but different issues about negative views of people leading to prejudice are apparent in each generation. We have to have eyes open for the next threat - whether asylum seekers, Muslims, economic migrants from Eastern Europe, travellers or whatever. Empowering all should be a key to policy, strategy and pedagogy.

Power - Obama's bio

2009-06-30T10:41:00.008+01:00

As a youth, Obama was taken to Indonesia when his mother married an Indonesia student who was then recalled back home after the coup in the 1960s. This extract comes from the realisation of political realities, making passive acceptance the only way to live safely.

"Power. The word fixed in my mother's mind like a curse. In America, it had generally remained hidden from view until you dug beneath the surface of things; until you visited an Indian reservation or spoke to a black person whose trust you had earned. But here power was undisguised, indiscriminate, naked, always fresh in the memory. Power had taken Lolo and yanked him back into line just when he though he'd escaped, making him feel its weight, letting him know his life wasn't his own. That's how things were; you couldn't change it, you could just live by the rules, so simple once you learned them."
Barack Omama, Dreams From My Father, p.45.

The socio-political status quo acts as a powerful block to free enterprise. It blocks opportunity for all, and replaces it with opportunity for those favoured. We need to did out who benefits from the status quo. There are cases where that benefit can be removed (as in the recent case of banker's bonuses) and others when benefits need to be spread more fairly. Power and its benefits is therefore a powerful problematic in the analysis of society and social institutions.

Also some thoughts from The Audacity of Hope (2006):

"I find the President and those who surround him...possessed of the same mix of virtues and vices, insecurities and long-buried injuries, as the rest of us. (p.48)

He goes on to talk about values and empathy, the importance of trying to see things from someone else's point of view even when (or especially when) you disagree with them. It strikes me also that this is an agenda for personal reflexivity, that is, evaluating one's own position and life journey. We might think of our contribution to life, the world, and to knowledge; our attitudes and prejudices and were they come from; our feelings of threat, the borderlands where our comfort zone ends; and life traumas that may have an impact on out thoughts and feelings. For work in education, how we ourselves were 'injured' by the system may affect our current views, just as the winners, the minority, those who succeeded and went on to hold political or economic power, are concerned to maintain whatever helped them succeed, even when it failed the other 80%. And working out our values is one thing, distinguishing between reality and rhetoric is another. Obama adds: what is it you actually spend your energies, time and money on? This is what we really values and may be consequential or inconsequential.

On his induction to the Senate, he cites the octogenarian Senator Byrd with general approval despite his once belonging to the Ku Klux Klan. He says,

"I wondered if it should matter. Senator Byrd's life - like most of ours - has been the struggle of warring impulses, a twining of darkness and light" (p.75)

He sees this as an analogy for the senate, over time supporting both civil rights and slaveowner rights. "Struggle of warring impulses" points in all of us to those tensions which pull us in different directions - the pull of greed over the nag of altruism; the joy of power over the benefits of cooperation. For teachers, the imperative for order over the freedom of creativity. Identifying our own tensions and ambiguities is part of reflexity in action. Which we call darkness, and which light, is also not unproblematical.

Finally here, talking about the Constitution as a defence againse absolutism and tyranny, he says,

"we must test out our ideals, vision, and values against the reality of a common life, so that over time they may be refined, discarded, or replaced by new ideals, sharper visions, deeper values" (pp.94-5)

This also is reflexity in action, the process of probing, checking and testing. It puts one's life on the line, exposing some things we hold dear as empty, some gods as idols, some certainties as delusions. If research does not do this, I for one would find it not deserving of my time, and not worth the candle.

A New View of Society

2009-06-15T18:40:00.004+01:00

Last week we were in Scotland, ending with New Lanark and Biggar. The latter was probably not home of my forebears, although my paternal grandparents came from Scotland, settling via Canada in Dublin where the Bigger family had a history. Probably grandmother Macmillan family was 'settled' in Canada to make way for sheep. Grandfather was a bookbinder, an artisan. Together they had thirteen children in Dublin, a large Protestant family.

A society which promoted wealth over poverty, fostered ignorance through child labour rather than education, and oppressed its already traumatised workforce, leads us to New Lanark and Robert Owen. The cotton mill there is now a World Heritage site, with exhibitions, preserved buildings, and one mill rebuilt into a hotel which was filled, when we stayed, with Freddie Mercury fans attending a tribute concert. A ghost train in an exhibition mill let Annie guide us round her times, the work she did, how her family lived - and how she was educated. Robert Owen was the first employer to open a nursery school in the mill, ensure that both children and adults had opportunities for education, introduced a health service, and ran a fairtrade shop for the benefit of workers. For him, healthy intelligent workers were worth investing in. If all other employers did likewise, society itself would change.

His treatise A New View of Society argued the point, but failed to win over his fellow employers. Rather it made him enemies. I quote merely his essay heading quotations:

Any general character, from the best to the worst, from the most ignorant to the most enlightened, may be given to any community, even to the world at large, by the application of proper means; these means are to a great extent at the command and under the control of those who have influence in the affairs of men.

It is not unreasonable to hope that hostility may cease, even when perfect agreement cannot be established. If we cannot reconcile all opinions, let us endeavour to unite all hearts.

Truth must ultimately prevail over error.

It is beyond all comparison better to prevent than to punish crime. A system of government therefore which shall prevent ignorance, and consequently crime, will be infinitely superior to one, which, by encouraging the first, creates the necessity for the last, and afterwards inflicts punishment on both.

This was a radical, new, rationalist view of society which sowed seeds for the modern world.

Do we today need a new view of society? Education has not created utopia. Nor has it empowered young people. Nor does it provide the skills and creativity that citizens and employees will need in twenty years time. Employers and entrepreneurs are more likely to be created by school failure than by success. The curriculum fails to excite, and refuses to allow focus on things that do excite. There is no flexibility, no broad measure of achievement other than mechanistic SATs and exams. There is no room for the joy of ambiguity, or wrestling with problems and issues. None of this is the fault of teachers; rather it is the myopia of policy makers of both ruling parties since 1988, supported by media idiocy.

If the answers to my questions will be challenging to find, we need now to begin asking the right questions of how education, the curriculum and assessment fits children and young people to become adults who have something worthwhile to contribute to their world, a world in which there will be no smooth sailing. I hope this is a world without prejudice, persecution, oppression and injustice - such is certainly worth fighting for.

Night Talk, Thames Television 1987

2009-06-13T13:10:00.005+01:00

I wrote these seven short talks in March 1985 and recorded them in early summer for later transmission starting 27.1.1986 for one week, in a two minute block at the end of each evening’s programmes after which ITV went off air. See http://ftvdb.bfi.org.uk/sift/title/615699 and http://ftvdb.bfi.org.uk/sift/series/11342.

The series specialised in a spiritual/religious reflection relevant to the time, with a mix of contributors including Chad Varah and Trevor Huddleston. In my case, as an atheist, my comments were more spiritual than religious with the general theme of multi-faith religious education, which at the time was my bread and butter, having been a religious education teacher and then a teacher trainer. I was invited because of an account of a talk I gave in Banbury on multifaith religious education, reported in the Methodist Recorder (I wrote the copy). My stance was that informing children about a range of religions would reduce the tendency towards prejudice and racism but increasing understanding and enthusiasm, taking away the fear of the unknown. Today, I am pleased that diversity is generally more comfortably accepted than then. However, the anti-racist task requires more than making children/people more informed. Some ‘nice’ and well-informed people are racists and profoundly bigoted.

Writing something meaningfull in 200-250 words proved to be an exacting task, a very important discipline for my later writing. Reading it to camera proved no less simple. Here are the talks followed by a few comments.

Monday. Teaching World Faiths.

Imagine, if you will, a class of six year olds. Their teacher decided to hold a Passover celebration to be fair to Ben, the only Jewish boy in the school. The children acted out the Elijah story, visited a local synagogue, made a Menorah candlestick and other items, and as a climax held a Passover meal. With the help of Ben’s parents, food was prepared in accordance with Jewish food laws, a search for bits of hidden leaven was made, and the wine (really grape juice) flowed. The ritual followed simply. Ben recited the four questions in Hebrew, unleavened bread and bitter horseradish were eaten, the afikomen was hidden, and found. By this time, Elijah’s cup had been mysteriously drained. A child called out, “Three cheers for the Jews”, which prompted a spontaneous response. The children had learnt that most important of lessons, that learning about people, their culture and religion can be fun, and can be meaningful. They had taken a big step towards understanding and empathy.

Next term I unexpectedly received a card, skilfully crafted by a six year old hand, wishing me Eid Mubarrak, a Muslim blessed fast-breaking greeting. The Muslim children had also shared their celebration, the end of a month of spiritual discipline, prayer and fellow-feeling for the hungry.

A nine year old Sikh boy from another school exclaimed, when I recognised a picture of Guru Nanak, the first Sikh spiritual teacher, “How do you know about our Gurus? No one in school knows about them. Later I ended the assemby with the words “And now for a Sikh prayer”. Sikh children responded with devotion, others with genuine interest and respect.

Teaching world faiths is not a chore, but a joy which can be exciting, stimulating and truly moving.

Discussion:
Teaching world religions was a new development in the 1980s. None of us were trained properly to do it, and many teachers did not dare. They got rather confused about who believed what, though to be fair the children grasped things rather more quickly if clearly taught. I tried things out in various schools, covering Judaism, Islam, Hinduism and Sikhism. I gave a talk about this to a Methodist group in Banbury, which I wrote up for the Methodist Recorder. Thames Television researchers saw it and invited me to record seven daily talks about religious education. The scripts, otherwise not archived, have emerged from my attic, and here they are.

In my lifetime as a teacher of religious education, the curriculum moved from being pro-Christian and Bible based, to an attempt to lead children to understand religion itself. The teachings of the major faiths therefore became more central. I regard this as an important shift, but there is still a further shift to be made. The curriculum has promoted the major religions, aiming for understanding and empathy. And that has been useful. However, we are in a post-religious age, and there are secular ethical and moral positions. Religion has over the years been harmful where personal freedoms have been curtailed and orthodoxy has been forced. We as a species need to decide over the next century or two whether religion, and in particular fundamentalist and tribal religion which regards all others as wrong, is in itself helpful or harmful. For me, the potential for harm outweighs the potential for good.

Tuesday – Without Prejudice.

The 1944 Education Act, still the current law on religious education states that religious education should be “not distinctive of any particular religious denomination”. Wisely, Christianity is nowhere mentioned. I recently sat five young children down around a tape recorder to discuss beliefs and customs – a Hindu, a Sikh, a Muslim and two Christians, from the Moravians and the Brethren. Each contributed openly and with deep interest and fascination without condemning others, and without condescension.

Teachers are committed to developing children’s understanding through open and unbigoted investigation. Religious education partly involves learning about religious stories, rituals, festivals and beliefs. In part it illuminates what, beneath the surface, religion means. In part, too it explores issues that religion ought to confront, such as purpose, meaning, justice and social concern. One such issue is prejudice, deep-seated in all societies and a profound influence on children and their parents. Fortunately in the primary school children’s opinions have not yet hardened into prejudices, and attitudes are mostly positive and open.

It is the task of religious education to confront prejudice by encouraging children to reflect upon its root causes – ignorance, low social concern and patronising assumptions. This task requires sensitive handling, but will be well worth the effort.

Discussion:

The law regulating religious education changed in 1988 in the Education Reform Act. Christianity was made the dominant religion, but the requirement for a broadly based curriculum covering the other religions was enshrined in law. I recognise that the term ‘other religions’ is demeaning, but this division of status is implied by the Act. Practitioners were not deterred from good multi-faith practice by the new law. The LEA Agreed Syllabuses continued to cover five or six world religions.

Over time, I continue to emphasise that issues of purpose, justice and prejudice should be the starting point for religious education. I later developed this further in ‘Challenging Religious Education’ (linked here): religious education should challenge children’s assumptions and open them up towards inter-faith understanding and global relationships. A sound knowledge of world faiths is not enough to conquer prejudice – prejudice itself and its effects have to be one of the lens through which children should develop understanding of why people have valued religions.

Wednesday – Frogs

Each March hundreds of frogs migrate through our village for their annual courtship rituals in a small pond in our garden. Some die on the road, though we help as many as we can. We are powerfully reminded that life goes on. Frogspawn is often taken into school to let children see it hatch and develop into tadpoles. I have seen tanks of oxygen starved dead tadpoles in many places, so a greater emphasis on care for fellow creatures would be helpful. I recently overheard a proposal, thankfully thwarted, to kill and dissect tadpoles in a primary school. The pupils would learn one vivid lesson, that wildlife can be mistreated and killed for our benefit and interest. That lesson, if learnt young, will not go away but be there fore life.

“I am, therefore I exploit”. This sums up a widespread western attitude to the world and the environment. For Buddhists, non-violence is a vital principle that should govern our relationships with all living things. Bushmen of the Kalahari and Australian Aborigines, both cultures savagely and wilfully hunted down within recent history, regard people as part of creation, not as its kings. Theirs is an intimate and harmonious interaction with their world, expressed through attitudes, myths, rituals and behaviour.

We too in the developed world have powerful myths. “Life came by accident and destroys itself selfishly and wilfully”, we say. This of course says more about us than about life. As for our responsibilities to life forms and the environment, we have a great deal to learn from such groups as the Bushmen.

Discussion:
I was influenced then by the writings of Laurens Van Der Post, especially his children’s story A Far Away Place in which white and Bushman children relate comfortably and learn from each other. The filming came at a time when the frogs were breeding in the garden, and my other more prosaic ideas were falling through. A teacher training student had proposed to dissect a tadpole, and I had dissuaded her for the reasons given, and with the more persuasive instruction to consult the headteacher.

Religious issues seem to me to be central ethical issues of life itself. In fact, ethics are an absolute must for all subjects of the curriculum – this is a real preparation both for childhood and for adult life. Respect for life is part of this, more trendy today than then. Animals are still generally assumed to not have rights – we kill to eat, and kill animals such as foxes, badgers and seals who threaten this carnivore business by being carnivores themselves. There is a balance which we have not yet found.

Thursday – Teaching Christianity

“The trouble with multi-faith religious education”, an infants teachers said to me “is that Christianity loses out”.
“By no means”, I responded “in fact Christianity can gain a great deal”. By not demanding that children accept Christian dogma, teenage rejection diminishes. The clash between religion and science disappears. Some denominations get a fairer deal – Mormons, Rastafarians, Jehovah Witnesses and Pentecostals.

Take Jesus. That Jesus is Messiah is a Christian belief, but not an objective fact. That this is meaningful to Christians is a fact worthy of exploration. Educationally it is inappropriate to demand belief, as if we are in a fascist state; nor conversely to make a dogma of agnosticism, the “don’t know” cop-out. Children need to be allowed to weigh up evidence, positive and negative. They can legitimately explore how the life of Jesus helps Christians visualise something of what God is or does. The virgin birth and resurrection, described by Christians themselves as ‘myth’, become less problematic. Pupils are able to discover what different Christian groups claim, and why. They ask what Christians mean when they represent God in human form, and how the belief in God’s continuing presence in the world affects the way believers think and behave. Whatever they personally decide, they will have a greater understanding of Jesus’s importance.

Discussion:
British education has been an imperialist Christian enterprise that discussions of religious education can become meaningless. The objectors referred to here of course were arguing from the point of view that religious education should preach and convert. I taught in a school in the 1980s that regarded its multicultural intake as all ‘English’ which was represented by hymns such as ‘Onward Christian Soldiers” in Assembly. Imagine a hymn today, “Onward Muslim Soldiers”!
My promotion of rationalism generally received short shrift – that was not what they meant at all. Yet I would still assert it today. The impact of preaching within religious ‘instruction’ did lead to total rejection of religion (Christianity) which had been ‘shoved up our throats’ and went the way of Santa Claus, that other major adult fraud against children. Uncovering the one led to rejecting the other. Adults (teachers and parents) should not lie to children and leave problems to be sorted out later. God becomes a problem, as does death and Santa Claus. Adults follow social pressure to conform, to confirm the lies. I discovered the truth about Santa Claus aged about 3. I am still angry about the deception. A friend traumatically discovered it aged 10, and is still traumatised by the shame. Rationalism is the only way. Talk to children as to adults. Do not patronise.

Friday – Integrated Learning.

We divide knowledge too easily into convenient sealed packages or “subjects”. Integrated learning, common in primary schools, can help children see themselves and their world as a harmony, with various perspectives enriching the counterpoint. I worked recently with a class of seven year olds on the topic ‘Earth’. This explored the world they experienced and invited their deep inner reflection.

In observing our earth, we interpret what we see. Human issues emerge – of value, feelings, mystery and responsibility. We reflect on meaning and purpose, putting feelings into words in a poem, or creation story perhaps. We reflect on our place on earth, our potential for good, and our habits of possession and destruction. We express our feelings, our hopes, our wonder or sheer joy, through art, drama, movement, music or creative writing. Myths, stories, poetry – like the Psalms of old – express similar responses in religious language. We encounter and enjoy life and growth, with wonder, respect and concern. And we contemplate death, the ultimate mystery.

Such reflective attitudes to life and the world are the stuff that religion should be made of. Enriched by it, children can begin a real dialogue with others, their environment, and with the world they inhabit.

Discussion:
It has always amazed me how the simple truth, that knowledge is unified and too important to be divided into so-called ‘subjects’, should cause politicians and the Daily Mail to get their knickers in such a twist. After 1988, the National Curriculum divided ‘knowledge’ savagely into subjects with learning objectives and content in ways which made integrated thinking impossible. Children, after all that abuse, cannot therefore think holistically, and nor than the teachers who were trained post 1988. Most of those dedicated experts trained before that were edged out by the inspection regime which recognised compliance but not talent. Still today, attempts to return to a sensible curriculum are met with cries not to return to ‘topic work’. I agree in the sense that we should not return to superficiality; but we should be building connections across all aspects of knowledge and help children to make ingenious and unexpected links, which will be the creativity of tomorrow.

Saturday – Symbols.

We take symbols for granted, but children cannot. To recognize what common emblems mean gives them a good start. When they express themselves through symbols they create, children gain a deeper understanding of why symbols are used and what they seek to express.

Religions express deep concerns through more than emblems. Clothing (like prayer shawls), food (like the Eucharist) and images all point to symbolic meaning and evoke devotion. Initiation rituals act out commitment. Sculptured images and icons, of Jesus, Durga, Krishna or Buddha, evoke a realm of meaning far beyond the significance of their raw materials, deeper even than the real lives of those depicted.

Religion explores concepts and insights far beyond descriptive language, and often resorts to pictures. Images can be verbal. If God by definition is beyond description, not attempt at description can be authentic. So we use symbol. When we call God father, mother, creator the sun, even the wind (or spirit) we say nothing about God but a great deal about ourselves. We may prefer to visualise God through a human being – a Jesus, or a Krishna.

Religion involves profound human concerns, the human spirit expressing what it feels and means by creating images for what it finds impossible to describe. Yet symbols alone, without reason, justice or compassion, can be diabolical, not benign. The value of a symbol lies in the quality of what is symbolised, not in its origin.

Children can symbolically express their own feelings and ideals through art, drama or creative writing. Exploring ideals, insights and perplexities through symbols and symbolic metaphors of their own making can greatly enrich their learning and understanding.

Discussion.
The confusion between symbolic/metaphorical language and literal description presents crucial lessons to be learnt. Much that is accepted as ‘real’ is in fact metaphorical: a radio ‘wave’ does not resemble the sea, nor does an electrical ‘current’. Yet we need metaphors to understand things, by analogy. Religious writings are full of imagery; working out the reality is far more difficult and is always problematic. Education’s task is to make a child’s understanding of metaphor to be liberating and thereby an aid to learning and understanding.

Sunday – Religion and Science

The clash between religion and science began long before Charles Darwin; but the problem is a false one, created by a religion more concerned with literal biblical interpretation than with deep contemplation of life. It was a clash of rival certainties, with appeals to authority coming from different directions, from religious teaching on the one hand, to observation of the universe itself on the other.

Dogmatic approaches to the hypotheses of science, or to religious beliefs, tend to close the mind to wider – and deeper – possibilities. Science observes, records and seeks to explain, contributing tiny pieces to the cosmic jigsaw. Imaginatively filling in gaps, it theorises on what the completed jigsaw might look like. This raises more questions, which it then takes into account. This process ideally begins in the primary school when children explore and experiment, stimulating their scientific skills. When children learn to ask the right questions, they begin to glimpse the wider picture and become part of the universal search for knowledge and meaning.

Religion in contrast contemplates ultimate meaning. We each perceive this in a personal way. We express it all too inadequately through our attitudes, behaviour, art, stories and rituals. We are human and may prefer a quick, easy fix, and off-the-peg belief system. Children are aware that life is miraculous, the birth of a kitten or lamb, the pupating butterfly. They respond with wonder and excitement. Within the egg lies the mystery of life. The Hindu Vedas recognized this when they celebrated the birth of existence as the hatching of a cosmic egg. For Jews this creative mystery is God, fashioning order from the void by the divine word. Christians and Muslims continue this insight. Children can respond to the mystery through their own art, poetry and speech. They may find traditional responses enriching, or constraining. Their personal responses can deepen with time, or dulled by dogma. Yet together scientific investigation and inner reflection are formidable tools for reflection and understanding, helping children to come to terms with their world and, more importantly, with themselves.

Discussion.
Christian creationist views have come to blows with science since Darwin, but other religions to not so much share the same battleground. Scientism, which is the use of scientific ‘knowledge’ as the only basis of understanding, is an atheistic fundamentalism which battles against religious fundamentalism. Yet there is middle ground in which positive dialogue takes place.

Education as Research.

2009-06-13T12:47:00.001+01:00

My question is about how education and research inter-relate, and where the border is between them. Research is about questioning, theorising, seeking to explain, deconstructing other explanations and generally getting under the skin of a problem. My experience of undergraduate education (29 years now as a lecturer) is that this generally does not happen, and that the curriculum and assessment impede rather than promote research activity. Even in a BA level 3 course for mature students which centres on work-place research, at best students achieve a sound methodology and descriptive write-up.

However, it is my belief that even in schools, primary and secondary, children should problematise explanation, deconstruct arguments and learn to be creatively critical. Sometimes schools achieve a measure of this, but the curriculum and assessment patterns tend to focus on knowledge rather than thinking. That is why artificial ‘thinking skills’ programmes were designed, too little, too marginal and too late.

Education should be about questioning, problematising, arguing based on evidence, explaining, and testing explanations. So from the infants onwards, education and research should happen together. That is a better model of education than knowledge, so-called ‘facts’ and regurgitation of other people’s ideas, but formal assessment requires regurgitation and punishes creativity. The questions now taking place in Universities about integrating education and research are welcome, but should be applied to all education. If young people are to be prepared to manage their (and our) futures, education and research need to be one and the same, encouraging the new generation to ask awkward questions and tackle difficult problems. This is I am afraid the opposite of the model of education that we have.

Of course, new knowledge is rooted in the old, so deconstructing current knowledge claims are as important as rigorous attempts at reconstruction. Both require disciplined learning which has both a depth and a breadth. And it requires teachers who are tuned into this. The aim of teaching is to produce challenging learners – learners who are never content with easy answers, ask challenging questions, are skilled crap-detectors, and who look for better answers to better questions. Learners such as these also been to work cooperatively to recognize that knowledge creation is a team effort, in which positive discussion and creative disagreement have parts to play.

Cambodia

2009-04-27T16:18:00.007+01:00

We arrived in Cambodia by boat, up the Mekong river where people live and work, floating or on stilts. Phnom Penh appears in the distance, strangely fresh as you get close, until you realise that the Kymer Rouge destroyed so much as international money is trying to get the country 'fit for tourism'. 'Fit' means expensive looking, chic and swish, palaces for the privileged next to the shanties of the poor. How do you measure ambition and progress? 'I can now afford a pair of shoes' a guide admitted. Becoming a guide is high-status, an important goal.

How do you come to terms with a country where the legitimate government murders three million or so citizens without trial? Even the killing fields themselves are tourist destinations. The Kymer Rouge ruled 1975, filling the void of the American departure, to 1979, when the Vietnamese army threw them out for killing villagers in Mekong delta villages they coveted. Cham Muslims were also targeted for genocide. This was an extreme nationalism - you became a traitor simply by disagreeing with the ruling party and breaking rules, such as not to cry out when being flogged with wire or 'electrified'. A school called "The 7th January 1979 School" celebrates day of liberation. To buy arms the KR made their population, themselves starving, produce rice for China in return for weapons and landmines - unfortunately made of plastic so difficult now to find and defuse. The main victims were educated people such as teachers and doctors, as potential threats of opposition, so there is now a black hole in education and professional skills. How also do you come to terms with the fact that the KR, after their merciless cruelty was well known, were apparently funded by Britain and the USA in the 1980s for their guerrilla opposition to the Vietnamese at a time when Reagan was haranguing the United Nations for the Vietnamese to withdraw?

It is a country of ghosts - that is reminders of past brutalities and the loss of valuable people and their skills. One young man could not marry because he had a family to support since his father's death. Trauma is not far beneath the surface. Tourists are viewed as part of the solution and luxury hotels are stringing up which make heavy use of resources - gardens being watered, swimming pools, unlimited water in the rooms when outside there is shortage; clean sheets every night, towels twice a day. There is a power relationship between the tourist, the customer, and those servicing them. Bad feedback, even an unthoughtful comment, could be a factor in whether that person's family eats or not. I will long remember the look of terror in a young maid's eyes when earrings went missing and she thought she might be accused - quickly remedied with the hotel, but a sign of life at the edge.

Cambodia needs tourism, but responsible and thoughtful tourism which respects the local people, however lowly the tourist assumes them to be. All are grafting to feed a family. Most are gracious about reverses, but smiles and the absence of insults go a long way. Cambodia also needs to become diversified. People dream of careers in IT, though not having easy access to a computer. There are, as in Laos and Vietnam, craft skills in the villages that need markets. Too much of too similar goods are offered at local markets. Fairtrade arrangements to import goods to affluent countries would go a long way to better the health and education of families. The tourist does not have sufficient suitcase space to make much of a difference.

For information on projects to alleviate poverty and develop education, see www.concertcambodia.org. ConCERT means Connecting Communities, Environment & Responsible Tourism.

Vietnam

2009-04-18T06:13:00.009+01:00

But for an accident of geography, had I been born in the USA I would have been sent to Vietnam in 1966 to take part in such events as the Tet Offensive. The roads and villages have many war cemeteries to remember the north Vietnamese dead. The War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon) explicitly catalogues war crimes committed by the French and Americans on simple villagers, many of whom had to live underground in caves and tunnels, superbly engineered with hand tools, to escape B52 bomb strikes. Why? Because killing 'communists' provided political capital for politicians. The military strategy was to kill more Vietnamese militants than could be recruited. If ordered by your government to kill little brown villagers, it helps to demonise them - thus was born the term 'vietcong', Vietnamese communist, VC, 'Victor Charlie' or simply 'Charlie'. The communists benefited from local resistance fighters who were largely not communist. Most Vietnamese just wanted peace, freedom and independence, just as occupied nations wanted in world war 2, and as Britain would have fought for had we been invaded in 1940. How sad that this orgy of killing and destruction should be targeted at such charming people. The faces of corpses in the War Remants Museum were those visible on the streets, ordinary nice poeple. I was especially struct not by blood and gore but by a photograph of a mother trying to swim be young children across a river away from B52 bombs. Total desperation, just like any mother whose children were threatened. That still is haunting. Who photographed it? and why? One war photograher said "Stop, I want a photograph". The group were terrified women and children. Ten seconds later they were machine gunned, but the photographer "did not look back". War must always be obscene. Defensive wars against aggressors may always be needed, but need clear aims and planning to protect ordinary people. Today, Americans are welcome in Vietnam, and war veterans encouraged to meet up with their former enemy. Still under a communist government, the process of reconciliation has begun

After experiencing Hanoi traffic (and Ho Chi Minh City traffic is worse) I can understand chaos theory a little better. There are millions of motor bikes in Vietnam, which swirl around the road in all directions. Vehicle drivers weave and honk without regard to lanes, pushing, shoving. Traffic moves in from side roads without pause or hesitation. We crossed a main road on a zebra crossing; but nothing stops, and there is no pause in cars and especially motorbikes across four carriageways. Provided that you inch forward making no sudden movements, nothing hits you and you are across. Even a one-legged woman crossed safely. I saw no accidents, even little ones. People hustle and harry for advantage, but at the appropriate moment give way. If they did not do so, British style, there would have been immediate multiple pile-ups. All is good natured, no tempers raised, no road-rage, no retaliations. It was described to me as 'organised chaos', but it was really an equilibrium reached by actions and reactions which cancel each other out. It is purposeful, not random, unemotional, indeed beyond emotions. Emotions would distract the constant level of attentiveness. British drivers, with their blaring radios, mobile phones and shaking fists, would not last a minute in Hanoi. Where the traffic, as Cziksentmihali might say, 'flows'.

Vietnam is post-colonial. The French, overlords until world war 2, made the mistake of returning. They and their allies, especially the Americans, paid a high price for that, as did the local people. Today the houses and tombs of puppet monarchs are open both as examples of decadence and opulence (there is plenty of evidence of royal spoilt brats) and quality workmanship by artisans. There is a fierce independence of the local people, and justified sense of hurt. The Americans were spurred on by an ideology of hate against communists, personified by Senator McCarthy, but furthered by a succession of presidents who thought, falsely, that these were battles they could win.

The new colonists are tourists. Along the coast, beaches are being walled in to keep out locals. The hotels and resorts are likely to be owned by foreign investors, who cream off the top dollar. There are of course jobs for the local people, and markets for souvenirs. However there is a subservience to tourists that most do not deserve; it is important to please tourists if only to protect oneself about damaging complaints. Given the foul temper of the average tourist on a bad day, survival might hang on the whim of the rich. The hotels are the new palaces. Tourism might be a hope for economic prosperity, but not without stress. Tourists themselves need to consider trips to such places as building friendships. We too easily slip into complaining customer mode. We demand too much, too large a share of rare resources, such as water and power. As responsible tourists we should consume as little as possible, and make as much contribution to the local economy as possible. The local people as as dependent on tourists as they were on the French. They have craft skills, such as weaving, textiles and sculpture, but there is too much too similar, and training too conservative. They need wider markets; but also they need the encouragement to be creative. The children need to approach the 21st century differently. Yet there are hopeful youngsters, and I hope that their life choices soon broaden.

Laos

2009-04-18T06:12:00.002+01:00

Hand-made products. A phenomenal amount of time and effort goes into weaving and other handicrafts. These 'cottage industries' dominate life in village homes, with children following their parents, especially girls following their mothers onto looms. Villages have numerous stalls each selling the same thing. The night markets present a never ending display of items so similar that supply must outstrip demand. What took many hours to produce ends up being sold for just 5 dollars. My heart goes out to them. If their market was widened through fairtrade export, they might have a better chance to get the proper price for their work, at greater volume. What a difference that would make to their lifestyle, health and education. I saw signs of this beginning in a small way - where products also had become more creative and less traditional, selling at huge prices to the affluent in their American and European mansions . This could also happen at more affordable levels.

Buddhism. It is odd how religion manages to reverse itself. As the new year festival approached (Songkran in Thailand) worshippers bought birds in bamboo cages to set free. This gives them 'merit', some ethereal benefit which might enhance their multi-life destiny. In fact, these poor birds are traumatised as they were neglectfully handled, in a very hot son, by children as young as three. What started as an act of kindness has become a culture of cruelty, for profit. The birds, once released, will be rapidly recaught and offered for sale again. Buddhism teaches respect for life; this exploitation is unpardonable. The children sell such things instead of going to school, so they will become the uneducated poor of the next generation.

The global village. Our guide had learnt English, his sister French, his brother Japanese. They will never be in competition for work. Russian is spoken in their home, since father once lived there. Newspapers carry British, Italian and Spanish football results, as well as baseball results. English football (or at least the big four clubs) on satellite has a strong fan base. I was bemused by a word search in a Laos newspaper which demanded an in depth knowledge of the geography and villages of Devon. Not surprising that no one had won the prize: I certainly could not do it without an atlas. American music and films were other cultural exports. Cultural colonialism is alive and well.

Language learning: sociolinguistics and education.

2009-03-29T14:39:00.002+01:00

I am reading currently The Handbook of Educational Linguistics edited by Bernard Spolsky and Francis M. Hult, in 2008, 44 chapters and 675 pages. This handbook has a huge scope, so my comments are selective. The Handbook’s concern is how children learn to speak, read and write, whether in one language or several. The discipline of the sociolinguist is to observe, listen and report. Mostly they are not teachers, but their observations are likely to be very relevant to learning and teaching.

A third of children in the world do not have an education in their first language. In some English medium schools (i.e. who teach in English) in the UK, there can be over a hundred different first languages spoken by pupils. Although it is true that English is a useful language for them to have, research strongly indicates that those who do not use their first language in school do not develop language or understanding as readily as those who do. If they can use both first language and English together, they get the benefit of proper development and bilingualism. It is important therefore that all children are able to approach learning through their first language. James Cummings conducted intensive research into this issue over several decades. He demonstrated that although conversational language can be picked up relatively quickly, the development of academic (more abstract) language is a much more difficult and long-term skill. This he termed ‘context reduced’ language, in that ordinary language is about objects, people in context. In other words, it is easier to be descriptive than philosophical. A child who has not been educated through a first language may consequently be several years behind those who have.

Of course, these children are also from lower status homes in that their language does not dominate the culture. Advantaged children are those who are educated in their first language, and they are in a position to perpetuate their advantage by achieving higher qualifications. This process of being a dominant language we term hegemony. This term draws from the Marxist observations of Antonio Gramsci, discussed elsewhere in this blog: he, writing in the 1930s, discussed political and ecclesiastical hegemony in his native Italy. Hegemony is now widely used of the privileges of power anywhere, for example in colonial and post-colonial contexts. In Curacao, for example, the Dutch colonial power runs Curacao schools through the Dutch language and using Dutch textbooks, even though the children speak Papiamentu as their first language. Where teaching is not bilingual (for example when Dutch teachers are used rather than islanders) the children are at a disadvantage with academic concepts. The same applies with English, French and Spanish medium schools.

In the UK, the tradition of having bilingual support teachers flourished in the 1980s, but became replace by monolingual teachers using the dominant language (English). This brought back the disadvantage. It becomes expensive and difficult to organise support when many first languages are found in a school. One implication is for parents and other family to become involved in the first language education of young children, from infancy and into the school years. Implications for schools are:
To value first languages, never making the use of first language a punishable offence. (This still often happens).
To encourage first language speakers into school and to work closely with parents and families, perhaps taping stories and lessons in minority languages.
To encourage peer support, with inexperienced children being helped by older more confident children.
To encourage the use by staff of common words of praise (Well done! Good!).

For the education system more generally, advisory teams need to prepare and train staff in how to cope with multilingual classrooms, for example:

To develop appropriately the education and confidence of parents from minority communities
To develop bilingual/multilingual dictionaries
To become more confident in name forms
To become more aware of cultural (including religious) practices such as festivals
To develop curriculum resources, such as simple stories and lessons in the whole range of languages in video formats.
But above all in how to encourage first language use in diverse classes.

This is an important agenda for raising children and families out of disadvantage. It means developing a partnership between the dominant cultural and linguistic community and minorities within it. Being bilingual is a significant skill that ought to be recognised culturally and in the market-place. Monolingual English children are disadvantaged in various ways. They have not developed language through regular use of more than one language; they can only use their first language in their work; they have no access to many of their neighbours, leading to cultural isolation. That bilingual pupils are advantaged, and monolingual pupils disadvantaged in life ought to be the focus of more discussion.

Andragogy: teaching adults.

2009-03-29T14:37:00.001+01:00

In brief, the term was used by Malcolm Knowles in discussions of adult education. Knowles was a further education/tech college lecturer interested in how teaching adults was different from teaching school children. Pedagogy means ‘guiding children’, so andragogy would mean ‘guiding adults’. Coming from the 1960s, it is now very dated, even though there have been later editions. The model of pedagogy was different then – more transmission and authority than in experience based learning. The introduction of experience-based and discussion types of pedagogy developed rapidly in schools in the 1970s, thanks to the Stenhouse Humanities programme, Integrated Studies and the like. Primary schools were dominated throughoutout this time (after the Plowden Report of 1966, influenced by the philosophy of John Dewey) with encouraging children to learn through experience, making curricula relevant to children. Knowles was reacting against an old fashioned notion of learning and teaching.

Knowles argued that discussion was better than telling, and that discussion should be based on the adults’ life experiences. We would say that today about teaching children too. There is a big question therefore whether pedagogy and andragogy are different. It is true that adults tend to have more life experience than children, but that is a matter of degree. For both, discussion is important, and so is the structured discipline of listening, taking notes and writing essays. One big difference is in authority – you can’t talk to adults as though they are children – but you might argue that we don’t talk to children very effectively anyway and should treat them with more respect. How you give a group of students boundaries may differ between children and adults, again in degree rather than in kind. In considering how learning is best facilitated at any level, we can reflect on what works well and what not, without getting bogged down by the tired old andragogy/pedagogy debate.

The issue of how best to teach adults needs more exploration. Fill them with confidence, instil can-do attitudes, use their everyday needs and issues, help them to think and express themselves clearly, show them how knowledge is relevant to their lives, help them to analyse and synthesise, make them curious, encourage self-discipline, celebrate their achievements. This is a powerful list to act on. It is the same list as we would use with children.

Apology

2009-03-29T14:36:00.002+01:00

Please note that my internet and email has been offline for three weeks so there has been a gap in posts. Many apologies.

Superstition and Children

2009-03-09T16:15:00.004Z

There seems to be a very strange reluctance for humans to be rational. The little people tug at my Irish imagination, and demons have been left behind by my Christian upbringing. I remember as a teacher in the 1970s one of my pupils, aged 16, being exorcised by a Christian minister to remove some demon within her - when actually iron tablets and a sense of purpose would have done her more good. People with mental disorders have been accused of demon possession even into the present.

I am interested then to explore how children navigate their path between the real, the pretend, and the irrational supernatural. Perhaps I am a good person to do this. My Christian upbringing declared as real God, with a Son, with supporting angels, who was about to return to the earth at any moment to take Christians up in a twinkling to become his new world generals. This was presented as fact, as was the virgin birth and the resurrection. A young person faced with these declarations of 'obvious fact' unravels them only slowly. On the other hand, projected reality which is clearly stupid struck me very early as shameless adult deception - I refer to Santa Claus and all that jazz. At the age of around 3, I became political and campaigned hard to persuade my siblings and friends that the Father Christmas industry is a con. It was not taken kindly by either parents or children. Where my certainty came from I do not recall, but I recall being a mixture of triumphant and angry, and very impatient of people who appeared not to believe me.

I recall these events in other contexts. A dear friend who believed and continues to feel betrayed 30 years later, so hard did the disclosure of the con take her. And other parents who want their children to know the truth but find their children totally wrapped up in this false belief and find it hard to prick the balloon. The argument for perpetuating the myth is said to be to preserve Christmas as a magic time for children. Actually, it is a consumerist myth: ask, and you shall be given whatever is on your list to Santa. Christmas is a time for receiving goods - toys, sweats, inessentials. It is a cargo cult - be good and believe and goods will come to you from Lapland, delivered everywhere in the world at the same moment by a hairy man with hairy reindeer, finding a way in even when there is no chimney. That a family cannot afford the goods, and prioritise income badly to do this is not considered. I guess at 3 I didn't object to the toys, but was very clear where they came from - Mum, Dad and the shop.

Children realise that they have grown out of the con well before teenage years, and even connive to dupe their younger siblings. But this is an a inappropriate relationship between adults and young children, and abuse of knowledge and power. Young children need better guidance into what is real and what is not. Of course, if Santa is a con, other things may be too, especially things that cannot be seen and touched. It is for example no coincidence that children develop scepticism about God at the same time, another myth pushed at them remorselessly. There might be a better way, showing children from the beginning, without deception, that working out what is real is actually a difficult thing to do.

I believe that children have inbuilt strategies to help them. I mean, the pretend game. I watched some tots at our local playground playing with a rotating wheel. It had become the Titanic. A lad, age 5, very energised, was working very hard to keep the ship off the iceberg. Another child stumbled over to play with the wheel, clearly confused, so the captain shouted, 'Pretend, silly'. The Titanic sank with exaggerated human despair. Children are extremely good at Pretend. They know that truth can be wrapped up in their imaginary world, and that the game helps their understanding - without ever forgetting the difference between pretend and real. Pretend is no deception, it is a deliberate strategy to use the imagination creatively.

A pretend game of giving and receiving, not only gifts but also kindnesses, would foster the magic of Christmas, and Eid, and Divali and Hanukkah, in children. But it is the children who pretend, not the adults. When pretend becomes a dogmatic lie, and not a portal into the imagination, it actually does a disservice by confusing truth with pretend in the child's mind.

Victor Turner, social process and performance

2009-03-09T14:36:00.003Z

This post is a summary of a review of the work of Victor Turner, particularly Victor Turner and Contemporary Cultural Performance, edited by Graham St. John, 2008. Turner focused on the concept of liminality, 'betwixt and between', adapted from the 1908 work of Arnold van Gennep on rites of passage. He applied this first to an African tribal society he had studied, and then to modern Western society. At a time when deep social structure was being emphasised, he rooted for social process. Social performances (such as rituals) cemented the comminity together by reducing tension.

That Turner generalised van Gennep's schema has introduced a range of confusions which this volume in part sorts out and in part magnifies. The concept of liminality (the state of being on a threshold) was applied both to major upheavals and to performances generally, distinguishing only between ‘authentic’ liminality, and playful artifices such as the theatre which are named liminoid, or liminal-like. Liminality is viewed as an in-between state of mind, in between fact and fiction (in Turner’s language indicative and subjunctive), in between statuses. This concept has endured in performance studies and has the potential for wider usage. His arguments for a positive liminal state of mind, which he called communitas, also has potential for inspiring creative ‘beyond the box’ approaches. This is ‘bottom-up’, multi-perspectival, democratic – or in his terminology anti-structural, beyond authority structures. Turner drew all this from the idea that ritual is transformative, even therapeutic, social drama, not only functional but eufunctional – viz. working for good. This is an attempt to define the creative process, and is still inspiring research and practice. Creativity as theshold still has potential to be developed. However, Turner’s notion of all ritual being social drama is an overgeneralisation. Some ritual is traditional, nostalgic and as regards new insights, quite dead. Tribal rituals studies in anthropology were capable of more dynamic interpretation, with rituals solving social disputes, but Turner was not justified to interpret all ritual as explained by this model. It is reasonable to use these dynamic rituals as a model for transformational theatre, but not all theatre is life-enhancing. The concept helps us to evaluate ritual, distinguishing between rituals which reconcile disputes, which affirm identity and community, and which are nostalgic and static.

Turner’s schema provides a social revolution through ritual, which draws both from his Marxist past and his Christian present. His communitas is reminiscent of ‘fellowship’. Turner’s central belief was that ritual has still a central part to play in modern western society, with serious purposes (liminal), and entertainment aims (liminoid, liminal-like). Performances can have serious transformative purpose, challenging, changing hearts and minds and being a part of social reconciliation. Much about Victor Turner has been reworked and honed; but there are serious concepts which still need to be further developed in terms of theatre, ritual and religion, and even education where there is meaning in the idea of threshold. New studies might concentrate on “the subjunctive”, the potential, the might become: using quasi-ceremony as exciting threshold activities may well reduce existing stresses and encourage appropriate forward planning.

When published, a link to the review will be provided here

Karl Marx and the Good Society

2009-03-01T21:41:00.005Z

Clearing out books has led me to reread Justice, Equality and Community: An Essay in Marxist Political Theory, a study of the influence of Marx by Vidhu Verma (Sage, New Delhi, 2000). This is a book that will stay on my shelves a little longer.

The question is, what did Marx say about justice, exploitation and the just society. Her own preference was for a non-judicial form of justice, that is justice not as a mechanism of the courts, but a human value. Marx said most on exploitation, especially that based on power differentials and class. On justice and the good society, Verma has attempted, well, a jigsaw puzzle. Justice is not a matter of redistributing wealth to the needy, even if the big picture of socialism and communism was redistribution. The reality was more complex. Justice carried implications of fairness over vested interests, something we still have not worked through. Justice in a judicial sense is not justice at all but a game between advocates seeking to shed doubt on clear guilt. Only the innocent have much to fear from court 'justice'.

So today, what is justice, and what is "the good society"? The big issue is how to balance the aspirations of individuals with general social well-being. I deal first with the individual. Marx dealt with exploitation on a class level, and in particular the exploitation of workers by owners. The decision not to unfairly exploit any other person but to deal justly at all times is an aspect of ethical personal development, which is gradually developed from childhood on by example and by principle. Religions have promoted moral relationships, but they are not dependent on religious belief, and not all religious people are as ethical as the ideal. Thus, this is an agenda for families, schools and other influences, including writers and the media. In short, "What kind of person am I?" is a key educational and social question.

Justice then is an automatic act of such an attitude of mind. It is internalised. It is focused on strangers and ememies as much as family and friends. It cherishes difference and seeks to help the needy. It is hard edged too, for fighting injustice becomes a natural moral response, which means never turning a blind eye.

How to combat injustice and exploitation also has a constitutional and judicial aspect. A constitution lays down expectations; governments create laws to control specified unethical acts such as theft and murder; and courts make decisions and set sanctions. The best sanctions are curative, turning offenders into future ethical individuals. The reality is that sanctions do not do this, and are seen more as taking difficult people off the streets. For sanctions to be therapeutic is expensive. Finland prefers this option with young people, of whom only three are held in custody. This reminds me of Ernest Thompson Seton in America at the beginning of the 2oth century. Noticing that local lads were vandalising the new farm he had bought, instead of calling the police, he invited them for a weekend of woodland activities ending with a campfire. This was the beginning of the American Scout movement, and he was able to observe later in life that all, even the villains, had grown up to become successful fathers and businessmen.

How schools and society can foster this internalised sense of justice, self respect and respect for others is the greatest challenge both nationally and globally. There is no time left for the small-minded political bickering about curriculum and assessment. The stakes are too big.
Seton...

Dynamic Evaluation

2009-02-23T10:40:00.004Z

Is evaluation research or not? This is a complex question, the answer to which is that it can be but need not be. Let us inquire into what might turn an evaluation into research.

The simplest form of evaluation is the feedback questionnaire. They are given out at the end of staff-development courses, as a client satisfaction form. They might give an indication of quality, and ideas for future improvement, if they are seriously filled in. In reality some are and some aren't, some give comment and others ticks in multi-choice boxes. If a quality session is recognised as such by one perceptive person, whilst ten press-ganged attendees offer low scores, the result will be too low a score. Thus it is fundamentally not reliable. These questionnaires tell us more about the attendee than about the session. To be sure of reasonable feedback, a session needs to ensure that people are not taken out of their comfort zone; this also means that they will not move on. I remember race awareness training in the 1980s. This took people so far out of their comfort zones that anger inhibited rational learning. A session needs to push people out of the comfort zone but not too far - staged knowledge construction rather than revolution.

An evaluation might try to find out whether pupils or students have progressed during an intervention. Thus a pre- and post- questionnaire on the topic under consideration, establishing baseline and summative data, can chart progress. Knowledge and skills are simpler to handle than softer aspects such as emotions, behaviour, attitudes and values. Broadening the questioning to take in different stakeholder perspectives (e.g. pupils, teachers, parents, therapists) produces more broadly based feedback data, and spreading that data over time strengths it further. Studies like this are routinely published as research. However, their ability to generalise may vary, since there are many factors which affect the success or failure of a programme. Which processes are effective and which not may be very hard to discover.

A research might look elsewhere for ideas about such processes and seek confirmation in the data. These ideas are contained within the notion of 'theory'. For example the processes of learning draw on the work of Lev Vygotski, on how adult teaching and mentoring help to boost and structure knowledge. The word 'scaffolding' is now commonly used. Social process might draw on the work of Victor Turner, on how social performance or ritual smooths the way for social progress. The processes within individual well-being might use Abraham Maslow's work. New lines of theorising rarely come from a single piece of work but are associated with the life-work of particular individuals. Typically, a piece of research will gather its unique data, and theorise about it using appropriate models from others.

Dynamic evaluation takes us one stage further. Often evaluation simply records what has happened and seeks to grade its effectiveness, using instruments which range from crude to over complex. A crude feedback questionnaire may get many returns but contain no useful information. A 20 page questionnaire may get very useful information but have few returns.
I call this a static evaluation. After the event there are recommendations on how to do it better next time. Over the time of a long project there might be annual recommendations to allow for some formative development, if the project structure allows it. The relationship between the project and the evaluation is mechanistic - recommendations are ticked off during the following year, when the next phase of the evaluation makes further recommendations.

Dynamic evaluation seeks to improve and develop processes day by day. The project needs to allow for growth in the flexibility of its targets. The growth is produced not by the recommendations of the evaluator but by the quality discussions that the evaluator facilitates. The project team, by responding to these, find more effective ways of achieving their goals. The evaluation instrument is likely to be the policy discussion group; if questionnaires are used it will be to feed into this discussion. The facilitator will seek to open up perspectives in the group, and look for inhibitions and negative practices to counter. The group will be encouraged to focus on the real objective of the programme (e.g to help pupils progress in specified ways) rather than on numbers and mechanistic box ticking. The evaluation should therefore get to the heart of the issue and seek ways in which the team from an early stage establish positive strategies to meet their real objectives.

Because of the nature of the relationship, the evaluator is intimately involved with all aspects of the work in hand, attending and actively participating in every significant meeting. This therefore cannot be done by skimming over the surface of the project. There is a value for the project in the quality of internal debate and strategy setting; there is a benefit for knowledge generally (that is by turning this relationship into research) if the change processes are made explicit and investigated more theoretically.

Interpreting Myth

2009-02-19T15:40:00.003Z

This post begins with Sheila Moon's A Magic Dwells: A poetic and psychological study of the Navaho emergence myth (1970). My purpose is to explore how myths can be approached, and to transfer that is appropriate to other kinds of writings.

The myth cycle describes the emergence of living things and eventually humans. There is no creator God, just the concept of emergence. The interplay between good and evil is central, with the first man being evil and powerful; to be balanced and replaced eventually by Changing Woman with benificent creative power. On causation the myth declares it was 'just because' - no apparent cause, just "the symbol for the ancient curtain of mystery hanging between us and all that we do not yet comprehend" (p.20). Choices are made, without clear reasons. A creator-god provides a feeling of rational choice. In the psyche, the creator-god is an explanation and celebration of life itself. "For the creator-god also is at bottom a symbol of man's will to live" (p.21). It is a mystery, but a mystery under control, deliberate, and beneficial.

Life of course is none of these things. Life can be snuffed out in seconds by disease, accident or disaster. No explanation, no apology. Life is generated by blind impulse to mate, but that is no guarantee of fertility. And the world into which mankind or beast are born is hostile, so we all struggle to survive viruses and predators. That is a hard place psychologically, especially for humans with long memories and deep anxieties.

Things and people, the Navaho observed, developed from somewhere and something. On that mysterious route, choices were made that made humans what we are and not snakes. The process of development balanced the power (authority, dictatorship) of men against the creativity of women. That which is beneficial comes from that creativity. Men have the choice to follow instinct to power or soften it with his creative feminine side (Jung's anima).

In 1989 I wrote a chapter on religious signs and symbols in Creating the Old Testament (ed. S. Bigger). This explored what signs and symbols in artefacts and language might mean psychologically, that we should not be taking them literally. Psychologically, God the father-figure provides a sense of direction and protection - balanced in religions such as Hinduism with parallel ideas of God the mother. Bible faiths were in denial of the feminine, which slipped back into national psyche in a host of embarrassing ways, such as through Astarte and her fertility cult. Also concepts such as faith are rooted in our good faith, our personal authenticity. Our belief in afterline is an affirmation that life has been worth living. Of course, such assumptions are not real, and are a bar to insight. We will only understand life here and now if we cease to view it as a punishment for the past or a preparation for bliss. It is here and now. Our quality of living it now is the whole point.

We express our ideas about the quality of our existence, our hopes, aspirations and anxieties differently, although some of the old myths still have power. Star Trek drew part of its charm from the myth that there will still be a world centuries to come, that it will be united, and that we will still be exploring the galaxy. The American mission of policing the world is extended absolutely everywhere. Where we came from is also included, with planets being modified for life, and superbeings seeding dna into a myriad of cosmic soups in beginning universes. This is deeply settling and comforting.

Meeting deep human need (psychology) is balanced by expressing profound insight (poetry) exploring the cases of 'just because', the mysteries, the wonders. We can therefore use these twin lasers to help us both understand literature and ourselves.

Shirin Ebadi

2009-02-18T19:46:00.008Z

Shirin Ebadi is an Iranian human rights lawyer fighting for liberty and social justice, especially for the marginalised. She was Nobel Peace Prize winner for her work in 2003. Here is the BBC estimate of her work. She was the first female judge in Iran, and teaches law in the University of Tehran. Her offices from which she complained for the marginal was closed down by the authorities and staff arrested.

Much of her work has been on women's liberty and rights. Since the Iranian revolution, freedoms for women have been considerably eroded.

Her recent work has been to support the Iranian Bahai community. Bahais have been persecuted in Iran ever fince their founding in the middle of the 19th century. Since the Iranian revolution, Bahais have been executed for teaching children, and for being Bahais (regarded by some Muslims as a heresy of Islam, but believing themselves to be a separate world religion). Family wealth and property has been confiscated, and children have been denied an education and entry to university. In January, arrests of six Bahais hit the news, including a member of her own staff. More details linked here. On Channel 4 News today, she showed desecrated Bahai gravestones and expressed great concern for both the treatment of the Bahai minority, and civil rights generally.

The Bahai Faith emerged as a peaceful religion in Iran from the 1850s. Their first teacher, called The Bab, was executed, their first 'Manifestation of God', Bahaullah, was imprisoned until his death in 1892. Both left a considerable body of teaching that encouraged world development to an ideal in which men and women are considered equal in status, that all races and nations should be deemed equal, that extortion and impoverishing must be stopped, that the world should develop a democratic politics in which everyone are valued. They teach that all religions should be valued as expressions of God's revelation. The encourage the empowerment of both families and communities. What is there in this philosophy that must be silenced?

Power in this world is held by vested interests who demand obedience and deny freedom of thought, religion and action. Those in power have mechanisms, such as police and army, to assert their dominence. Individuals therefore have to decide whether to allow this to happen uncontested, or be counted as ethical opponents, and thereby as workers towards peace, equity, respect and human well-being. The opposite is to be supporters of aggression, injustice, disrespect and human degradation. Whatever our beliefs, we have to stand up and be counted as ethical workers towards global and local peace.

See further: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shirin_Ebadi.

Paulo Freire

2009-02-14T13:57:00.004Z

Paulo Freire was born in Brazil and worked as teacher in the shanty-town slums. He criticised the tradition approach of the teacher giving knowledge to passive students, comparing it to putting money in the bank - the students accumulating given knowledge. His approach required dialogue, discussion and debate, with students being active in their learning. He affirmed that such an education process should be empowering for the learner, helping them raise their consciousness about the world and about political issues. Education should, he affirmed, help people see their world differently. He was firmly opposed to workbooks, for example for adult literacy, which dominated most of his work. People learn best if the knowledge and skills they are building up are useful to their lives, even life changing. The power between teacher and learner is narrowed, removing if possible the status gulf between the two so that the learning experience is two-way, built on relationship and joint effort towards a single goal. This dynamic approach to teaching and learning he described as praxis.

More detail can be found in the on-line Encyclopedia of Informal Education .

There are lessons for teaching today.
First that teaching means establishing a positive dialogue with learners which is rooted in a good relationship.
Second that there is more to teaching than administering workbooks or worksheets. It is about creating an interest in the topic which is shown to be relevant to life.
Thirdly, that knowledge is not given and received; rather understanding is constructed together.
Fourthly, education should change the way pupils and learners think about their lives, making them more aware, more ethically concerned, and politicised (i.e. inspired to change their world).

The effectiveness of provision in schools, colleges and universities could profitably be measured against these criteria. Where structures make such dynamic learning impossible,, they should be dismantled.

A Good Childhood: Searching for Values in a Competitive Age

2009-02-12T22:09:00.009Z

The report, A Good Childhood: Searching for Values in a Competitive Age for the Children's Society by Richard Layard has just been published. Details are on The Children's Society website

Recommendations include:

Teachers should:

Help children to develop happy, likable social personalities.

Base discipline on mutual respect.

Eliminate physical and psychological violence from school.

Make Personal, Social and Health Education statutory.

Present sex and relationships education not as biology but part of social and emotional learning.

New tests on emotional and behavioural well being should be carefully piloted.

There are various recommendations for parents, governments, advertises, media and others but these are summarised by the final recommendation:

All Society should:

Take a more positive attitude to children. Welcome them into society and help them.

Recommendations include abandoning SATs in favour of teacher assessment, investing more heavily in child and youth services, and providing youth facilities and centres with educative as well as recreational aims.

The report, now arrived, is a slim Penguin paperback. It is written in simple language, so simple that it seems like obvious common sense and hardly worth writing about. Yet, if it is common sense, why have opposite policies and strategies been in place for 20 years? - a curriculum more enamoured with testing than with enjoyment; a mechanistic demand for literacy and numeracy than with their development within a relevant and appropriate context which excited the children; an ethos of 'managing' behaviour with punishments rather than developing positive attitudes and self-control? The alternative answers are out there, and were in common use before these new 'reforms' in 1988. Further, the critique of this report was being shouted out loud across these 20 desert years - what about relevance such as work on the environment and citizenship? So these were tacked on to the margins, to be done in stolen time. What about enjoyment and achievement as well as good scores? So new guideline were given to require teachers to get children to enjoy the unenjoyable curriculum. This is non-political. The Tories started it, New Labour continued it equally enthusiastically. Someone has to change it. I hope that the Children's Society report gives a nudge in the right direction.

Facts and figures:
Percentage of children 5-16 with
Anxiety disorders 3.3%
Depression 0.9%
Conduct disorders 5.8%
ADHD 1.5%
Autism/ASD 0.9%
Eating disorders 0.3%
Total, any disorder 9.6%

Treatments: family talking therapy is highlighted, but the quality of the interaction is crucial. The best can improve the situation by up to 28%; this goes down as quality of the therapist decreases (based on family ratings). A very poor therapist can make things worse. Pages 121-3.
Costs of social care, remedial help and crime, per child (averages, 1998 prices)

with conduct disorder £70,000
with conduct difficulties £24,000
without disorders or difficulties £7,000 (source: p. 126 and note 260).

Looked after children:
About half of the children held in custody were 'looked after' in care.

Experience is Pedagogical - John Dewey

2009-02-11T18:33:00.011Z

John Dewey was a psychologist and philosopher when has had over the decades a profound effect on education. e championed informal learning within the formal education system. These points are taken from 'Experience is Pedagogical', first published in 1897. I present them here as not of historical interest only but helping us to reconstruct what education could become. Here, highly simplified:

Article 1, I believe Education is ...
the individual is a social being, society is an organity unity of individuals. Education must begin with individual capacities, interests and habits. The purpose of education is to improve society.

Article 2. What the school is...
a social institution, involved in a social process, a process of living today and not preparation for living in the future. Schools must represent real life, and grow out of family life. It must encourage children to participate in the process. School should be about personal growth. Examinations are only of use if they determine the potential role the child can play in community life.

Article 3. The curriculum. The child's own social experiences need to be the start of the curriculum. Subjects need to begin with ways in which they are experienced in everyday life.

Article 4. Methods. Only activity can deliver the various aspects of education and learning without dullness or sentimental emotionalism. For activities, interests can be observed.

Article 5. The School and Social Progress. Education needs to be a mechanism to achieve social progress. It should merge arts with sciences. The teachers need to recognise the dignity of their calling as helping to form a better society.

It will be interesting to map this against current educational provision.

Sample quotations from Experience & Education (1938), a lecture series which offers a mature synthesis of his ideas on education:

"basing education on personal experience may mean more multiplied and more intimate contacts between the mature and immature than ever existed in the traditional school, and consequently more, rather than less, guidance by others." [p.21]

"How shall the young become acquainted with the past in such a way that the acquaintance is a potent agent in the appreciation of the living present?" [p.23]

"Experience and education cannot be directly equated to each other. For some experiences are mis-educative. Any experience is mis-educative that has the effect of arresting or distorting further experience. An experience may be such as to engender callousness; it may produce a lack of sensitivity and of responsiveness...
It is not enough to insist on the necessity of experience, nor even of activity within experience. Everything depends on the quality of the experience to be had... [It is the task of the educator] to select the kind of present experiences that live fruitfully and creatively in subsequent experiences." [pp.27-8]

"Every experience is a moving force. Its value can be judged only on the ground of what it moves towards and into" [p.38]

"When education is based upon experience and educative experience is seen as a social process, the situation changes radically. The teacher loses the position of external boss or dictator but takes on that of leader of group activities." [p.59].

Round the World In 80 Faiths

2009-02-08T17:42:00.006Z

At the point of writing, Peter Owen Jones is finishing his BBC series on marginal faith groups. In general I have welcomed his open-mindedness, an Anglican priest thrust into first hand experiences within the anthropology of religion. Above all he has been quick to recognise the imperialist nature of Christianity engaged on world domination, believing itself to be the only true faith. He apologises for this arrogance on several occasions.

Currently he is visiting El Tio, a devil-god deep in South American silver mines, a relic of the indigenous gods submerged by Catholicism. He handles poisonous snakes with American fundamentalist Christian snake-handles, following a quaint verse in Mark 16. He greatly disliked Voodoo blood sacrifice for its cruel waste of life, although most of the sacrificed flesh was apparently eaten (except for the kitten and puppy). He rejoices when a colonised indigenous faith fights back to form a rich syncretism. He tries to show such living rituals as culturally enriching and empowering.

Too many faiths are shown to cover here, so I am content to explore principles. The anthropologist loves diversity and is saddened when the traditional dies out and is replaced by a global impoverished culture, be it in literature, music or religion. Yet not all traditional beliefs have been helpful and can imprison a people in the past. British beliefs in ghosts, black demon dogs, and witches are not things I would wish preserved or restored, however children's novels such as Whitby Witches or The Ragwitch would wish. There is a balance between people valuing the best of the past (but not all of the past) and moving forward. I worry therefore that faiths such as those presented have become a museum of human delusion if taken literally. I understand that cultural identity is important, but underlying many customs are irrational beliefs, in spirits, demons, deities, fate and the afterlife. On the programme as I write, Catholics are blessing automobiles to bring good fortune. In many cases, what we see is the triumph of superstition over education. Religious people have no problem in believing the impossible or unlikely, and there is no sign globally of a rational coming of age. Owen Jones rejoices in the 'museum' but supports the rational. He said, 'No minister can get rid of my demons. I have to sort out my issues for myself'. Maybe the prisoners 're-directed' by Pentecostal needed to be shaken out of their destructive path and given a new direction. The issue is whether that dependent direction is best for them in the long run.

Do people need bizarre myths? Some are ancient and traditional, like the two former cannibal tribes putting aside enmity by exchanging children - fortunately now a symbolic exchange. Some are however very modern and very strange. All have in common the importance of ritual and performance. Ritual gives some social cohesion, the feeling of togetherness. That togetherness has a purpose. The ceremonials of Nuremberg in 1935-6 aimed to bind together the German people behind an all-powerful leader. Owen Jones shows how rituals can become personally intrusive, inviting psychic distress. Others brought him peace, the residence in a smoke-filled tent, and listening to the river with a shaman. Each of these cases showed that these apparently positive practices were condemned as diabolical, and their celebrants persecuted and killed. He ends in Turin with a ground living in religious harmony, drawing equal insight from all faiths - a marginal cult, but a spiritual high-spot.

So what is diabolical? The insistence that only we are right and others must be forced to agree with us? Or a treasuring of the voices of many people who live, believe and act in ways which enhance the well-being of the world as a community. I know my answer.

Leadership and the modern Prince

2009-02-07T10:39:00.008Z

Machiavelli wrote The Prince to articulate principles of medieval leadership, in which legalised political violence was accepted as normal. Antonio Gramsci wrote from prison as Mussolini's political prisoner "The Modern Prince", set in 1930s Italy (see earlier post on Prison Notebooks, PN). Here leadership is shown as a mixture of consent and force. Consent is needed by key stakeholders - the army, the police, the judiciary for example. Popular consent of the majority is helpful when force has to be exerted against a minority. The implications of this balance in Europe during the 1930s and 1940s was obvious to anyone with even a casual understanding of Nazi and Fascist policies. Gramsci, a Marxist, was in favour of democratic leadership.

I am concerned here with applying the idea of a modern Prince to contemporary leadership issues, including those in education. The leader can offer direction (forced or negotiated) and/or intellectual and moral leadership (PN:57). Leadership in education can be centralised to an individual or devolved to several layers. Parents and staff may be interested to ask whether the current situation is by consent or fiat, and the extent to which consent is sought - that is stakeholder views are valued. This suggests how much ownership the stakeholders feel in the status quo. Pupils are also major stakeholders. We might therefore ask on how the balance between force and negotiation is established, especially in the context of dealings with pupils. A school or college can only run with pupil/student consent (that consent might be freely given or grudging) but they could by sheer numbers sabotage the management of education by refusing to take part. The balance between management by force, by grudging consent and by freely-given consent might be used as a health check for the institution, and strategies to move the balance upwards devised and maintained.
Like the distinction between state and civil society, a school balances central power (the headteacher) against stakeholder competence and enthusiasm, the school equivalent of civil society, where many people work towards the public good. The more these are in balance, the healthier the institution. Leaders in education therefore need to devote energy towards nurturing bottom-up quality, and cannot achieve a quality organisation unless they do. They also therefore need to be the kind of people, in terms of personal qualities and attitudes, to do this well. Then the leader offers negotiated direction to the organisation, without which it is rudderless. The authority vested in the leader rests squarely on the quality of the intellectual and moral direction offered. Direction as to be owned democratically; but it also has to be fair, ethical, properly evidenced, securely conceived and suitably flexible. This then is the person specification of The Prince in education, that is the headteacher, the College Principal the Vice-Chancellor, devolved leader, head of service, or government minister. Today, they should not be bringing in the cavalry to kill opposition but negotiating a win-win situation.

From a school perspective, this means management by motivation rather than by compulsion, force, punishment, and expulsion. From a state perspective, it means working to narrow the gap between the many thousands of young people in prison or detention in Britain, and the remarkable figure of only 3 in Finland. For both school and state, anti-social activity is remedied by appropriate education and not by force.

Ivan Illich and Deschooling

2009-02-05T10:02:00.004Z

Back in the early 1970s Ivan Illich was persuaded that school education was so bad that the only answer was to scrap them. His book, Deschooling Society was iconic. He contrasted learning with schooling. Schooling is about compliance and obedience whilst learning is about excitement, motivation and empowerment. He referred both to an inappropriate curriculum, and an undemocratic school ethos. Schooling is done to children and not with children. His vision was of a global network of expertise that people could buy into (and offer good or bad feedback) instead of the state providing an education system. To the call to introduce free schooling worldwide, his view that this was the most unhelpful thing to impose onto a developing country. More knowledge, yes, more learning, yes, but NOT more schooling.

This has been a challenging thought. The 1980s UK government imposed a National Curriculum to improve things - it was even called the Education Reform Act in 1988. That was a botched disaster which saw annually revised versions, important afterthoughts such as citizenship, environmental education and careers education. Then a bolted on personal and social education permeation. Angst about standards, behaviour and school quality provide annual post-mortems. Employers still campaign about low literacy and numeracy levels. Campaigns about respect, and 'behaviour modification' are constantly reinvented. Education costs billions, but the problems have not gone away.

Of course, the issue for Illich was what would take the place of schools. He said, a network of expertise. We now have the internet so there is a means for delivering such a network. Of course, the good needs sifting from the awful, but that is not impossible.

It is time to reconsider Illich's arguments. Do schools need to disempower pupils? How could they in contrast empower them? Do schools (or colleges, universities) need to pretend to be the only holders of knowledge? Can education institutions prepare students to become adaptable thinking adults who will live in a world where knowledge is unrecognizably different from what we now think we know? Is the internet the best way of achieving this? Or will other things follow?

So Illich argued that schools made pupils dependent and not independent. That the NHS makes people dependent on experts rather that independent pursuers of healthy lifestyles. That in general all government institutions should empower rather than disempower, and produce motivated and enterprising people. That is still an important national and global aspiration. Schools, Colleges and Universities are only as good as they are at delivering such an enriching agenda.

Mathematics education blog

2009-02-05T09:37:00.002Z

Can I point those interested to a mathematics education blog from Norway at http://mathedresearch.blogspot.com by Reidar Mosvold at the University of Stavanger.

Middle Ground

2009-02-04T15:28:00.005Z

The phrase 'middle ground' reminds me of a few things.

First, Homi Bhabha who writes on post-colonial relationships which are full of authority issues, and post-authority issues. He speaks of dialogue between the former powerful and powerless to find middle ground in which authority agendas have been dissolved and the discussion can move forward.

Second, Armitt L (2005:196) Fantasy Fiction: An introduction New York, Continuum. This explores children reading fiction (especially fantasy) in which they enter imaginatively onto another plane, 'middle ground' (through a wardrobe/window/portal) where belief in reality is laid aside. It could also represent the acceptance of drama and soaps as 'real' in the imagination. If you like, children have to lay their agendas, assumptions and dogmas down and enter imaginatively into a new world, first imagined and gradually more and more fleshed out until that middle ground becomes the new reality. The teachers job is involve them imaginatively in this process.

Third, post Vygotskian Socio-cultural Activity Theory. An activity is a deliberate purposeful human set of actions. The subject has a motive which aims at the desired outcome. The middle ground between the intention and the outcome contains 'mediating symbols and tools'. A desired outcome might be post-authoritative self-discipline. The mediating symbols are mostly linguistic, although there may be other rituals and rights of passage embedded. The first mediating tool is the discussion group, which sought to unravel prejudice and dogma and open up new horizons. Such tools will produce argument and conflict - this is essential if progress is to be made, and you have to navigate through conflict and never bury it or avoid it. The new consensus should represent all views broadly, so it should never be s/he who shouts loudest (or most articulately) wins. Everyone needs to be able to agree on the group statement before moving on.

The middle ground is also a kind of consensus in which the different parties or stakeholders seek to achieve a win-win situation. There are pitfalls when an authority figure tries to force a consensus through. Also, a consensus may not provide the best solution, which might have been expressed by one person and been sidelined by vested interests. Consensus might end up being a conservative or reactionary position, as Galileo once found.
Note: this development of a response to a student is to explore the concept of 'middle ground' in interesting ways

Gramsci, hegemony and social complexity

2009-02-02T11:56:00.010Z

Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937) was born in Sardinia and his work focused on Italy. A marxist, he was co-founder of the Italian Communist Party, working on their newspaper Unita. He was imprisoned by Mussolini from 1928-33 where he produced 'Prison Notebooks' which have turned him into a marxist theorist of some note. On release he continued writing until his death in 1937. A selection in English was edited by G Nowell Smith and Q Hoare in 1971, with a useful introduction. There is also a helpful discussion by Stuart Hall, reprinted in Stuart Hall: critical dialogues in cultural studies, ed David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen, Routledge 1996.

He is known for developing the concept of hegemony - that is the authority that sustains people or groups in power. He identified a continuum between hegemony by control/ constraint, and by social agreement. His analysis was at the practical level of everyday life and national policy rather than a high abstraction. He recognised that real life is complex and was against the oversimplifications of scientism, economism, empiricism and positivism, that is that easy answers cannot be produced by science, economics, measurement or sense-evidence. Reality is much more complex, with all these areas, and others, all contributing. Such complexity needs to be factored into our research and analysis of life. He complained constantly that marxism was oversimplifying Marx.

Periodization: Gramsci recognised that there are periods of stability and periods of unheaval. Therefore a long view charts relations between structure and superstructure (that is, how local upheavals affect the social and political structure of the whole. These upheavals are similar to what Kurt Lewin called 'unfreezing'; changes to the superstructure of the organisation or society resembles Lewin's 'refreezing'. For Gramsci, forces are in relationship. The marxist revolution will not be sudden and total but a gradual process over time. A class, whether workers or bourgeoisie, is not united but very varied. Moving either class towards the other is a process of small steps.

Whichever is in control has hegemony and holds it either by force or by agreement, usually a mixture of the two. The ideal is to move strategies towards consensus and away from force. His examples focused on Italy with different hegemonies exerted by Mussolini and the Catholic church, each with privileges and self-seeking agendas. His campaign therefore was to move closer to the hegemony of the people.

This leads to the distinction between state and civil society. Civil society (the accumulation of all non-state activity) provides the way to neutralise any excessive hegemony by the state. In other words we all need to play our part, in our own way and our own fields, in social change.

Stuart Hall took these principles and applied them, as Gramsci had never done, to issues of race, racism and anti-racism. The long view shows gains and losses, and the best we can hope for is gradual progress, so long as everyone with a stake plays their part. The revolution from racism to antiracism creeps therefore along the continuum; racists will stop affirming their racism long before they change their attitudes, if ever they do.

This idea of slow revolution (non-marxists tend to call it improvement or progress, without always defining the criteria) is one we can apply to many aspects of education, attitude and practice. The 'intellectual world' is inclusive of everyone who thinks and articulates clearly, which should ideally be everyone. 'Thinks' means to think about life, experience, society, community, politics, justice and democratic empowerment. That is a challenge, and alas runs counter to the concept of intellectual found in the Academy.
Link: http://www.infed.org/thinkers/et-gram.htm

The Banality of Injustice

2009-02-01T10:50:00.008Z

This means that injustice can appear ordinary and normal. Hannah Arendt, a German Jewish writer, coined the phrase "the banality of evil" in her 1963 account of the trial of the Nazi Adolph Eichmann in Jerusalem - Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. There was an expanded edition on 1994 (Penguin). She argued powerfully that we should not regard people like Eichmann, Himmler and Hitler as monsters - they were ordinary people alongside other ordinary people who persuaded each other that evil (murder, grievous bodily harm, causing starvation) is acceptable so that they could feel good after working efficiently for the boss, and guilty only if they let him down. They develop a pride in their work, comparable with any other craftsman. Viewed like this, we discover that similar people are everywhere, fortunately only active when the culture around them allows them to act with impunity. How for example in Rwanda could people turn against their neighbours so quickly, and executioners with machetes kill men women and children in cold blood and then do home for tea because they are tired? And consider it a normal day's work. Eichmann was absolutely normal. The psychiatrists examining him reported he had a good personality and desirable caring attitudes within friends and family. Arendt said, people like him "were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal". At the time he had no concept that he was doing wrong. She called it "the fearsome, word-and-thought-defying banality of evil".

This can be applied to injustice. Normal people not thinking they are doing wrong by discriminating against people on grounds of race, colour or religion, especially if they feel sure of social approval. If the law of the land promotes it, then confidence grows that there will be no consequences for unjust actions. In other words, we live on the brink of civil war, with normal people viewing others as enemy. The trials of these 'normal' politicians in Nuremburg was in my lifetime. Rwanda and Bosnia have been in the lifetimes of most people reading this. This civil war is happening now.

So what about the 'banality of good' - creating a culture of authentic altruism, a caring society, so helping others is the normality, and selfish discrimination is considered unacceptable. Before we are self-righteous about this, how much are these ideals deep down in people's souls rather than being an unwelcome social constraint. Altruism today has to be informally policed by people prepared to stand up and be counted. Philip Zimbardo, the psychologist, talked of 'the banality of heroism', when being a hero resisting evil is what ordinary people do and not what elite people do.

Preparing children to be heroes is a serious task. Understanding the concepts of justice, altruism, and good as contrasting with unfairness, discrimination and evil are part of it; and challenging unacceptable attitudes and behaviour is the rest. As tools, parents and teachers can use example, stories, discussion and practical action. If being caring is developed as the normal thing to do, we are closer to having a society when kind and just actions become the norm.