BERA e-seminar 16 MAY–23 JULY 2005

The purpose of this seminar was set out by Jack in the form of an invitation:

". . . to a discussion on the contributions of our living educational theories and our evidence of our educational influences in our own learning and to the future of educational research . . ."

with a further suggestion:

". . . to let each other know where our educational theories can be accessed and where we can see evidence of our educational influences in our own learning, the learning of others and in the learning and education of social formations."

A later discussion of these ‘focal points’ gave rise to the question:

"How can we develop standards of judgment that help us to understand the nature of educational theories and what counts as evidence of educational influences in learning?"

Jack invited me to revisit the text of my BERA (2000) Review to assess whether the standards of judgement it discussed might be applied to the growing archive of contributions and further asked me to enquire into identifying an appropriate review process (see summary at http://www.jackwhitehead.com/bera05/Principles.htm)

for the archive that would result from the postings to the e-seminar.

The resultant archive (see http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/archives/bera-practitioner-researcher.html ) contains a total of 304 entries in 69 strands for the months of June and July. My final contribution was sent as an email to Jack on 9^th August and contained inter alia the following comment:

“. . . The e-seminar is now nominally at an end; the archive is essentially complete – and I am now looking for some sort of conclusion to this whole enterprise. I am, therefore, asking the question: "What are we to make of the e-seminar archive?" However, it is an enormous and multi-faceted document and my judgment is that, in its current form, it is not amenable to an interrogation that can make a comprehensible response to the original aims of the e-symposium.

“. . . I suspect that each of us – each past contributor to the archive who might respond to my question – is likely to plot their own highly individual and idiosyncratic path through the archive. . . . My suggestion is that we need to be able to make links between individual postings and to make references to points that seem to resonate with each other.

“. . . However, I think it is vital not to impose a 'reading' on the archive as a whole that seems from any given contributor's point of view to remove individual elements of meaning from their original context. As I have said elsewhere, I do not think it is good enough for one person ('the reviewer') to write a linear commentary ('a review') that strings together extracts ('quotations') from the archive ('the literature') – or for a 'gatekeeper' to nominally collate comments from contributors. . . .”

I later focused this invitation within the action-enquiry question: "How can we develop standards of judgment that help us to understand the nature of educational theories and what counts as evidence of educational influences in learning?"

With these points in mind, the following is an attempt to put forward some suggestions about how we might respond to the question: "What are we to make of our e-seminar archive?"

I have already said that I do not think the current form of the archive is amenable to an interrogation by one person that will be adequate to respond to the original aims of the seminar. The archive has resulted from the contributions of a large number of people and so I am beginning to think that a review would best be carried out by those people, sometimes acting independently and at other times acting collectively. In an attempt to ‘get the ball rolling’, I have concentrated on the postings that I made over a period of six weeks and on the direct responses that I received to those postings. With the help of DreamWeaver software, each posting has been converted into an HTML browser-readable (webpage) document and the whole hyperlinked package has been placed on Jack's server at http://www.jackwhitehead.com/bera05/Main%20Index.htm

If you access this site, you will see that the pages are linked in a sequence that represents the main thread of my reading of the archive. For me, it represents a ‘significant strand’. Each page is uniquely identified by its date (month-day) and time (hours:minutes). The Homepage contains a Main Index that shows the pages I have chosen, their sequence and an outline of their content. The Sitemap page is a summary of the Main Index.

My suggestion is that each contributor/reviewer makes their own selection from the archive and will construct their own corresponding Main Index. Thus, there will be as many Main Indexes as there are reviewers’ selections – but there will only be one Sitemap. Each reviewer’s sitemap strand (i.e. distillate of their own specific Main Index) should intersect at one or more points with the existing sitemap, until a composite builds up that shows the structure of the composite reading that has been made of the archive. However, the format of my contribution to the sitemap is not satisfactory and alternatives will be researched. Also to be resolved is the provision of suitable software that will allow each of us to make selections from the archive and to build up our ‘readings’ on Jack’s server.

What am I hoping for? All I have done so far is to assemble one sequence of postings to make a sort of ‘reading’ extracted from the archive that I think tells its own story. In the end, I want us to be able to make sense of what we have written, drawing on as wide a selection as possible from all of the archive’s multifarious strands and sedimentary layers. At the moment, I view the archive contents as raw data – living standards of judgement have yet to evolve through the very process of the generation of living educational theory from it. It is the form of that process that I am trying to draw out and elucidate. I think it would be a pity for us not to attempt to make something of the archive because a good deal of what it contains is likely to be reworked and reposted the next time a similar exercise occurs, in which we are asked to give an account of our practices as action researchers.

Clearly, I need to find a means of adding comments to my reading to show others where I think the salient features lie – I need to demonstrate the meanings I am claiming to make from my reading of the archive. One possible method could be to add yellow ‘PostIts’ against specific sections of highlighted text. I do not want to chop up individual postings or extract material from its immediate context within its specific posting or from within the context of that posting within a strand. Another method could be to give a guided tour of my reading by means of hyperlinking significant (to me) highlighted sections. But best of all, I suspect, would be some sort of communal dialectic of explication – almost as if we had printed out the whole archive, stuck the pages onto a huge wall and were standing in front of it with highlighter pens and a determination to have respect for what all others had written. Above the wall would be an illuminated neon sign proclaiming the words of Jack’s original invitation and the focus of our efforts. The marks and comments we made with our pens on the printouts stuck to the wall would be the written record and the story of what we had made of our archive; they would ultimately form a response to the questions:

1. How can I/we convince others that the contributions I claim to have made to

· our living educational theories

· and our evidence of our educational influences in our own learning

· and to the future of educational research

are significant?

2. How can I demonstrate evidence of my/our educational influences in my/our own learning, the learning of others and in the learning and education of social formations?

3. How can we develop standards of judgment that help us to understand the nature of educational theories and what counts as evidence of educational influences in learning?

Staying with my metaphor of the crowd gathered around a printout of the archive, perhaps a video of our activities at the wall would constitute the best demonstration of the generation of living standards of judgement.

Please let me know what you think. Are we to make something of this archive, or are we to press eagerly on into the future, looking for the next opportunity to rehearse our familiar arguments amongst ourselves, without actually convincing anyone outside our immediate circle that we have made any sort of serious contribution to the wider debate.

Peter Mellett

5^th October 2005