Tue, 21 Jun 2005 10:56

From: Peter Mellett <esspem@BATH.AC.UK>

Subject: Re: Start of the Review Process

Jack –
You state: " So, in the process of reviewing the accounts of others of their educational influence, in relation to my understanding of their standards of judgement, I intend to focus on my own enquiry learning in exploring the question, ‘How do I improve my understanding of the processes of pedagogising living educational theories?' …”

This reinforces my concern always to listen with the greatest possible care when I am engaged in dialogue. It reminds me of a decade ago when I was writing my dissertation - I would frequently come to the Monday AR group with sheaves of paper containing my latest problematic descriptions and attempted explanations. However, rather than banging away at that locked door, it was often the case that I would become absorbed into the discussion of another's work. When I left the group I would find that magic had been at work - the process engendered by the earlier engagement would start to operate at an intuitive level on my own concerns and, almost unbidden, the key would turn in the lock and the door to the next stage would swing open. Thus I am convinced that, by addressing within dialogue the concerns of another, my own concerns become explicated and resolved.

You say you are conscious of bringing yourself to the edge of your competence/incompetence and have a creative sense of failing to explicate the processes of pedagogising living educational theories (now - is that living educational theories as a general category or each of your own living educational theories? I would prefer mother’s methods here to father’s!) If Maggie Farren has achieved your aim in her own work, then I assume from your sub-text that you feel you cannot adopt wholesale her form of resolution to create your own. Perhaps each piece of living educational theory has its own unique and optimal way of expressing its pedagogy – which I maintain requires careful listening while holding the concern within a dialectical arena.

A final rememberance from my dissertation days – one that made me face the public arbitrariness of my own personal certainty: Marx wrote (in Ilyenkov, p.29) "Even with philosophers who gave their work a systematic form, e.g. Spinoza, the real inner structure of their system is quite distinct from the form in which they presented it. … it is necessary ... to distinguish between that which the author in fact offers and that which he (sic) gives only in his own representation."

- Pete