From supervision to
supervisor:
Responsibility as logic
by Professor Moira Laidlaw,
Ningxia Teachers University
Paper presented at the Monday
Evening Educational Conversation of 26 February 2007 convened in the Department
of Education, University of Bath.
Philo of Alexandria: Be kind, for everyone you meet today is
involved in a great struggle.
Context
I want to describe and explain the educational
influences, which have helped me to clarify my values in action in the name of
education between 1990 and today. As I leave VSO's care as a charitable
organisation, whose motto is: 'sharing skills, changing lives', in order to go
back to rural China as an independent educational action researcher for however
long they'll have me, I have come to understand the importance of knowing where
I've been to help me to understand where I am now and where I'm going. I
believe this present writing is a way of accounting for myself (Holley in ed.
Laidlaw, Lomax and Whitehead, 1994), which I hold to be a professional requirement
in what I am doing in the name of education. In addition, it helps me to
clarify what it is about the constellation of values that have helped me to
mould myself into the kind of educator I want to be. I am not suggesting a
linear progression from A-Z, but rather a journey, whose landmarks I recognise
as influential in my educational development.
One of the most significant periods for me of my own
educational development was as a Ph.D. student with Jack Whitehead at the
University of Bath. This part of the present writing is not calculated as a
testament to him, but rather a free acknowledgement of how his talents as a
supervisor helped me to self-evaluate and take responsibility for my own
development. I have written elsewhere (Laidlaw, 2007, BERA elist) about the
specific ways in which Jack helped me to harness my own gifts and come to terms
(literally and metaphorically) as an agent of change in my own life, but in
this writing I will take a couple of instances with references to how these
have influenced my actions. Like Jack, I do not claim that he educated me. I
have educated myself. My living educational theories (Laidlaw, 1996, 1997,
2000, 2004, 2005, 2006, a&b) belong to me but I warmly acknowledge Jack's
involvement in the processes of my educational maturation and his continuing
support for me as a post-doctoral colleague and friend.[1]
In providing a safe yet challenging space to me, Jack
nurtured my development. He set out, I am sure, to nurture my educational
development, but he ended up helping me to grow up. In insisting that I alone
was responsible for my achievements and my failures, he played to my grown-up
nature, rather than the, at times, frightened child of my neuroses. The space
Jack created for me was educational rather than personal, and over the six
years of my research programme, I came to value the space and time and the
contours of this space. This space was somewhere in which I was free to try
hard. I was free to fail. This space was contingent on my pursuing educational
enquiry, but wasn't conditional on whether I 'passed or failed'. This gave me
the security I needed to develop and then take responsibility for that
development. I was free to be enthusiastic and eccentric and myself. I was free
to explore the creative bent of my character in whatever ways it manifested
itself (with me it was stories and fiction and self-analysis). I was not,
however, free to expect Jack to take responsibility for anything in my psyche
that was not his concern. That particular boundary seemed to me at the time to
stem from a ruthlessness in him, and a natural human frailty in me. After all,
I'd had a hard time! Why would he not meet me halfway? I came to understand
through the years that Jack's consistent vision about the purposes and potentials
of development needed both a keen psychological insight in the moment coupled
with a vision of future possibilities for individual and mutual advantage. Jack
is pursuing educational development, not psychoanalysis, although his talents
are saturated, it seems to me, with psychological insight about how individuals
feel and what their motives are. His consistent emphasis on educational
development as opposed to self-analysis - but on the links with one's inner
life to potential educational practices and enquiry - meant that I gradually
learnt to focus more and more clearly on what it was I was pursuing in the name
of education.
Jack set clear boundaries in his supervision of my
Ph.D. programme. These boundaries were to do with responsibility and ownership.
My belief is that the degree of mental health of an individual is precisely
analogous to the state of an individual's boundaries surrounding responsibility
and ownership. And in order to pursue my own educational development I needed
to become more clear about what it was I was responsible for, both as a human
being and as an educator. It isn't that Jack divides the two, but he influenced
me to see the complex nature of those boundaries and work out for myself
over time how
I stood in relation to them. This was my process, not his. The difference was
that I needed to make changes. Jack helped me to help myself. That for me, was his great
contribution to my development, which has had the result of harnessing more of
my creativity and originality towards the world than I was capable of before.
Through his influence, and my own very hard work and belief in my own
worthwhileness and potential, I was able to learn that it isn't the gifts you
get that count, but the gifts you can offer yourself and others. Jack's supervision
is a form of alchemy.
So, from my Ph.D studies I launched myself with much
greater confidence and sense of mission into my role as teacher and researcher
in Oldfield School. I felt confident about my own boundaries - about what was
mine and what wasn't. Again, it's not linear this kind of process.
2000, Early May. I'm sitting in Oldfield, in
the Great Hall, watching the girls as they write in an English Literature
examination, heads bent, some biting the tips of their pens in concentration, others
looking up and catching my eye at times and smiling, and I feel this enormous
rush of love for them. It's comfortable. It's idyllic for those moments. The
calm, the studious hush, the beauty of all the girls, a sense of loving
protection.
2000 Late May: I'm sitting on a train returning from
my father's funeral, and suddenly, I know that I have to do something more
challenging. Take more responsibility because I can. These words express the
simplicity on the other side of complexity, but essentially this is exactly
what happened. One moment, destination Bath. The next moment, destination China
as a VSO volunteer.
No 'cause and effect' here, but a logic that was
growing (Laidlaw, 2004). If I had learnt what I had learnt then what I wanted
to do was logical. It was the right time for me to take more responsibility.
Because I could. Because my life was leading me there. Not to follow that
insight, would for me have been self-betrayal. To be true to myself meant
following through, not just knowing cognitively. It was, as I see it, a very
logical progression from what I learnt as a Ph.D. student with Jack. The values
of responsibility, with their associated values of love and a sense of awe
about the human condition (Laidlaw, 1996) and about living as a human being
amongst human beings, meant doing more consistently in line with my values as
they were developing.
In my Ph.D. I set up the idea of living and
developmental standards of judgement - or values - and one of the key values I
work with is responsibility and all that entails, and therefore I 'had to' go
to China. The last sentence, which makes perfect sense for me, shows, however,
the innate problem of linking cause and effect in human agency. For me it was
inevitable. It was unstoppable. I can trace that conclusion back to the
insights developing through my Ph.D. and my increasing awareness. It galvanised
me and harnessed my most life-affirming energies. But Jack wasn't responsible
for any of it, although his influence in terms of using AR to empower others,
was absolutely part and parcel of the ways in which he influenced me. And now,
I was ready to take my understanding and form of life elsewhere and develop something
indigenous with others, collaboratively and appropriately in a culturally new
setting.
I've spent five and half years in China. Most of them
were happy times. I hated the first term (see Laidlaw, 2004b) and I didn't
enjoy my secondment to Beijing (no one's fault including mine. I just didn't
like the work-style or the city-life).
2001-2006: Creating and holding open a space:
In building up an AR centre in Guyuan, through working
closely with my wonderful dean, Dean Tian Fengjun and other colleagues, over
five years from 2001-2006 we have established a space. This space isn't
radically different in terms of the context it occupies in the hegemonic
dynamics of politics and truth from the one the AR group here in Bath occupies
within the university and academic world (Li and Laidlaw, 2006; Whitehead,
1993). Both spaces have been created and were possible because they offered
something that could help to empower individuals and groups in their
educational development. Both of the dominant cultures seemed uneasy with
academic innovation and status (Whitehead, 1993; Tian and Laidlaw, 2006). Both
spaces have been surrounded by dominant spaces with axes to grind, which can
become opposed to the kinds of freedom and nurturing capacities required by
such innovations we are supporting. At the University of Bath, Jack has held
open a space to encourage new ways of educational thinking, acting, evaluating,
theorising, improving practice and so on. At Ningxia Teachers University we are
holding open a space to encourage critical thinking, self-evaluation and
enquiry learning. Our reputation in the northwest of China is steadily growing
and achieving momentum.
The understanding of the importance of holding open a
space is something I learnt with Jack as a student, and which Dean Tian is
politically very astute about. I don't claim here that Jack's space is like my
space, or our space, but that the processes of enquiry themselves seem to
require holding open a space for learning and development. That's what I
learnt. Enquiry from the heart and the soul as well as the mind requires a
space in which all those aspects can flower and integrate. I think my Ph.D.
really helped me to see the value and influences of context on knowledge,
practice and theorising. I am NOT saying that the space in Ningxia Teachers
University is an extension of Bath University's AR space, just as I am not
saying that my Ph.D. content, conclusions and so on, belong to anyone but
myself. But there are links of influence between NTU's AR space and Bath
University's. So that was from 2001-2006.
This brings me to 2007. My contract with VSO expired
at the end of January. In leaving the organisation I cannot say that the
decision was wholly conscious, but I was struck as I was when I first 'decided'
to go to China in 2000, with the conviction that there was a further turn on
the road of responsibility, which I could take by going back and working with
my colleagues to develop the research-base of the new University in Guyuan.
It's something of a rationalisation to say that I am going back to help
diversify what Guyuan does from what Jack does, but there's something of that
in my decision. In 2003 I hit upon the idea of working towards AR with Chinese
characteristics. It was a joke at first, in the sense that I had often remarked
that China has this wonderful capacity to take an idea from anywhere and render
it Chinese somehow. Why not with AR? And then again, seriously, why not with
AR? Couldn't
this process of creating AR with Chinese characteristics itself be a conduit
for empowerment, autonomy, responsibility and intact, healthy boundaries but in
a Chinese way in a way that benefited Chinese people in their lives? If, as I
and my colleagues freely discuss, that AR helps them to liberate themselves in
the name of education, how much more potent might an AR with Chinese
characteristics be? Perhaps a space for people to grow in their own best
images, as I had had the chance to do? Which increasingly seems to me a human
right. A way for Chinese creativity and originality to seed itself, perhaps? As
the idea caught hold in the English department, our work became more focused
and we started to publish more (Li, 2005; Ma, 2005; Gong, 2005, Tian and
Laidlaw, 2006; Liu Xia, 2006).
As a VSO volunteer I was committed to sustainable
development and saw myself as needing to get out soon in order to leave my
colleagues to it. To develop the kind of autonomy that I had seen for myself in
my own educational development was so crucial to ownership and responsibility.
Then Jean and Jack visited each for the second time in 2006 and Jean asked
about us convening a Ph.D. programme? The boundaries changed from that moment.
I saw myself as having a new job, a new horizon, a new role to play. We are
still hoping this may happen, but the funding is proving elusive. And such was
the timing that returning or not, I was now obligated to go to Beijing for six
months to work in the VSO office on AR enquiries and monitoring and evaluation.
(Luo, 2007).
So why am I returning to Guyuan now if, as is quite
possible, we won't have an immediate Ph.D. programme? Because now I won't be
going back as a volunteer but as an independent. This means I give up certain
rights and become bound by the contract laws of China. I have to trust my
organisation more. It will be more difficult for me to bail out. Why am I doing
this? This isn't my responsibility, is it? I don't know, but it's logical - to
me. In going back as one of them (although that isn't ever quite going to be
the case, given my high foreigner's status and British passport, I understand
that) I am giving myself to this AR with Chinese characteristics set of values,
because I feel it's right. I feel it's appropriate. I feel it's my destiny.
When I'm planning this or working on it, or contacting my colleagues and
friends about it and my life in Guyuan from next month, I feel elated. I feel
properly used! I feel this is what I am made to do. The crucible of my
educational development enabled me to find a conscious voice through Jack's
supervision and my own endeavours in overcoming the pain of truth and
realisation about my responsibilities in the world.
My timetabled responsibilities are manifold from March
onwards. I will be taking some graduate classes in methodology, but will spend
most of my time with individuals and groups in the development of their own AR
with Chinese characteristics as well as helping others to develop the skills
required to facilitate AR. We are a new university now, at the bottom of the
Chinese universities' ladder, with a mission statement to be a beacon of light
and of learning to the northwest of China as well as fulfilling our academic
duties to the students themselves. I want to be more involved in the lives of
the people (hence my self-taught reading of Chinese to
Agatha-Christie-in-translation level!) I will hope to be supervising academic
processes of AR with Chinese characteristics, knowing that I don't want to
follow my own teachers or teacher-researchers, but help others to become the
best they can be.
I have spent a lot of my time in the last seventeen
years working on the development of my Living Educational Theory (LET). This
has manifested itself in the 'China' years as the promotion of LET there as
well. In seeking to refine my ability to supervise LET with colleagues and
students (which will become a part of my own educational development and
theorising as well of course) I seek to further the kind of values of
developing appropriate responsibilities and engendering the kinds of spaces and
contexts that lend themselves to enquiry, learning, evaluation, and praxis, a
melding of practice and theory. I do not seek to create a Bath satellite, but
to work with others on programmes of educational development that serve their
local, national and international needs. I believe this work to be a small
fragment of a huge mosaic, to which we add a glint of gold each time we work
out how to improve our practice, 'how to make the possible probable'
(Whitehead, 2003).
As I look at the landscape of my life now I realise
that my journey is punctuated by sunshine in the day and lamplight at night. I
have been lucky. I have come to a place inside and outside that I value. This
constitutes for me my own educational development. My ability to take it
forward to others more consistently and more devotedly is a mark, I believe, of
my taking of responsibility.
I don't want to overstate this, but it's important
it's not misunderstood. It is not because of Jack that I do what I do, or for Jack either, but it is with him to an extent, because he
continues to hold open that space at Bath for me (as he does for so many others)
as I and others do for him and Jean, for example, at Guyuan. In working on this
brief paper, I sent a draft to Jack for his comments as I know he will always
be interested in the work I am doing. This quality of interest in the other is
another of Jack's supervisory talents. He wrote this in response on 18th
February:
I was thinking why do I think that Maggie Farrens
research is world leading and mine is definitely internationally recognised and
a case could be made that it is internationally excellent in relation to the
generation and testing of living educational theories. The difference is that
Maggie has systemically integrated the processes of supporting the creation of
living educational theories within her workplace. I think Jackie did this in
developing a culture of inquiry and you are doing this at CECEARFLT and through
your intentions to support the development of a masters programme and doctoral
research at Ninxgia teachers university. I think you have a passion to support
individuals in the expression of their originality in creating their own living
educational theories and express a scholarly passion in enabling the
practitioner-researchers you work with to develop their understandings about
how to enhance the validity and rigour of their research accounts. I also see
you stressing the importance of recognising, in the living theories, the
significance of the enquiry for the individual, for others, for China and for
the world.
They may be Jack's words, but
he has authentically expressed my own sense of what it is I am doing and intend
to do. In understanding the other, in taking an interest, in nurturing,
sometimes guiding and always listening to the other, I hope to continue the
kinds of professional relationships with my colleagues of the kind I myself
first experienced as liberation and empowerment as a Ph.D. student with Jack. In returning to Guyuan I have
a sense of strength and of excitement, mission and of obligation. In fact,
those four elements seem all the same to me these days. I hope in the future to
continue sharing ideas and together with colleagues and students in developing
an educational basis in the new university. Dean Tian recently talked to me
(January 2007) about possibilities for international collaboration, that he sees
as key in this process, and I paraphrase his comments from notes I took
afterwards:
When we have scholars visiting us we see the world
better. We gain perspective. We can learn from them and they can help us to
build a strong foundation. We are proud to be associated with Professor Jean
McNiff and Dr. Jack Whitehead and Professor Moira Laidlaw. These experts have
vastly helped us to increase our understanding about education and development.
Sustainable development is important in our project. We want to build an
excellent foundation here at NTU. We want to improve the quality of education.
We believe there is a link between this and building a better society. We
welcome our international friends to help us in this great task.
I am proud to be working with my dear colleagues again
- Dean Tian, Li Peidong, Liu Xia and others at the university, and colleagues
such as Ma Yangui and Mr. Gao at the Hui Middle School in Haiyuan. I count
myself the lucky one! Guyuan, here I comeÉ
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[1] This puts me strongly in mind of Jean McNiff's recent posting to the BERA e-list about ownership of her own LET. When we have gone through the process of this kind of supervision, one of the key points is this growing awareness of our own individual ownership that evolves from our own creativity and originality, which cannot causally be claimed by anyone else, including Jack.