freedom, playfulness and education

Thought for the day...

2011-09-05T02:25:00.003-04:00

This is the moment when we must make the necessary pedagogical and institutional adjustments to a pervasively connected culture. That survey from last year found that even at Kindergarten level, two-thirds of parents were willing to buy a mobile for their children – if schools integrated the device into their pedagogy. But the survey also pointed to opposition within the schools themselves...Hyperconnected Education

There are many freedoms here but we have to free ourselves as practitioners first...

Falling and Throwness

2007-03-11T15:30:00.000-04:00

From Being and Time:

Idle talk, curiosity and ambiguity characterize the way in which, in an everyday manner, Dasein is its 'there' - the disclosedness of Being-in-the-world. As definite characteristics, these are not present-at-hand in Dasein, but help make up its Being. In these, and in the way they are interconnected in their being, there is revealed a basic kind of Being which belongs to everydayness; we call this the "falling" of Dasein. (p. 219)

Idle talk and ambiguity, having seen everything, develop the suposition that Dasein's disclosedness. which is so available and so prevalent, can guarantee to Dasein that all possibilities of its Being will be secure, genuine and full. Through the self certainty and decidedness of the "they", it gets spread abroad increasingly that there is no need of authentic understanding or the state-of-mind that goes with it. The supposition of the "they" that one is for which everything is 'in the best of order' and all doors are open. Falling Being-in-the-world, which tempts itself, is at the same time tranquillizing.
However, this tranquillity in inauthentic Being does not seduce one into stagnation and inactivity, but drives one into uninhibited 'hustle'. Being-fallen into the 'world' does not now somehow come to rest. (p. 222)

The tempting tranquillization aggravates the falling. Versatile curiosity and restlessly "knowing it all" masquerade as a universal understanding of Dasein. (p. 222)

Falling Being-in-the-world is not only tempting and tranquillizing it is at the same time alienating. (p. 222)

The alienation of falling - at once tempting and tranquillizing - leads by its own movement, to Dasein's getting entangled in itself. (p. 223)

Is this of playing and being played?

Dasein plunges out of itself into itself, into the groundlessness and nullity of inauthentic everydayness. But this plunge remains hidden from Dasein by the way things have been publically interpreted, so much so, indeed, that it gets interpreted as a way of 'ascending' and 'living concretely'. (p. 223)

Is this a description of Dasein subsumed by 'the game'?

Dasein's facticity is such that as long as it is what it is, Dasein remains in the throw, and is sucked into the turbulence of the "they's" inauthenticity. Throwness, in which facticity lets itself be seen phenomenally, belongs to Dasein, for which, in its Being, that very Being is an issue. Dasein exists factically. (p. 223)

Dasein can fall only because Being-in-the-world understandingly with a state-of-mind is an issue for it. On the other hand, authentic existence is not something which floats above the falling everdayness; existentially, it is only a modified way in which such everydayness is seized upon. (p. 224)

Might playfulness as a state-of-mind allow Dasein the freedom to travel the roads between the authentic and inauthentic?

This freedom might be an understanding act of travelling. I am tempted to say is not a resistance to falling and that it may be falling with authenticity. Embracing the authentic and inauthentic, what is Dasein's own, what is shared and what is other. Is there a possibility that in this travel itself a transcendence of what is authentic and inauthentic may occur?

Falling reveals an essential ontological structure of Dasein itself. Far from determining its nocturnal side, it constitutes all Dasein's days in their everydayness. (p. 224)

Authentic learning (I use this phrase with trepidation) seems to require immersion in the everyday with the awareness of that leads to deeper understanding. Playfulness may be able to provide a state-of-mind that allows for a freedom as understanding of moving between (or transcending?) the authentic and inauthentic ways of Being. What else might be required? Can playfulness as a state-of-mind be further explored so it has as its understanding authentic learning as well as freedom? Or could a further state-of-mind, with its own system of understanding, disclosedness and modes of discourse etc, fill this void intertwined with playfulness? If so, would this state-of-mind always be the same or differ under changing circumstances? Or have I just go too far?

And a quote to make me hold my horses:

The being of that disclosedness is constituted by states-of-mind, understanding, and discourse. Its everyday kind of Being is characterized by idle talk, curiosity, and ambiguity. These show us the movement of falling, with temptation, tranquillizing, alienation, and entanglement as its essintial characteristics.
But with this analysis, the whole existential constitution of Dasein has been laid bare inits principal features, and we have obtained the phenomenal ground for a 'comprehensive' Interpretation of Dasein's Being as care. (p. 224)

Meaning and intelligibility

2007-03-11T14:31:00.000-04:00

Cheers enowning for pointing out something I had missed in Being and Time.

Idle talk, curiosity and ambiguity.

2007-03-04T17:21:00.000-05:00

From Being and Time:

...when Dasein maintains itself in idle talk, it is - as Being-in-the-world - cut off from its promary and primordially genuine relationships-of-Being towards the world, towards its very being-in. p. (214)

The basic state of sight shows itself in a particular tendency-of-Being which belongs to everydayness - the tendency towards 'seeing'. We designate this tendency by the term "curiosity", which characteristically is not confined to seeing, but expresses a tendency towards a peculiar way of letting the world be encountered by us in perception. (p. 214)

[Aristotle] The care for seeing is essential to man's being. (p. 215)

What is to be said about this tendency just to perceive? Which existential state of Dasein will become intelligible in the phenomenon of curiosity? Being in the world is proximally absorbed in the world of concern. This concern is guided by circumspection, which discovers the ready-to-hand and preserves it as thus discovered. (p. 216)

When curiosity has become free, however, it concerns itself with seeing, not in order to understand what is seen (that is, to come into a Being towards it) but in order to see. (p. 216)

Curiosity is everywhere and nowhere. This mode of Being-in-the-world reveals a new kind of Being of everyday Dasein - a kind in which Dasein is constantly uprooting itself. Idle talk controls even the ways in which one may be curious. It says what one "must" have read and seen. In being everywhere and nowhere, curiosity is delivered over to idle talk. These two everyday modes-of-being for discourse and sight are not just present-at-hand side by side in their tendency to uproot, but either of these ways-to-be drags the other one with it. (p. 217)

This brings to mind some staffroom conversations I have had!

When, in our everyday Being-with-one-another, we encounter the sort of thing which is accessible to to everyone, and about which anyone can say anything, it soon becomes impossible to decide what is disclosed in a genuine understanding, and what is not. This ambiguity extends not only to the world, but just as much to Being-with-one-another as such, and even to Dasein's Being towards itself. (p. 217)

Thus Dasein's understanding in the "they" is constantly going wrong in its projects, as regards the genuine possibilities of Being. Dasein is always ambiguously 'there' - that is to say, in that public disclosedness of Being-with-one-another where the loudest idle talk and the most ingenious curiosity keep 'things moving', where, in an everyday manner, everything (and at the bottom nothing) is happening. (pp. 218-9)

Being-with-one-another in the "they" is by no means an indifferent side-by-side-ness in which everything has been settled, but rather an intent, ambiguous watching of one another, a secret and reciprocal listening-in. Under the mask of "for-one-another", an "against-one-another" is in play.
In this connection, we must notice that ambiguity does not first arise from aiming explicitly at disguise or distortion, and that it is not something which the individual Dasein first conjures up. (p. 219)

Could authentic learning be thought of as a mode of discourse which avoids idle talk, curiosity and ambiguity as framed by Heidegger? This may be direction for the nuts and bolts of my inquiry!

Being there and discourse

2007-03-04T15:30:00.000-05:00

More from Heidegger: The fundamental existentialia which constitute the

Being of the "there", the disclosedness of Being-in-the-world, are states-of-mind and understanding. In understanding, there lurks the possibility of interpretation - that is, of appropriating what is understood. In so far as a state-of-mind is equiprimordial with an act of understanding, it maintains itself in a certain understanding. (p. 203)

Does learning - when described with assertion and interpretation - feed directly back into freedom as an understanding which discloses playfulness? Possibly - a sense of freedom may engender learning and learning may enhance the understanding that is freedom. This is interesting cold learning be associated with freedom in addition to other understandings?

In clarifying the third signification of assertion as communication (speaking forth), we were led to the concepts of "saying" and "speaking", to which we had purposely given no attention up to that point. The fact that language now becomes our theme for the first time will indicate that this phenomenon has its roots in the existential constitution of Dasein's disclosedness. The existential-ontological foundation of language is discourse or talk. This phenomenon is one of which we have been making constant use already in our foregoing Interpretation of state-of-mind, understanding, interpretation, and assertion... (p. 203)

Discourse is existentially equiprimordial with state-of-mind and understanding. The intelligibility of something has always been articulated, even before there is any appropriative interpretation of it. Discourse is the Articulation of intelligibility. Therefore it underlies both interpretation and assertion. (pp. 203-4)

The way in which discourse gets expressed is language. (p. 204)

I would prefer not to limit discourse to language. Discourse with oneself and others seems to me to have many other forms - of which language is an important, shared and obvious one. I would like to think that intelligibility can be articulated in many ways.

Discoursing or talking is the way in which we articulate 'significantly' the intelligibility of being-in-the-world. Being-with belongs to Being-in-the-world, which in every case maintains itself in some definite way of concernful Being-with-one-another. (p. 204)

'Communication' in which one makes assertions - giving information, for instance - is a special case of that communication which is grasped in principle existentially. In the more general kind of communication, the Articulation of Being with one another understandingly is constituted. Through it a co-state-of-mind gets 'shared', and so does the understanding Being-with. Communication is never anything like a conveying of experiences, such as opinions or wishes, from the interior of ones subject into the interior of another. Dasein-with is already essentially manifest in a co-state-of-mind and a co-understanding. In discourse Being-with becomes 'explicitly' shared; that is to say, it is already, but it is unshared as something that has not been taken hold of and appropriated. (p. 205)

In talking, Dasein expresses itself not because it has, in the first instance, been encapsulated as something 'internal' over against something outside, but because as Being-in-the-world it is already 'outside' when it understands. What is expressed is precisely this Being-outside - that is to say, the way one currently has a state-of-mind (mood), which we have shown to pertain to the full disclosedness of Being-in. Being-in and its state-of-mind are known in discourse and indicated in language by intonation, modulation, the tempo of talk, 'the way of speaking'. In 'poetical' discourse, the communication of the existential possibilities of one's state-of-mind can become an aim in itself, and this amounts to a disclosing of existence. (p. 205)

Ah, a sigh of relief. For me, at least, this seems to mean we do not have to limit our discourse to language, although we cannot deny its importance in Being-with. These quotes make me smile too - I am really interested in the co-state-of-mind, in particular in playfulness as a co-state-of-mind and the freedoms subsequently disclosed.

Keeping silent authentically is possible only in genuine discoursing. To be able to be kept silent, Dasein, must have something to say - that is, it must have at its disposal an authentic and rich disclosedness in itself. (p. 208)

Intriguing...

Our Interpretation of language has been designed merely to point out the ontological 'locus' of this phenomenon in Desein's state of Being... (p. 210)

Assertion and interpretation

2007-02-25T17:01:00.001-05:00

Assertion is not a free-floating kind of behaviour which in its own right, might be capable of disclosing entities in general in a primary way: on the contrary it always maintains itself on the basis of Being-in-the-world... ...any assertion requires a fore-having of whatever is disclosed; and this is what it points out by way of giving something a definite character... ...Thus any assertion requires fore-sight; in this the predicate which we assign and make stand out, gets loosened, so to speak, from its unexpressed inclusion in the entity itself. (p. 199)

When an assertion is made, some fore-conception is always implied; but it remains for the most part inconspicuous, because the language already hides in itself a developed way of conceiving. Like any interpretation whatever, assertion necessarily has fore-having, a fore-sight, and a fore-conception as its existential foundations. (p. 199)

...assertion cannot disown its ontological origin from an interpretation which understands. (p. 201)

Between the kind of interpretation which is still wholly wrapped up in the concernful understanding and the extreme opposite case of a theoretical assertion about something present-at-hand, there are many intermediate graduations: assertions about the happenings in the environment, accounts of the ready-to-hand, 'reports on the Situation', the recording and fixing of the 'facts of the case', the description of a state of affairs, the narration of something that has befallen. We cannot trace back these 'sentences' to theoretical statements without essentially perverting their meaning. Like the theoretical statements themselves, they have their 'source' in circumspective interpretation. (p. 201)

The λόγος gets experienced as something present-at-hand and Interpreted as such, while at the same time the entities which it points out have the meaning of presence-at-hand. This meaning of Being is left undifferentiated and uncontrasted with other possibilities of Being, so that Being in the sense of a formal Being-something becomes fused with it simultaneously, and we are able even to obtain a clear-cut division between these two realms. (p. 203)

I need to reflect and explore further assertion, interpretation and learning. Certainly what is being described here in reminiscent of learning. Reflecting on playfulness, freedom and learning; it will be interesting to see whether the tenuous associations so far explored can maintain and strengthen themselves as they unfold and enfold. Or will something new emerge?

Back to Being and Time - Assertion (Judgment)

2007-02-25T15:11:00.000-05:00

From a previous blog:

This process of interpretation and building meaning could be one way of starting to define learning.

The ability to move between possible interpretations and meanings is a freedom and requires playfulness. In this sense the understanding could be freedom - understanding and choosing possibilities as possibilities.

Learning can be assisted by the freedom to move between, subsume and synthesise interpretations and meanings.

On further reflection, it is hard to imagine learning without understanding and pursuing possibilities as possibilities that is freedom as I have started to define it.

Heidegger introduces us to a place for 'assertion' (judgment?):

All interpretation is grounded on understanding. That which has been articulated as such in interpretation and sketched out beforehand in the understanding in general as something articulable, is the meaning. In so far as assertion ('judgment') is grounded on understanding and presents us with a derivative form in which an interpretation has been carried out, it too 'has' a meaning. Yet this meaning cannot be defined as something which occurs 'in' a judgment along with judging itself. (p. 195)

In what follows, we give three significations to the term "assertion". These are drawn from the phenomenon which is thus designated, they are connected among themselves, and in their unity they encompass the full structure of assertion.

1. The primary signification of "assertion" is "pointing out". In this we adhere to the primordial meaning of... ...letting and entity be seen for itself. I the assertion 'The hammer is too heavy', what is discovered for sight is not a 'meaning', but an entity in the way that it is ready-to-hand'...

2. "Assertion" means no less than "predication". We 'assert' a 'predicate' of a 'subject', and the 'subject' is given a definite character by the 'predicate'. In this signification of "assertion", that which is put forward as assertion is not the predicate, but 'the hammer itself'... ...Every predication is what it is, only as a pointing-out. The second signification of "assertion" has its foundation in the first. Within this pointing-out, the elements which are Articulated in predication - the subject and predicate - arise. It is not by giving something a definite character that we first discover that which shows itself - the hammer - as such; but when we give it such a character, our seeing gets restricted to it in the first instance, so that by this explicit restriction of our view, that which is manifest may be explicitly manifest in its definite character. In giving something a definite character, we must, in the first instance, take a step back when confronted with that which is already manifest - the hammer is too heavy. In 'setting down the subject', we dim entities down to focus in 'that hammer there', so that by thus dimming the, down we let that which is manifest be seen in its own definite character as a character that can be determined. Setting down the subject, setting down the predicate, and setting down the two together, are thoroughly 'apophantical' in the strict sense of the word.

3. "Assertion" means "communication". As communication, it is directly related to "assertion" in the first and second significations. It is letting someone see with us what we have pointed out by way of giving it a definite character... ...That which is put forward in the is something which can be passed along in 'further retelling'. There is a widening of the range of that mutual sharing which sees. But at the same time, what has been pointed out may become veiled again in this further retelling, although even the kind of knowing which arises as hearsay (whether knowledge that something is the case or merely an acquaintance with something always has the entity itself in view and does not 'give assent' to some 'valid meaning' which has been passed around. Even hearsay in a Being-in-the-world, and a Being towards what it has heard. (pp. 196-8)

If we bring together the three significations of 'assertion' which we have analysed, and get a unitary view of the full phenomenon, then we may define "assertion" as "a pointing-out which gives something a definite character and which communicates". (p. 199)

A brief methodology...

2007-02-22T18:10:00.000-05:00

Freedom, playfulness and learning have deep significance for me personally. In order to inquire into these in a meaningful manner I will first have to consider my own relationship with them. It seems natural to consider these through narratives which can be interpreted in light of others exploration on playfulness and freedom. These narratives will be inspired by further interpretation of works by philosophers and researchers who have detailed their own perspectives on freedom, including Martin Heidegger (2002, 1982), John Dewey (1989), Maxine Greene (1988) and Rudolf Steiner (1964, 1894). Other texts to inform the narratives will come from stories from my own practice and personal histories.

This autoethnographic (Chase, 2006, p. 660) approach will aim to envisage frames-of-understanding which can be shared, reflected on and reshaped by others within my community of practice. These frames-of-understanding will have their own shared narratives and interpretations informing how they might be shared and utilised within a wider community. This process of framing, sharing, re-framing and sharing again is intended to provide direction and motive for my research. Distinctions between methodology and subject of the research will be interdependent. These interdependencies are worthwhile and necessary to consider themselves. For example, by reflecting on the four traditions that inform Valerie Bentz and Jeremy Shapiro’s Mindful Inquiry,

Phenomenology: a description and analysis of consciousness and experience

Hermeneutics: analysis and interpretation of texts in context

Critical Social Theory: analysis of domination and oppression with a view to changing it

Buddhism: spiritual practice that allows one to free oneself from suffering and illusion in several ways, e.g., becoming more aware (Bentz & Shapiro, 1998, p. 6),

the methodologies outlined so far have strong resonances with all of these traditions, as does the research itself. All participants will be following, but not limited to, aspects these traditions. Indeed the frames-of-understanding in themselves will in all probability owe some gratitude to them. The research will be guided, honed and sustained through its own logic of understanding.

And a further note:

From my research there should be some direction in enabling what Parker J. Palmer describes as ‘Good talk about good pedagogy’ (1998, p. 144). With appropriate playfulness, possibility should emerge from the communities closest to the practice – which by its nature and manifestation is problematic. The participants will be given a voice through reflection on and application of the metaphors of freedom and playfulness, with the specific ambition of assisting them with improving their practice. Through their voices, it is intended, that a sharable and accessible frame-of-understanding for transforming practice will be described, tested and refined.

How might freedom, playfulness and learning within practice be shared?

2007-02-22T17:45:00.000-05:00

Explorations of philosophical perspectives on freedom, playfulness and learning become more interesting and intriguing when considering how they may relate to practice. For anyone involved in educational practice there are many possibilities, of which only a few may be pursued. There are many ways that the choice to move between these possibilities may be limited, through intrinsic, perceived or extrinsic factors. Using the shared metaphors associated with playfulness and freedom could provide a catalyst for possibility. Some aspects of practice may mirror playfulness as a state-of-mind. For example Max van Manen (1999) examines some of what is intangible within practice – outlining practice as explanation stopper, practice as lived experience, (un)reflective practice and the complexity of practice. On (un)reflective practice he states:

…the theory of reflective practice seems to overestimate the possibility of introspective "reflection on action while acting" (van Manen 1994, 1995). Phenomenologically it is very difficult, if not impossible, for teachers to be immersed in interactive or dialogic activities with their students while simultaneously stepping back from the activity. (van Manen, 1999)

Supporting teachers while they explore and embody the complexity and variety of learning in practice provides the environment for this study. It also provides direction for inquiry. If it is impossible to be reflective when immersed within practice then where does that leave the practitioner? Do they feel free to:

enable students to learn – can practice have playfulness as its state-of-mind?
act or do they feel played within games of their own or others construction?
explore their own and shared possibility?

Back - updated working definitions for play etc

2006-12-17T19:29:00.000-05:00

I have made some progress going through the candidacy process. Some of which will emerge later. For now I have tinkered a bit with my original working definitions:

Play

Play has its own mode of being which we will call a game. This being exists only in the world and is not aware of its own being – it does not have Dasein character. It does however require participants with Dasein character to give the game importance and make it matter.

Players

The players are the participants in the game. In order for them to be players then they must take the game seriously. All players are played by the game and lost to the game while they are playing it. They are concerned only with being-in-the-world, with the they only as it exists within the world of the game. Their 'authentic being' is lost to them. The game can not be disclosed to the world without the players being predisposed to being players.

Playing

Playing is giving oneself to the game and the play - in as much as the game has to be taken seriously one is played by the game. It is essential to be part of the they and therefore it is unlikely for Dasein's authentic being to be disclosed. It is useful to note that this being lost in the they is neither inherently negative nor positive.

Being Playful (moving away from the direct influence of Gadamer)

Being playful allows one to be able to play with what is serious and the games that matter within one's Being-in-the-world. Being playful can make one feel as though one is outside the game or games, it also can transform what is serious into a game. In the constructing a new game, which may be more a complex or a simplified version of it constituents, the pitfalls of other games are created. This game is still part of Being-in-the-world. Being playful is Dasein's conscious construction, and thus is more likely to phenomenologically disclose aspects of 'authentic being'.

Playfulness

Playfulness as a mode of state-of-mind is of Dasein and cannot apprehend itself without losing authenticity. Playfulness envisions the possibilities of our 'authentic being' to be realised within Being-in-the-world, and the possibilities of Being-in-the-world to inform our 'authentic being'. If we accept this then it can be said that Playfulness is a conduit and phenomenologically is of 'authentic being'.

Paraphrasing Heidegger (1926, p180):

That which playfulness plays is that very entity which is played - Dasein.

Research Quest: Ethics and being

2006-11-15T09:18:00.000-05:00

In what ways will my inquiry take my values, and those of others, into account?

I am struggling for a way to articulate this, for me at the moment I see whirls that are both beautifully and frustratingly circular. These whirls are just glimpses of a philosophy of freedom, playfulness and learning.

My inquiry aims to free people to learn through playfulness. This playfulness is not a trivial one - it is a state-of-mind. This state-of-mind is with us all the time and can disclose freedom or freedoms absence depending on how caught you are up in your seriousness or your play. An important point here is that permission and judgement of freedom to learn comes from within each individual - in the context of my inquiry the aim would be to do this through playfulness. Being-in-the-inquiry means being valued and being valuing - inwardly and outwardly. Without this then the basis of the inquiry, its philosophy and phronesis, have to be questioned and regenerated or more to the point question and regenerate themselves.

In what ways will the inquiry take ethics into account?

Ethically there are real issues around messing with the stuff of being. Experimenting with a state-of-mind could be considered ethically fraught. However the inquiry is there not to free people to learn, but to allow people to be free to learn. They are the instruments that measure this freedom as well as its author. Permission to continue is not a tacit or fleeting - it is continual and reflective. The inquiry will have its own ethical journey - moving through and intertwining the shared ethics of those within it.

What is the place of myself and my "voice" in the inquiry?

My voice is where I start. Is there a choice here? My 'I' has to be explicit in order for me to transcend what is mine about freedom and playfulness and discover what is and can be shared. Throughout the enfolding of my inquiry what is and can be shared will become mine to a certain extent - well awareness of these at least. My 'voice' will respond to and guide the inquiry in order to allow other voices to be heard - participants, literature, the inquiry itself...

What are my ways of being mindful in research?

I will refer to mindful inquiry that I have taken quotes from before. We can refer to the four knowledge traditions that mindful inquiry is based on:

Phenomenology: a description and analysis of consciousness and experience
Hermeneutics: analysis and interpretation of texts in context
Critical Social Theory: analysis of domination and oppression with a view to changing it
Buddhism: spiritual practice that allows one to free oneself from suffering and illusion in several ways, e.g., becoming more aware (1998, p. 6)

From my previous post I think that my ways of being mindful align strongly with these four traditions. What may or not be so clear is that the inquiry is intended to enable participants within it to follow these four traditions themselves. Now that is an interesting line of inquiry...

What are my ways of being scholarly in research and writing?

I have already touched on ways I might be scholarly. In short my research and how it is communicated should be open to be schooled (I see fish here rather than classrooms) by literature, participants, itself and so on... My research and writing should have playfulness and freedom to be scholarly - as those should within it.

Questions: (c) Pugh, R & Yaxley, B. 2005

Bentz, V. M., & Shapiro, J. J. (1998). Mindful inquiry in social research. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage

What forms might my research take? (first try)

2006-11-12T09:27:00.000-05:00

As I have been reading over the past couple of weeks I have been reflecting on what shape my study may take. I feel that it has to be open to many paths - but there still needs to be some structure or form. One way to look at this is by revisiting the purposes of my research.

For me freedom and playfulness, as perspective and practice, has been transforming professionally and personally, with colleagues, students, friends and family. Reflection on the freedom, playfulness and being has is empowering for my transformations. There is commonality and otherness about this sense of transformation that emerges when in dialogue with others about freedom, playfulness and being. Transformation occurs within a person, group, community etcetera, not something that can be applied from the outside. It appears to me that the natures of freedom, playfulness and transformation require that all three are explicit aspects of the research. That is the inquiry would not attempt to distance itself from the participants. The intention would be for participants to be able to transform themselves and participate in the transformation of others. Actually, it is probably enough for them to be able to identify that which is of transformation for themselves and others. How might I achieve this?

As an initial scaffolding for my thoughts about the process my research may take I will look at a generic structure, in the form of phases, proposed by Denzin & Lincoln (Table 1.1, p. 23, 2005).

Phase 1: The researcher as Multicultural Subject

Revisiting an exploration of my own traditions I feel that I need to further explore freedom and playfulness deeply, from a personal point of view and as a member of many communities. This includes exploring the traditions I embody from my family as well as those gained through research and dialogue with others.

The generation of a sharable construct of freedom and playfulness will be hampered, and possibly subverted, without a deep understanding of who I am and how I am evolving in relation to these ways of being.

Freedom, play, playfulness etcetera have lively, circuitous and interwoven histories. Bringing some of these together in new ways to suit my purposes is the parallel first step with situating myself and my shared histories. My guess is that throughout my research these two aspects will take on a life of their own - there will have to be some resolution before continuing however.

Ethically, if I am attempting to engender a transformation process with freedom and playfulness it would be remiss for me not to explore as many perspectives on my own and others understanding before unleashing it on the world. The aim would be to ensure that the inquiry was at least illuminating, if not a step towards transformation, for all participants.

Phase 2: Theoretical Paradigms and Perspectives

I have already discussed that out of the broad paradigms described, my research largely appears to fall into the constructivist paradigm. With a relativism, co-creation and transferability central to the 'products' of the inquiry.

When situating myself and participating in my inquiry then the paradigms associated with critical theory may provide relief and substance for all participants. When we are talking about being 'freer' to learn - having greater freedom... we have to question what limits or bestows this freedom etcetera. Feminist theory and its focus on emancipation may be informative here - emancipation through transformative inquiry?

Phase 3: Research Strategies

I have outlined above the start of my research - situating myself, in relation to freedom and playfulness as I evolve a philosophy of freedom and playfulness. I have already started evolving a philosophy of freedom and playfulness, reflecting on my personal lived experience as I proceed. There is an obvious, albeit unpredictable, path for this synthesising as I read Heidegger, Gadamer, Greene, Dewey, Steiner and so on. In situating myself I intend to record and interweave narratives from my family - an autoethnographic process. Once this has some sense of resolution - I would hope to have a sharable and accessible model, for want of a better word, for freedom and playfulness which I could use to enter dialogue with others.

These others would be people from my past, present and future who have some experience of transformation. The focus would be on inquiring into how our shared understanding of freedom and playfulness has a place in their experience of transformation and how to move to the next step of providing an environment that engenders freedom to learn and transform. This may take the form of an action research amongst a group of peers at the time.

The model cocreated could be introduced utilising critical ethnography with critical action research - taking the emancipatory and ethical lead from strategies such as feminist communitarianism. The inquiry may be informed though mindful inquiry and other global perspectives throughout.

I will aim towards forming the idiosyncratic, emergent and cohesive set strategies throughout the inquiry.

Phase 4: Methods of Collection and Analysis

In the same way the strategies will be emerging the methods of collection will adapt to suit the life of the inquiry. There will be interviews, observations, artifacts, autoethnography, textual analysis and more. It is intended that the methods of collection and analysis will be largely determined by the participants - including myself.

Phase 5: The Art, Practices, and Politics of Interpretation and Evaluation

Interpretation and evaluation will also be emergent during the inquiry - very difficult for me to imagine at this stage.

So there is a start - I need to discuss, read and reflect before the forms really take shape...

Denzin, N.K. & Lincoln, Y.S. (Ed) (2005) The SAGE handbook of qualitative research 3rd Edition, Sage Publications, California, USA.

Narrative inquiry: multiple lenses, approaches, voices (paper)

2006-11-09T08:47:00.000-05:00

Notes from the Handbook of Qualitative Research

Contemporary narrative inquiry

I begin by outlining the a set of five analytic lenses through which contemporary researchers approach empirical material.(p. 656)

Analytic lenses

First, narrative researchers treat narrative - whether oral or written - as a distinct form of discourse. Narrative is a retrospective meaning making - the shaping or ordering of past experience. Narrative is a way of understanding one's own and other' actions, of organizing events and objects into meaningful whole, and of connecting and seeing the consequences of actions and events over time. (p. 656)

Second, narrative researchers view narratives as verbal action - doing or accomplishing something. Among other things, narrators explain, entertain, inform, defend, complain, and confirm or challenge the status quo. Whatever the particular action, when someone tells a story, he or she shapes, constructs, and performs the self, experience, and reality. When researchers treat narration as actively creative in this way, they emphasize the narrator's voice. (p. 567)

Third, narrative researchers view stories as both enabled and contained by a range of social resources and circumstances. These include the possibilities for self and reality construction that are intelligible within the narrator's community, local setting, organizational and social memberships, and cultural and historical location. While acknowledging that every instance of narrative is particular, researchers use this lens to attend to similarities and differences across narratives. (p. 657)

Fourth, narrative researchers as socially situate interactive performances - as produced in this particular setting, for this particular audience, for these particular purposes. A story told to an interviewer in a quiet relaxed setting will likely differ from the "same" story told to a reporter for a television news show, to a private journal that the writer assumes will never be read, to a roomful of people who have had similar experiences, to a social service counsellor, or to the same interviewer at a different time... ...a narrative is a joint production of narrator and listener, whether the narrative arises in naturally occurring talk, an interview, or a fieldwork setting. (p. 657)

Fifth, narrative researchers, like many other contemporary qualitative researchers, view themselves as narrators as they develop interpretations and find ways in which to present or publish their ideas about the narratives they studied... ...This means the four lenses just described make as much sense when applied to the to the researcher as they do when applied to the researched... ...narrative researchers are likely to use the first person when presenting their work, thereby emphasizing their own narrative action.(p. 657)

Diverse approaches

Without claiming to be comprehensive or exhaustive in my categories, I briefly outline five major approaches in contemporary narrative inquiry. (p. 658)

Some psychologists have developed an approach that focuses on the relationship between individuals' life stories and and the quality of their lives, especially psychosocial development. In addition to gathering extensive life stories, these researchers sometimes use common psychological tests. (p. 658)

A second approach has been developed by sociologists who highlight the "identity work" that people engage in as they construct selves within specific institutional, organizational, discursive, and local cultural contexts. Unlike the psychologists just described, who conceptualize the life story as distinguishable from the - yet having an impact on - the life, these researchers often treat narratives as lived experience. Thus they are as interested in the hows of story telling as they are in the whats of storytelling - in the narrative practices by which storytellers make use of available resources to construct recognizable selves. (p. 658)

The third approach is also sociological. Here, narrative researchers share the interest in the hows and whats of storytelling, but base their inquiry on extensive interviews about specific aspects of people's lives rather than on conversations in specific organizational contexts. These researchers are interested in how people communicate meaning through a range of linguistic practices, how their stories are embedded in the interaction between researcher and narrator, how they make sense of personal experience in relation to culturally and historic specific discourses, how they draw on, resist, and/or transform those discourses as they narrate their selves, experiences, and realities. (p. 659)

Anthropologists have led the way to a fourth approach to narrative inquiry. Some call this approach to narrative ethnography, which is transformation of both ethnographic and life history methods. Like traditional ethnography, this approach involves long-term improvement in a culture or community; like life history, it focuses heavily on one individual or on a small number of individuals. What makes the narrative ethnography distinct is that both the researcher and the researched "are presented together within a single multivocal text focused on the character and process of human encounter" (Tedlock, 1992, p. xiii) (Chase, 2005, p. 659)

A fifth approach t narrative inquiry is found in autoethnography, where researchers also turn the analytic lens on themselves and their interactions with others, but here researchers write, interpret, and/or perform their own narratives about culturally significant experiences. (p. 660)

Chase, S.E. (2005) Narrative inquiry: multiple lenses, approaches, voices. In Denzin, N.K. & Lincoln, Y.S. (Ed) The SAGE handbook of qualitative research 3rd Edition, Sage Publications, California, USA.

Tedlock, B. (1992) The beautiful and the dangerous: encounters with he Zuni Indians. New Press, New York.

Participatory action research: communicative action and the public sphere (paper)

2006-11-07T15:41:00.000-05:00

Notes from the Handbook of Qualitative Research

Participatory research

Three particular are often used to distinguish participatory research from conventional research: shared ownership of research projects, community-based analysis of social problems, and an orientation toward community action. (p. 560)

Critical action research

Critical action research expresses a commitment to bring together broad social analysis - the self-reflexive collective self-study of practice, the way in which language is used, organization and power in a local situation, and action to improve things. (p. 560)

Classroom action research

Classroom action research typically involves the use of inquiry and data collection by teachers (often with the help from academics) with a view to teachers making judgments about how to improve their own practices... ...Primacy is given to teachers' self-understandings and judgements. The emphasis is "practical," that is, on the interpretations that the teachers and students are making and acting on in the situation. (p. 561)

Action learning

The fundamental idea of action learning is to bring people together to learn from each other's experiences. There is emphasis on studying one's own situation, clarifying what the organization is trying to achieve, working to remove obstacles. Key aspirations are organizational efficacy and efficiency, although advocates of action learning affirm the moral purpose and content of their own work and of the managers they seek to engage in the process. (p. 561)

Action science

Action science emphases the study of practice in organizational settings as a source of new understandings and improved practice. The field of action science systematically builds the relationship between academic organizational psychology and practical problems as the are experienced in organizations. It identifies two aspects of professional knowledge: (a) the formal knowledge that all competent members of the profession are thought to share and into which professionals are inducted into the group and (b) the professional knowledge of interpretation and enactment. A distinction is also made between the professional's "espoused theory" and "theories in use," and "gaps" between these are used as points of change. (p. 561)

Critical participatory action research

Although the process of participatory action research is only poorly described in terms of a mechanical sequence of steps, it is generally thought to involve a spiral of self-reflective cycles of the following:
Planning a change
Acting and observing the process and consequences
Reflecting on these processes and consequences
Replanning
Acting and observing again
Reflecting again, and so on...
...In reality, the process might not be as neat as this spiral of self-contained cycles of planning suggests... ...the process is likely to be more fluid, open, and responsive. (p. 563)

...participatory action research has seven other key features that are at least as important as the self-reflective spiral.
Participatory action research is a social process. Participatory action research deliberately explores the relationship between the realms of the individual and the social...
Participatory action research is participatory. Participatory action research engages people in examining their knowledge (understandings, skills, and values) and interpretive categories (the ways in which they interpret themselves and their action in the social and material world)...
Participatory action research is practical and collaborative. Participatory action research engages people in examining the social practices that link them with others in social interaction...
Participatory action research is emancipatory. Participatory action research aims to help people recover, release themselves from, the constraints of irrational, unproductive, unjust, and unsatisfying social structures that limit their self-development and self determination...
Participatory social research is critical. Participatory action research aims to help people recover, and release themselves from, the constraints embedded in the social media through which they interact - their language (discourses), their modes of work, and the social relationships of power (in which the experience affiliation and difference, inclusion and exclusion - relationships in which, grammatically speaking, they interact with others in the third, second, or first person...
Participatory action research is reflexive (e.g., recursive, dialectical). Participatory action research aims to help people to investigate reality in order to change it... ...it is a deliberative through which people aim to transform their practices through a spiral of cycles of critical and self-critical action and reflection...
Participatory action research aims to transform both theory and practice. Participatory action research does not regard either theory or practice as preeminent in the relationship between theory and practice; rather it aims to articulate and develop each in relation to the other through critical reasoning about both theory and practice. (pp. 566-8)

Kemmis, S. and McTaggart, R. (2005) Participatory action research: communicative action and the public sphere. In Denzin, N.K. & Lincoln, Y.S. (Ed) The SAGE handbook of qualitative research 3rd Edition, Sage Publications, California, USA.

Grounded theory in the 21st Century: applications for advancing social justice studies (paper)

2006-11-07T13:49:00.000-05:00

Notes from the Handbook of Qualitative Research

Constructivist Grounded Theory

A constructivist approach emphasizes the studied phenomenon rather than the
methods of studying it. Constructivist gorunded theorists take a reflexive
stance on modes of knowing and representing studied life. That means giving close attention to empirical realities and our collected renderings of them - and locating oneself in these realities. It does not assume that impartial observers enter the research scene without an interpretive frames, biographies, and interests as well as the research context, their relationships with research participants, concrete field experiences, and modes of generating and recording empirical materials. No qualitative method rests on pure induction - the questions we ask of the empirical world frame what we know of it. In short, we share in constructing what we deifne as data. Similarly, our conceptual categories arise through our interpretations of data rather than emanating from them or from our methodological practices. (pp. 509-10)

Grounded theory - has a past

Grounded studies emerge from wrestling with data, making comparisons, developing categories, engaging in theoretical sampling, and integrating an analysis. But how weconduct all these activities does not occur in a social vacuum. Rather, the entire research process is interactive; in this sense, we bring past interactions and current interests into our research, and we interact with our empirical materials and emerging ideas as well as, perhaps, granting agencies, institutional review boards, and community agencies and grous, along with research participants and colleagues. Neither data nor ideas are mere objects that we passively observe and compile. (p. 510)

Rather than abandoning the traditional positivist quest for empirical detail, I argue that we advance it - without the cloak of neutrality and passivity enshrouding mid-century positivism. Gathering rich empirical materials is the first step. Recording these data systematically prompts us to pursue leads that we might otherwise ignore or not realize. Through making systematic recordings, we also gain comparitative materials to pinpoint contextual conditions and to explore links between levels of analysis. By seeking empirical answers to emerging theoretical questions, we learn about the worlds we enter and can increase the cogency of our subsequent analyses. Hence, data need to be informed by our theroetical sesitivity. Data alone are insuffiicent; they must be telling and must answer theoretical questions. (p. 511)

Charmaz, K. (2005) Grounded theory in the 21st century: Applications for advancing social justice issues. In Denzin, N.K. & Lincoln, Y.S. (Ed) The SAGE handbook of qualitative research 3rd Edition, Sage Publications, California, USA.

Mindful Inquiry: A Learner-Centered Approach to Qualitative Research (paper)

2006-11-06T14:33:00.000-05:00

With thanks to Adair Linn Nagata

Mindful inquiry combines the Buddhist concept of mindfulness with phenomenology, critical theory, and hermeneutics in a process that puts the inquirer in the center(Bentz & Shapiro, 1998, p. 171). Mindful Inquiry helped me develop both reflexivity and voice and resulted in personal transformation especially valuable in researching intercultural interactions.

Mindful Inquiry (MI)

MI is based on 13 philosophical assumptions that are listed here.
Awareness of self and reality and their interaction is a positive value in itself and should be present in research processes.

Tolerating and integrating multiple perspectives is a value.

It is important to bracket our assumptions and look at the often unaware, deep layers of consciousness and unconsciousness that underlie them.

Human existence, as well as research, is an ongoing process of interpreting both one’s self and others, including other cultures and subcultures.

All research involves both accepting bias––the bias of one’s own situation and context––and trying to transcend it.

We are always immersed in and shaped by historical, social, economic, political, and cultural structures and constraints, and those structures and constraints sually have domination and oppression, and therefore suffering, built into them.

Knowing involves caring for the world and the human life that one studies.

The elimination or dimunition of suffering is an important goal of or value accompanying inquiry and often involves critical judgment about how much suffering is required by existing arrangements.

Inquiry often involves the critique of existing values, social and personal illusions, and harmful practices and institutions.

Inquiry should contribute to the development of awareness and self-reflection in the inquirer and may contribute to the development of spirituality.

Inquiry usually requires giving up ego or transcending self, even though it is grounded in self and requires intensified self-awareness.

Inquiry may contribute to social action and be part of social action.

The development of awareness is not a purely intellectual or cognitive process but part of a person’s total way of living her life. (Bentz & Shapiro,1998, pp. 6-7)

MI is based on four knowledge traditions which Bentz and Shapiro describe as follows:
Phenomenology: a description and analysis of consciousness and experience

Hermeneutics: analysis and interpretation of texts in context

Critical Social Theory: analysis of domination and oppression with a view to changing it

Buddhism: spiritual practice that allows one to free oneself from suffering and illusion in several ways, e.g., becoming more aware (1998, p. 6)

Originally I thought that I would produce a competency model that could be the basis for training courses, but the main result of my efforts is an appreciation for a different way of being and relating. Simply stated, a transformation occurred while I was immersed in trying to understand how to relate more skillfully.

I do not have time to really go into what I came to understand about resonance, but let me try to summarize it in three points. I was particularly interested in three aspects of the phenomenon of resonance.
Intrapersonal Level: Promotion of an internal state that can contribute to a
kind of inner peace, pursued through self-cultivation

Interpersonal Level: Relational attunement, an experience of synchrony
between two people that provides the basis for mutuality

Research Application: A characteristic of good qualitative
research

I want to emphasize again the advantages I see of using MI for intercultural communication research. It offers a learner-centered approach to personally important questions, a holistic approach for inquiring into complex, multilayered interactions with the added bonus of providing a method of self-cultivation for you as an interculturalist. Because MI allows you to investigate phenomena that really matter to you, it can also help reveal the real, deeply personal meaning of your research.

Bentz, V. M., & Shapiro, J. J. (1998). Mindful inquiry in social research. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Nagata, A.L. (2002) Mindful Inquiry: A Learner-Centered Approach to Qualitative Research,Keynote at 2002 SIETAR Japan Conference.

The Practice of Practice (paper)

2006-11-06T09:27:00.000-05:00

A quick re-visit to knowing

With thanks to Max van Manen

The prominance of practice

With some authors the discourse of practice is especially associated with critical theory, postmodernist and deconstructionist writing. In the work of other authors we encounter a more commonplace usage of "the practice of teaching," analogous to the practice of religion or the practice of medicine. Similarly, the educational nomenclature such as "moral practice," "reflective practice," "critical practice" stands for the range of possible actions and vocabularies that these terms evoke. So it appears that practice has become a buzz-word.

Practice as explanation stopper

Another interesting feature is that practices, in this more fundamental sense (as reproductive dispositions, language games, genealogies, or embedded vocabularies) are not directly accessible, observable, measurable, definable. Rather, they are hidden, tacit, often linguistically inexpressible in a direct or propositional sense.

The important point is that while in educational discourses the term practice may be a gloss, it does hide a complex and fascinating pedagogical reality.

Lived practice

At the micro level of the practice of teaching there are layers of action and mutual understanding that are instantly and often unreflectively realized in everything that teachers do in constantly changing situations.

(Un)refective practice

It seems therefore that, on the one hand, the theory of reflective practice seems to overestimate the possibility of introspective "reflection on action while acting" (van Manen 1994, 1995). Phenomenologically it is very difficult, if not impossible, for teachers to be emersed in interactive or dialogic activities with their students while simultaneously stepping back from the activity. On the other hand, the theory of reflective practice seems to underestimate the complexity of the organization of ordinary teaching practices, and the incredible intricacies of practical actions in teaching-learning situations. I would argue that the practice of teaching is so challenging not only because it is cognitively complex but also because the knowledge that inheres in our practices is in part noncognitive...

Knowledge in practice

This is how I would make sense of these forms of noncognitive knowing:

(a) Knowledge resides in action as lived, e.g.,- as confidence in acting, style, and practical tact- as habituations and routine practices

(b) Knowledge resides in the body, e.g.,- as an immediate corporeal sense of things- as gestures and demeanor
(c) Knowledge resides in the world, e.g.,- as being with the things of our world- as situations of at homeness, dwelling
(d) Knowledge resides in relations, e.g.,- as encounter with others- as relations of trust, recognition, intimacy

By noncognitive I mean then that in their practice experienced teachers commonly demonstrate a kind of confidence that is really a form of knowing except that this "knowledge" cannot necessarily be captured in words.

In short, the study of the practice of teaching would need to be sensitive to the experiential quality of practical knowledge: the acknowledgement that much of knowing what to do, ensues from the complex dimensions of practice: one's body, actions, relations, and the things of one's world.

Complexity in practice

Teaching techniques employed by different teachers may look behaviorally the same on the outside but individual teachers always have acquired and developed these practices in a personal manner–sometimes in entirely different biographical and situational settings. Thus, particular practices get embodied in the context of personal life histories and backgrounds, and these practices become habituated in uniquely different situational and relational spheres.

Van Manen, M. (1994). Pedagogy, virtue, and narrative identity in teaching, Curriculum Inquiry, OISE/John Wiley (Toronto), Summer 1994, Vol. 4, No. 2. pp. 135-170.

Van Manen, M. (1995) On the Epistemology of Reflective Practice. Teachers and Teaching: theory and practice. Oxford Ltd. Vol. 1, No. 1, pp. 33-50.

Van Manen, M. (1999) The Practice of Practice.In: Lange, Manfred; Olson, John, Hansen, Henning & BŸnder, Wolfgang (eds.): Changing Schools/Changing Practices: Perspectives on Educational Reform and Teacher Professionalism. Luvain, Belgium: Garant.

Rethinking Critical Theory and Qualitative Research (paper)

2006-11-05T15:47:00.000-05:00

Notes from Handbook of Qualitative Research - Ch. 12

Critical Ethnography

As critical researchers attempt to get behind the curtain, to move beyond assimilated experience,to expose the way ideology constrains the the desire for self-direction, and to confront the way power reproduces itself in the construction of human consciousness, they employ a plethora of research methodologies. (p. 324)

Catalytic validity points to the degree to which research moves those it studies to understand the world and the way it is shaped in order for them to transform it... ...Research that possesses catalytic validity will not only display the reality-altering of the inquiry process; it will also direct this impact so that those under study will gain self-understanding and self-direction. (p. 324)

To construct a socially critical epistemology, critical ethnographers need to understand holistic modes of human experience and their relationship to communicative structures. (p. 328)

Kincheloe, J.L. & McLaren, P. (2005) Rethinking critical theory and qualitative research. In Denzin, N.K. & Lincoln, Y.S. (Ed) The SAGE handbook of qualitative research 3rd Edition, Sage Publications, California, USA.

Ethics and Politics in Qualitative Research (paper)

2006-11-05T12:14:00.000-05:00

Notes from Handbook of Qualitative Research - Ch. 6

I have chosen to pick out some bits on ethics and research - again starting with the the basic:

Codes of Ethics

In value-free social science, codes of ethics for professional and academic associations are the conventional format for moral principals.

Informed consent

Proper respect for human freedom generally includes two necessary conditions. First, subjects must agree freely voluntarily to participate - that is, without physical or psychological coercion. Second, their agreement must be based on full and open information. (p. 145)

Deception

...deliberate misrepresentation is forbidden. (p. 145)

Privacy and confidentiality

Confidentiality must be assured as the primary safeguard against unwanted exposure. All personal data ought to be secured or concealed and made public only behind a shield of anonymity. Professional etiquette uniformly concurs that no one deserves harm or embarrassment as a result of research practices. (p. 145)

Accuracy

Fabrications, fraudulent materials, omissions, and contrivances are both nonscientific and unethical. (p. 145)

I think it is easy to see how all of these have to be considered during research and how if they are not the validity of inquiry can be compromised. As Christians (2005) says himself when these inhabit the living world of research then they generate complex issues. In particular, I don't intend to have a value-free approach - however what is valued must be explicit and considered by participants. Each aspect of a code such as this can be broken only in the light of a greater ethic associated with valuing participants and their shared understanding.

Feminist Communitarianism

Social ethics

Over the past decade, social and feminist ethics have made a radical break with individual autonomy and rationalist presumption of canonical ethics... (pp. 148-9)

Rather than searching for neutral principles to which all parties can appeal, social ethics rests on a complex view of moral judgments as integrating into an organic whole various perspectives - everyday experience, beliefs about the good, and feelings of approval and shame - in terms of human relations and structures. (p. 149)

Compassion and nurturance resolve conflicting responsibilities among people, and as such these standards are totally the opposite of merely avoiding harm. (p. 149)

Accumulated wisdom, moral meaning from our own choices of decency, and the ongoing summons of the Other together reintroduce love, happiness, sympathy, and beauty into a modern, nonabsolutionist, but principled theory of morals. (p. 149)

Humans are defined as communicative beings within the fabric of everyday life. Through dialogic encounter, subjects create life together and nurture one another's moral obligation to it. Levinas's ethics presumes and articulates a radical ontology of social beings in relation. (p. 150)

A Feminist Communitarian Model

...the mission of social science research is enabling community life to prosper - equipping people to come to mutually held conclusions. The aim is not fulsome data per se, but community transformation. The received view assumes that research advances society's interests by feeding our individual capacity to reason and make calculated decisions. Research is intended to be collaborative in its design and participatory in its execution. Rather than ethics codes in the files of academic offices and research reports prepared for clients, the participants themselves are given a forum to activate polis mutually. In contrast to utilitarian experimentalism, the substantive conceptions of the good that drive the problems reflects the conceptions of the community rather than the expertise researchers or funders. (p. 151)

Interpretive Sufficiency

In contrast to an experimentalism of instrumental efficiency, this paradigm seeks to open up the social world in all its dynamic dimensions. The thick notion of sufficiency supplants the thinness of technical , exterior, and statistically precise received view. Rather than reducing social issues to financial and administrative problems for politicians, social science research enables people to come to terms with their everyday experience themselves. (p. 151)

Interpretative sufficiency means taking seriously lives that are loaded with multiple interpretations and grounded in cultural complexity. (p. 152)

Multivocal and Cross-Cultural Representation

With the starting hypothesis that all human cultures have something to say, social science research recognizes particular cultural values consistent with universal human dignity. Interpretative sufficiency in its multicultural dimension locates persons in a non-competitive, non-hierarchical relationship to the larger moral universe. It helps persons imagine how things could be different in the everyday world. It imagines new forms of human transformation and emancipation. It enacts those transformations through dialogue. (p. 153)

Moral Discernment

Communities are woven together by narratives that invigorate their common understanding of good and evil, happiness and reward, the meaning of life and death. Recovering and refashioning moral vocabulary help to amplify our deepest humanness. Researchers are not constituted as ethical selves antecedently, but moral discernment unfolds dialectically between researchers. (p. 154)

Our widely shared moral convictions are developed through discourse within a community. These communities, where moral discourse is nurtured and shared, are a radical alternative to the utilitarianism of modernity. But in feminist communitarianism, communities are entered from the universal. The total opposite of an ethics of individual autonomy is universal human solidarity. Our obligation to sustain one another defines our existence. (p. 154)

OK - that is enough for now. Time for a walk...

Christians, C.G. (2005) Ethics and politics in qualitative research. In Denzin, N.K. & Lincoln, Y.S. (Ed) The SAGE handbook of qualitative research 3rd Edition, Sage Publications, California, USA.

Reform of the Social Sciences, and of Universities Through Action Research (paper)

2006-11-05T09:36:00.000-05:00

Notes from Handbook of Qualitative Research - Ch. 1

I am continuing to go back to fundamentals in an effort to try and find direction. As such I am going to pick bits and pieces out - for my record as much as anything.

Tacit knowing

Much of our knowing is tacit; it expresses itself in our actions. (p. 49)

...tacit knowing connotes the 'hidden' understandings that guide our actions without our ability to explicitly communicate what the knowledge is. (p. 50)

Knowing how

"Knowing how" grounds knowledge in actions and, because this is precisely how we are able to identify tacit knowing, knowing how seems a more direct anchor to use. (p. 50)

Collective knowing

Knowledge is also inherently collective... ...People working together develop and share knowledge as a collective effort and collective product, the petty commodity view of knowledge production notwithstanding. (p. 50)

...refers to the work of Aristotle in making a taxonomy based on episteme (theoretical knowledge), techne (pragmatic knowledge and context-dependent practical rationality) and phronesis (practical and context deliberation about values). (p. 50)

...phronesis is best understood as the design of action through collaborative knowledge construction with legitimate stakeholders in a problematic situation... ...Phronesis is a practice that is deployed on groups in which all the stakeholders - both research experts and local collaborators - have legitimate knowledge claims and rights to determine the outcome... ...phronesis involves an egalitarian engagement across knowledge systems and diverse experiences. (p.51)

This is clarifying for me - I am not sure how you could work with people and not have phronesis as such... however....

Action research

...Either social research is collaboratively applied or we do not believe it deserves to be called research. It should simply be what it is: speculation. (pp. 52-3)

A different grounding for social research can be found in pragmatic philosophy. Dewey, James, Pierce... ...offer an interesting and fruitful foundation for ontological and epistemological questions inherent in social research that is action relevant. Pragmatism links theory and practice. The core reflection process is connected to action outcomes that involve manipulating material and social factors in a given context. Experience emerges in a continual interaction between people and their environment; accordingly, this process constitutes both the subjects and the objects of inquiry. The actions taken are purposeful and aim at creating desired outcomes. Hence, the knowledge creation process is based on the inquirer' norms, values and interests. (p. 53)

The research logic is constituted in the inquiry process itself, and it guides the knowledge generation process. (p. 53)

These general characteristics of the pragmatist position ground the action research approach. Two central parameters stand out clearly: knowledge generation through action and experimentation in context, and participative democracy as both a method and a goal. (p. 53)

Could a variant of this be used to ground my research, worth considering... and again, this time with a name:

Cogenerative Inquiry

Cogenerative inquiry processes involve trained professional researchers and knowledgeable local stakeholders who work together to define the problems to be addressed, to gather and organize relevant knowledge and data, to analyze the resulting information, and to design social change interventions. (p. 54)

Validity, Credibility and Reliability

The core of the validity claim centers on the workability of the actual social change activity engaged in, and the test is whether or not the actual solution to a problem arrived at solves the problem. (p. 54)

Dealing with Context Centered Knowledge

Precisely because the knowledge is cogenerated, includes local knowledge and analyses, and is built deeply into the local context, comparison of results across cases and the creation of generalizations is a challenge. (p. 54)

Comparison and Generalization

Central to the action research view of generalization is that any case that runs counter to a generalization invalidates it... ...and requires the generalization to be reformulated. (p. 54)

Time to go and clean the bathroom and reflect...

Greenwood G.J. & Levin M (2005) Reform of the sciences and of universities through action research. In Denzin, N.K. & Lincoln, Y.S. (Ed) The SAGE handbook of qualitative research 3rd Edition, Sage Publications, California, USA.

Introduction: The Discipline and Practice of Qualitative Research (paper)

2006-11-04T15:51:00.000-05:00

Notes from Handbook of Qualitative Research - Ch. 1

On the previous post, and with the remaining questions on my 'Research Quest' I found myself spiraling into eddies of repetition. So I am leaving those important questions (on ethics and aporia) to have a quick look at what form my research may take. To this end I am having a quick look at Denzin and Lincoln's third edition of their Handbook of Qualitative Research (2005). I have not read any of this text since the first edition - which I used to guide earlier inquiries. I think this text will be useful for me now for finding some possibilities for the for of my inquiry and giving me something further to ponder and pursue. I expect in this process I will be able to do more justice to the questions from Roy and Bevis that I have left unanswered. I know what follows is very general - but that is where I am most comfortable and, I think, where I need to be.

Three interconnected, generic activities define the qualitative research process. They go by a variety of different labels, including theory, analysis, ontology, epistemology, and methodology. Behind these terms stands the personal biography of the researcher, who speaks from a particular class, gender, racial, cultural, and ethnic community perspective. The gendered, multiculturally situated researcher approaches the world with a set of ideas, a framework (theory, ontology) that specifies a set of questions (epistemology) that he or she then examines in specific ways. (methodology, analysis). (p. 21)

Well that is good news - looks like I am on the right track. It is pretty clear where I am headed for the first of these, though the other two have less clarity. The reason for the muddiness here is partially because it is the nature of the beast and, I reckon, mostly because I have not given it enough thought.

Interpretive Paradigms

The net that contains the researcher's epistemological, ontological, and methodological premises may be termed a paradigm. (p.22)

Three broad categories for paradigms according to the handbook:

Positivist / postpositivist

They work from a realist and critical realist ontology and objective epistemologies, and they rely on experimental, quasiexperimental, survey, and rigorously defined qualitative methodologies. (p. 24)

Constructivist

The constructivist paradigm assumes a relativist ontology (there are multiple realities), a subjectivist epistemology (knower and responder cocreate understandings), and a naturalistic (in the natural world) set of methodological procedures. Findings are usually presented in terms of grounded theory or pattern theories... ...Terms such as credibility, transferability, dependability, and confirmability replace the usual positivist criteria of internal and external validity, reliability, and objectivity. (p. 24)

Feminist, ethnic, Marxist, cultural studies, and queer theory models

...privilege a materialist-realist ontology; that is the real world makes a material difference in terms of race, class, and gender. Subjectivist epistemologies and naturalistic methodologies (usually ethnographies) are employed. Empirical materials and theoretical arguments are evaluated in terms of their emancipatory implications.(p.24)

On first glance, the second option is the most attractive and if I had to pick one paradigm to inhabit I think that this would be the one. However, I think the other two have value for me and can have value for my inquiry - even if it is in the 'keeping it real' category. There is something about this way of organising paradigms that I am not entirely comfortable with. I think that I will end up skipping between these - playfully?

Strategies of inquiry

A research design situates the researcher in the world and... also specifies how the researcher will address the two critical issues of representation and legitimation.

A strategy of inquiry comprises a bundle of skills, assumptions, and practices that the researcher employs as he or she moves from paradigm to the empirical world. Strategies of inquiry put paradigms of interpretation into motion. At the same time, strategies of inquiry also connect the researcher to specific methods of collecting and analyzing empirical materials...

...These strategies include the case study, phenomenological and ethnomethodological techniques, and the use of grounded theory, as well as biographical, autoethnographic, historical, action, and clinical methods. (p. 26)

I am starting to have more questions - which is great. Even though I know there are many ways to form research, this brief summary has helped. I would still like it to be the case that I can weave together strategies as they become appropriate. I wonder how I can do this? I think I can... but how?

Denzin, N.K. & Lincoln, Y.S. (Ed) (2005) The SAGE handbook of qualitative research 3rd Edition, Sage Publications, California, USA.

Research Quest: Traditions

2006-10-29T15:25:00.000-05:00

What traditions of mine are likely to shape my inquiry?

I feel there are many traditions that form my ways of knowing and ultimately my inquiry. Some traditions of practice and research are evident in my ways of knowing. Interconnectedness, collaboration, usefulness, beauty and possibility have been central to my ongoing inquiry. In my ways of knowing missing are some traditions that are embodied within me - particularly those which represent my immediate and more distant family. There is a conscientiousness and deep caring within me that is commonly exhibited within my family. These traits have had an enormous range of consequences for us - many self destructive at the same time as being enlightening and some just self-destructive. In some senses I feel it is this that has nurtured my ways of knowing - but in what senses?

What consequences do my traditions have for the purposes of my inquiry?

There is a broad and clear direction in terms of my inquiry and its purposes - but i think my answer to the previous question illustrates there is an-other I need to consider. Broadly my purposes are to take this playfulness and freedom of being thing that I know works for me and work out how it could work for others. The very personal traditions brought to me by my family need to be explored for me to be able to situate myself in my research. So one of the purposes of my inquiry turns out to be to explore that of me which is not mine. I am attracted to re-exploring Heidegger's they here - something to I will need to contemplate more.

What are the consequences for me? What personal resources can I bring to this inquiry? What do I lack and how will I cope with this?

The consequences for me are that I will have to go deeply in ways that I was not really expecting. I bring hope, motivation and some experience to this inquiry, but I know that there is so much I need to do, know, be... I guess that would be a purpose of this research for me to explore other aspects of being. In brief - I am ready - there are worlds out there (and in here) for me to explore...

Might my traditions conflict with these traditions that might influence my inquiry? Is this a problem? Why?

Percieved conflict is a powerful tool for reflection for me. I would be more concerned if my traditions did not show this sort of complexity. That I would view it as more problematic if there were no problems.

Could there be conflicts between different traditions that might influence my inquiry? What are the possible grounds for judging the quality of the inquiry?

I can view percieved conflicts between traditions as opportunities for transcendence and deeper understanding - transcendence tested through my ways of knowing and caring. This perspective is in conflict with some traditions - these traditions can be used to generate questioning to help keep me honest and ensure I have not strayed onto a path of tangential arrogance. These seem like possible grounds for judging the quality of my inquiry. Are they grounds enough?

Questions: (c) Pugh, R & Yaxley, B. 2005

Research Quest: Knowing and being

2006-10-29T15:21:00.000-05:00

For me, are there ways of knowing that will lead me through my inquiry?

This represents an inquiry in itself and I think that in some ways that it will be a major aspect of my own inquiry. I think it is important to distinguish between knowing (which implies an ongoing process) and knowledge. I am far more comfortable considering knowing - probably because I feel I am lead by the evolution of understanding rather than accumulation what I do not know.

Some of the ways of knowing I prefer to use (and that drive the evolution of my understanding):

interconnected - how can the new be interpreted through my internalised understandings? What are the disconnects with these understandings?

collaborative - how do my interpretations and understandings compare with others' when in dialogue with texts and people?

utilitarian - is it useful for practice, furthering my or others' understanding etc?

aesthetic - eg. does it take a form which embodies both its own understandings and paradoxes? Is it elegant?

propositional - is my questioning flowing feely? Is the questioning forming eddies? Is it turbulent or chaotic? etc. Each of these have value - what might a state of questioning mean? How can we open possibility without losing integrity of what has come before?

These are not in any particular order or definitive and are just a start to reflecting on my understanding and raise further questions such as how do these ways of knowing manifest themselves and/or are chosen?

What account can I give of my ways of knowing?

When I reflect on my ways of knowing I tend to gravitate towards ways of knowing as being, rather than, for example, knowing as conformation knowledge or knowledge annexed. Again in my self referential, and possibly obsessive, way playfulness (moving between ways of knowing) appears to be useful. Sometimes I feel the freedom of moving between ways of knowing and sometimes this is not the case. I use this freedom (or lack of it) as an indicator for me about my ways of knowing. Thinking of playfulness as a state-of-mind disclosing itself as freedom appears to be useful here. My ways of knowing are one way my being prefers to disclose itself and it would seem a likely place to glimpse manifestations of my authentic being.

What images do I hold of myself as a researcher? What images do I aspire to? Why?

The notion of 'images' is at first distracting for me - automatically I picture photographs, films and other ways we share imagery - which tend to flatten out my reflections. So I will take images as related to imagination - how do I imagine myself as a researcher? What do I imagine that I could aspire to? Why?

One throw away answer is that I am a researcher waiting to happen. This has some resonance here and it makes me smile. Is that the limit of such a statement? On reflection, I reckon everybody is a researcher waiting to happen - so there is a limit applied through its universality. As a researcher I see myself as trying to fulfil the five points I outlined in response to the first question above. How I imagine myself now and in the future seems to be relatively stable. I imagine myself with understanding that is enhanced and enriched with greater:

interconnectedness

collaboration

usefulness

beauty

possibility

Questions: (c) Pugh, R & Yaxley, B. 2005

Research Quest: Motivation

2006-10-29T15:18:00.000-05:00

What is my motivation for my research?

Pursuing this research allows me to explore some big questions within my life in ways that have freshness and depth which may not be available through everyday reflection. This experience of iterative renewal of my inquiry with and for others, research, and practice embodies my motivation. This research, my research, sharing and informing my reflection is a way of giving my inquiry a life outside my own. Playfulness and freedom are within my being - not a place where they can live a healthly life for long.

What values and beliefs motivate me?

If I am honest, I can't avoid that behind my motivation is that a belief that my inquiry has a life that that is larger than mine. I value my thoughts and reflections enough to be shared. I value working with others (through their practice and inquiry), philosophical discourse, and being of and with research. I believe these within this place my inquiry can have a life of its own - a separateness. I value what works for learning and believe my inquiry has practical implications for the learning of others as well as my own. I believe that everybody is learning all the time - valuing others as learners means allowing them the freedom to believe this too. I value exploring playfulness as a state-of-mind which can either open or close learners to their possibilities.

Questions: (c) Pugh, R & Yaxley, B. 2005

Research Quest: Purpose

2006-07-27T13:52:00.000-04:00

After quite a break from blogging I am changing my path for a while - I am going to reflect on my research using questions provided to me by Roy Pugh and Bevis Yaxley. This serves a practical purspose for my studies in addition to giving me a chance to inquire into my inquiry. The first of these questions relate to purpose.

For what purposes am I involving myself in educational research? In other words, why am I involving myself in this?

Playfulness and freedom appear to me everywhere and in everything I do. Being free to learn, playfulness enabling freedom to learn etc plague me. Being plagued with freedom and obsessing with playfulness is something I need deal with! This is within me and I need to sort it out. Intrinsically these thoughts will not let me go until I inquire into them. I have experienced how powerful these thoughts are personally - generating questions such as:

How might playfulness ensure transcendence of play?

In what ways does playfulness, and my inquiry into it, affect what I do

, how I interpret the world

- my being?

How do people exercise their playfulness, even when their world appears to be at its worst?

What allows people to be playful and transcend the games of their own construction, even when they perceive them to be central to their being?

How can shared play, games, playfulness and freedoms be created with others without them feeling played?

I glimpsed shared playfulness and freedom within learning - what might allow this to be recreated for me and others?

These questions, and many more, deserve and demand some attention.

What are the educational purposes that will be supported by my research?

I would like to take what has been personally empowering inquiry and explore the extent and nature that further research could be empowering for others. I feel that freedom and playfulness can be seen as central for learning beings and provide a place for being a learner.

Often in research and practice the fundamental, difficult, and problematic, question of what it is to be a learner (or a teacher) has been left behind or to one side. What is often carried forward is how to be a learner (or a teacher). I feel dimishing the is in favour of the how can mean that the essence, soul and substance of learning can fade. Freedom and playfulness appears to me to give an opportunity to have both. Even exploring this and its place in practice is educational purpose enough.

What are the purposes of the research for all of those different people involved in some way in the research?

As I inquire into freedom and playfulness I intend for a model for practice should emerge. This model will be tested with and by learners with the aim of increasing their freedom to learn through playfulness. As the aim of including others is for them to willingly reflect on their practice and learning I envisage that participating would at the very least assist participants in reflective learning and pratice. So participation would have its own intrinsic value for participants and the model would have to tailor itself to enable all people involved to have the freedom to learn through playfulness.

Questions: (c) Pugh, R & Yaxley, B. 2005

Understanding and Interpretation - learning?

2006-04-25T01:49:00.000-04:00

Considering 'interpretation' in Being and Time in light of my previous thoughts has led what feels like further insight - but I am not sure. The direction of further exploration is unclear for me so what follows is scouting for possible paths...

The projecting of understanding has its own possibility - that of developing itself. This development of the understanding we call 'interpretation'. In it the understanding appropriates understandingly that which is understood by it.
In interpretation, understanding does not become something different. It becomes itself. Such interpretation is grounded existentially in understanding; the latter does not arise from the former. Nor is interpretation the acquiring of information about what is understood; it is rather the working out of possibilities projected in understanding. (pp 188-189)

Meaning is the 'upon-which' of a projection in terms of which something becomes
intelligible as something; it gets its structure from a fore-having, a fore-sight, and a fore-conception. In so far as understanding and interpretation make up the existential state of Being of the 'there', 'meaning' must be conceived as the formal-existential framework of the disclosedness which belongs to understanding. Meaning is an existentiale of Dasein, not a property attaching to entities, lying 'behind' them, or floating somewhere as an 'intermediate domain'. (P. 193)

In every understanding of the world, existence is understood with it, and vice-versa. (p. 194)

This process of interpretation and building meaning could be one way of starting to define learning.

The ability to move between possible interpretations and meanings is a freedom and requires playfulness. In this sense the understanding could be freedom - understanding and choosing possibilities as possibilities.

Learning can be assisted by the freedom to move between, subsume and synthesise interpretations and meanings.

Previously I have suggested that playfulness may be one state-of-mind which has freedom as its understanding. This is not the totality of understanding as other states-of-mind have their own understanding. This is problematic for me. I do not think playfulness to should be limited to itself as a state-of-mind in this way. Freedom is clearly not this simple either. They are more universal than that. As is learning.

I have so many questions! Cheers Martin, I am further towards insight, I have started really exploring learning and freedom - as well as playfulness. The view from here looks interesting.

Playfulness and Understanding - a start

2006-04-23T23:49:00.000-04:00

Since my last post (where things were appearing to crystalise for me), I developed and then shook off a seemingly unshakable flu. As I was recovering I discovered my mother was seriously ill and so here I am in Tasmania again; spending time with her and my family - some of whom have also travelled from overseas. These events have filled my time - though freedom and playfulness have not been very far from my thoughts. Events have sharpened and developed what I thought was understanding. Now I am ready again to continue my inquiry with the help of Heidegger.

State-of-mind is one of the existential structures in which being of the 'there' maintains itself. Equiprimordial with it in constituting this Being is understanding. A state-of-mind always has its understanding, even if it merely keeps it suppressed. (p. 182)

Playfulness as a state-of-mind has its understanding. Building further on a previous post: playfulness can inform and replenish Dasein by being a conduit for greater awareness of authentic being or it may allow further falling to the they. Each of these has its own apparent understanding.

In every case Dasein, as essentially having a state-of-mind, has already got itself in definite possibilities... ...Dasein is the possibility of Being-free for its ownmost potentiality-for-being. Its Being-possible is transparent to itself in different possible ways and degrees. Understanding is the Being of such potentiality-for-Being, which is never something still outstanding as not yet present-at-hand, but which is essentially never present-at-hand, 'is' with the Being of Dasein, in the sense of existence. (pp 183-4)

Understanding is the existential Being of Dasein's own potentiality-for-being; and it is so in such a way that this being discloses in itself what being is capable of. (p. 184)

A direct link to freedom. Playfulness as a state-of-mind of Dasein just exists and is not a definite precursor for disclosure of authentic Being. Playfulness as a state-of-mind could be how we manifest our potentiality-for-Being and disclose our possibilities. Could this be a sense of freedom?

...when that which is within-the-world is itself freed, this entity is freed for its own possibilities. (p. 184)

This sounds a little like play.

Dasein always has understood itself in terms of possibilities... ...understanding is the kind of Being of Dasein in which it is its possibilities as possibilities. (p. 185)

This sounds quite like playfulness. Hmmm... I would like to reflect further on playfulness and possibilities in association with understanding as described above - which is reminiscent of freedom. Considering freedom and understanding in this way 'freedom to learn' becomes even more intriguing for me - especially learning thought of in terms of understanding.

I will leave this post with a passage to ponder upon - freedom, playfulness, possibilities, understanding - and:

As existentialia, states-of-mind and understanding characterise the primordial disclosedness of Being-in-the-world. By way of having a mood, Dasein 'sees' possibilities, in terms of which it is. In the projective disclosure of such possibilities, it already has a mood in every case. (p. 188)

Could playfulness, as a state-of-mind, have freedom as its understanding?

Playfulness as a Mode of State-of-Mind

2006-03-04T09:38:00.000-05:00

When looking at the example of 'fear' that Heidegger uses for state-of-mind in Being and Time, it has become difficult for me to directly compare with playfulness. So I will tease out playfulness and associated concepts, and then come back to fear. Below is informed by Gadamer's Truth and Method (which I need to at closely again), together with some insights inspired by Heidegger. This is intended to replicate in part the analysis that Heidegger has given to fear (pp. 179-182).

Play

Play has its own mode of being which we will call a game. This being exists only in the world and is not aware of its own being (ie does not have Dasein character). It does however require participants with Dasein character to give the game importance and make it matter.

Players

The players are the participants in the game. In order for them to be players then they must take the game seriously. All players are played by the game and lost to the game while they are playing it. They are concerned only with being-in-the-world, with the they, in fact only as it exists within the world of the game. Their 'authentic being' is lost to them. The game could not be disclosed to the world without the players being predisposed to being players in the first place.

Playing

Playing is giving oneself to the game and the play - in as much as the game has to be taken seriously one is played by the game. The point is to be part of the they and therefore it is unlikely for Dasein's authentic being to disclosed. It is useful to note here that this being lost is not necessarily negative or positive - I would like to say this depends on your playfulness.

Now to my terms of interest (and away from Gadamer's) and possible representations of them:

Being Playful

Being playful allows one to be able to play with what is serious and the games that matter within one's Being-in-the-world. Being playful can make one feel as though they are outside the game or games, it is also equally seductive in transforming what is serious into a game. In the constructing a new game, which may be more a complex or a simplified version of it constituents, it creates the pitfalls of other games. This game is still part of Being-in-the-world. It does have the benefit of being of Dasein's conscious construction, making it more likely to phenomenologically disclose aspects of 'authentic being'.

Playfulness

Playfulness as a mode of state-of-mind is of Dasein and cannot apprehend itself without losing authenticity. This allows playfulness to envision the possibilities of our 'authentic being' be realised within Being-in-the-world, and the possibilities of Being-in-the-world to inform our 'authentic being'. Here it can be said that Playfulness is a conduit and its phenomenologically is of 'authentic being'.

From Being and Time:

That which fear fears about is that very entity which is afraid - Dasein. (p. 180)

To paraphrase:

That which playfulness is playful with is that very entity which is playful - Dasein.

I need to reflect more on this; I am sure what I have done so far is only a small step - but I have a better sense of the journey to come.

Being-in as such (Being there as a State of mind)

2006-03-01T18:35:00.000-05:00

The last two chapters in the first division of Being and Time are huge and my personal reflections are becoming increasingly grandiose, so I will try and look at things on a smaller scale to maintain my discipline. This way the issues raised in the previous blog about playfulness as state-of-mind can be discussed.

Some quotes and comments:

Dasein's existential spatiality, which thus determines its 'location', is itself grounded in Being-in-the-world. (p. 171)

It could be said that playfulness has to have subjects for its play and I think it is reasonable that these subjects are grounded in Being-in-the-world.

By its very nature, Dasein brings its "there" along with it... ...Dasein is its disclosedness. (p. 171)

This is here for completeness; the "there" is Dasein's they-self and discloses the authentic self. The relationship between the authentic self and the "there" is the "throwness" of Desein.

What we indicate ontologically by the term "state-of-mind" is ontically the most familiar and everyday sort of thing; our mood, our Being attuned. (p. 172)

Playfulness seems to fit within this broad definition.

In having a mood, Dasein is always disclosed moodwise as that entity to which it has been delivered over in its Being; and in this way it has been delivered over to the Being which, in existing, it has to be. (p. 173)

Just reasserting that Being predicates experience in the world, but mood (or state-of-mind) discloses aspects of authentic being.

The "that-it-is" which is disclosed in Dasein's state-of-mind must... ...be conceived as an existential attribute of the entity which has Being-in-the-world as its way of being. (p. 174) In a state-of-mind Dasein is always brought before itself, and has always found itself, not in the sense of coming across itself by perceiving itself, but in the sense of finding itself in the mood that it has. (p. 174)

For the moment I do not think it is unnecessarily limiting to consider that when playfulness itself is perceived then it becomes play, not a state-of-mind - although playfulness may be your state-of-mind when you are being playful in your play. Playfulness as distinct from being playful, playing, play and being played is central to my thesis.

The way in which the mood discloses is not one in which we look at throwness, but one in which we turn towards or turn away. For the most part the mood does not turn towards the burdensome character of Dasein which is manifest in it, and least of all does it do so in the mood of elation when this burden has been alleviated. It is always by way of a state-of-mind that this turning away is what it is. (p. 174)

If ever there was a playfulness trick this was it, but I think playfulness can allow a person to be able to turn towards their authentic self and what it is disclosing in ways other states-of-mind might not. This implies there are complexities to playfulness that need to be further explored - I would like to say that playfulness has many pathways into our very being. I will contain myself, at least publicly, while I am trying to inhabit Heidegger's rich and informative world.

Ontologically, we thus obtain the first essential characteristic of states-of-mind that they disclose Dasein in its throwness, and - proximally and for the most part - in the manner of an evasive turning away. (p. 175)

I am OK with that - sort of covered in my last comment.

And only because the 'senses' belong ontologically to an entity whose kind of being is Being-in-the-world with a state-of-mind, can they be 'touched' by anything or 'have a sense for' something in such a way that what touches them shows itself in an affect. (p. 176-7)

I have no issues with being playful, play, playing and being played made possible by an entity whose kind of being is Being-in-the-world with a state-of-mind of playfulness.

Existentially, a state-of-mind implies a disclosive submission to the world, out of which we can encounter something that matters to us. (p. 177)

A state-of-mind not only discloses Dasein in its throwness and its submission to that world which is already disclosed with its own Being; it is itself the existential kind of Being in which Dasein constantly surrenders itself to the 'world' and lets the 'world' "matter" to it in such a way that Dasein evades its very self. (p. 178)

Again playfulness fits into this genre with ease, although, it does not as easily sit with me that this does justice to playfulness.

The next section describes fear as a state-of-mind, I think playfulness has scrubbed up well so far. It will be interesting to make a comparison between fear and playfulness.

Playfulness as a state-of-mind...

2006-02-28T06:44:00.000-05:00

I woke up this morning thinking about Heidegger - I have now completed the reading the first section of Being and Time. I will record more detailed thoughts on these two chapters later, but I have to get some stuff out now!

It seems to me that in Heidegger's construct playfulness can be equal and complementary to 'anxiety' as a state-of-mind. If 'anxiety' is a window to one's authentic being, then playfulness can be awareness of the possibilities for that 'authentic Being'. This does not mean that playfulness is secondary to 'anxiety'. I don't think that playfulness requires 'anxiety' as a precursor. Playfulness can also spawn 'anxiety' - where anxiety is uncomfortable juxtaposition between 'authentic' and 'inauthentic' Being.

This is a big call and will require further reflection, investigation and understanding. Whatever happens, it feels like a worthy inquiry. Is that feeling the opposite of 'anxiety'? Is that feeling part of playfulness? (omg)

Without revisiting Sartre (his work is still in the mail to the USA), this adds a new dimension to his work. I wonder whether my ideas will stand up when I reread Being and Nothingness?

I also like the idea of relating authentic shared Being to playfulness, but that is a bit cloudy at the moment.

There is session of the course on Being and Time is on today, it will be interesting to see what I think after that. I can't wait!

The "They"

2006-02-24T13:06:00.000-05:00

The latest chapter of Being and Time that I have read deals with being with others and the impact others' being has on us. Some aspects of Heidegger's philosophies feel as though they are starting to crystallise in my mind. I don't expect I will be able to convey these in an easily understandable way for others yet - but what I write is gaining significance for me.

As usual, some quotes:

Is it then obvious that a priori that access to Dasein must be gained by mere reflective awareness of the 'I' of actions? (p. 116)

If the 'I' is an essential characteristic of Dasein, then it is one that must be Interpreted existentially. (p. 152)

Being-with is an existential characteristic of Dasein when factually no Other is present-at-hand or perceived. Even Dasein's Being-alone is Being-with in the world. (p. 156-7)

...those entities towards which Dasein as Being -with comports itself... ...are themselves Dasein. These entities are not objects of concern, but rather solicitude. (p. 157)

Everyday Being-with-one-another maintains itself between the two extremes of positive solicitude - that which leaps in and dominates, and that which leaps forth and liberates. It brings numerous mixed forms to maturity; to describe these and classify them would take us beyond the limits of this investigation. (p. 159)

Being with Others belongs to the Being of Dasein, which is an issue for Dasein in its very being. (p. 160)

Being-with-one-another must follow special routes of its own in order to come close to Others, or even to 'see through them'. (p161)

'Empathy' does not first constitute Being-with; only on the Basis of Being-with does 'empathy' become possible: it gets its motivation from the unsociability of the dominant modes of Being-with. (p. 162)

The "they", which is nothing definite, and which all are, though not as the sum, prescribes the kind of Being of everydayness. (p. 164)

In Dasein's everydayness the agency through which most things come about is one of which we must say that "it was no one". (p. 165)

And because the "they" constantly accommodates the particular Dasein by disburdening it of its Being, the "they" retains and enhances its stubborn dominion. (p. 165)

The Self of everyday Dasein is the they-self, which we distinguish from the authentic Self - that is, from the Self which has been taken hold of in its own way. As they-self, the particular Dasein has been dispersed into the "they", and must first find itself. (p. 167)

Freedom, Being with, authenticity - which makes me think more about playfulness as a state-of-mind and how that can be shared authentically with others.

I feel that the two extremes of positive solicitude lacks something in explaining the complexities of being-with others, but it is a more than useful illustration and Heidegger himself stops himself short on elaborating.

I will not have this luxury, as being-with others is central to shared playfulness and learning. I think this is an important line of thought for my study.

freedom, playfulness and worldhood

2006-02-20T15:55:00.000-05:00

Reflecting on Being and Time is helping to clarify freedom and playfulness for me. A couple of quotes that represent what has helped me to understand are:

Every entity that is to 'to hand' has a different closeness, which is not to be ascertained by measuring distances. (p. 135)

The objective distances of Things present-at-hand do not coincide with the remoteness and closeness of what is ready-to-hand within-the-world. (p. 141)

The homogeneous space of Nature shows itself only when the entities we encounter are discovered in such a way that the worldly character of the ready-to-hand gets specifically deprived of its worldhood. (p. 147)

In the phenomenon of space the primary ontological character of the Being of entities within-the-world is not to be found, either as unique or as one among others. Still less does space constitute the phenomenon of the world. Unless we go back to the world, space cannot be percieved. (p. 148)

This brought into focus some insight into freedom and playfulness in our world.

Playfulness, whether it is a state of mind (Dewey, How We Think), a personality trait (see previous blog entry 'Evaluating Playfulness') or however I can concieve it, does not have a place within-the-world. Playfulness, whether shared or not, seems very much within our world and never 'ready-to-hand' and is appears always 'present-at-hand'.

Does that lead to the possibility of empowerment to anyone participating in playfulness?

Even in a world 'deprived of its worldhood' freedom (or lack of it) could be very visible. Physical freedoms, the freedom from others actions and the freedom to act would broadly seem to fit into this category. We could think if these as 'ready-to-hand', apparent or possible freedoms.

What of 'present-to-hand' freedoms - which may or may not be associated with 'ready-to-hand' ones?

There are lots of examples of individuals deprived of almost all of their 'ready-to-hand' freedoms and maintaining their 'presence-to-hand' freedom. eg. Wole Soyinka. Hopefully we can't find too many analogies with this circumstance to educational practice (although...).

I am particularly interested in why people feel a lack of freedom to learn in the process of their education. Note: the implicit assumption that everybody wants, needs and is learning - I'll have to tackle that later, but it is one of my assumptions.

I was listening to an interview with Dorothy Rowe about depression the other day that resonated with me along those lines.

Here are a couple of quotes:

So I was an outsider and then all sorts of incidental things happened, and also I was always questioning what we were being taught at school because it was a very rigid sort of syllabus that we had.

But of course the outsider sees things more clearly, when you're on the inside there's a lot you don't see. So I don't mind being an outsider.

....when you're depressed you're inside a prison. That's what depressed people talk about, being in that prison and you can't get out of it. You treat yourself horribly so that you're the prisoner in isolation and the cruel jailor.

Now when you speak of emotions, emotions are meanings, you know fear is the meaning 'something terrible is happening that is a threat to me'. Anxiety is the meaning 'something terrible is about to happen'. Anger is a wonderful emotion because it brings out our personal pride, anger is 'how dare this happen to me' and we fight back. Or we should, but nicely though.

You know the more you hate yourself the more frightened you are of other people. Because if they see how bad you are they will punish you. In that way you cut yourself off from every aspect of your life and that's the prison of depression.

But the pattern of thought that leads people to be depressed is so well practised, the steps in it, they don't have to think it consciously. Because first of all the only people who get depressed are good people.

So how do you get out of that prison? Oh I can tell you very easily, it's very simple for me to say but it's hard to do because you have to change ideas that go right back to when you were a very small child. And the first thing is that you come to realise that it isn't a matter of struggling to be good all the time, that, you know, you set yourself some reasonable standards, if you've got a job then you want to do a reasonable job, you don't have to do a perfect job.

The freedom to learn appears to have some parallels with freedom from depression and is possibly less 'within-the-world' than 'being-in-the-world'.

Freedom and Play (paper)

2006-02-17T12:24:00.000-05:00

Catalysts for creativity

John F. Feldhusen and Sandra K. Hobson (Dec. 1972)

This is a really refreshing paper, that manages to capture the enthusiasm and possibility that can be engendered by playfulness and freedom.

To quote them:

Freedom is important in creative thinking... Torrance suggested that two kind of freedom are necessary ingredients for a creative atmosphere: freedom from threat of evaluation and freedom from inhibiting sets or directions. Sets are internalized predispositions that operate subconsciously to inhibit or facilitate behaviour... ...He suggested that if we force an individual to act according to someone else's values, we limit his creative ability... ...and his natural tendencies to explore his environment.

To create an atmosphere of almost total freedom we used several procedures. To begin with, we let the children dress anyway they wished. They could come barefoot if they wished. At the begining we announced that they would be completely free, even to stay away if they lost interest. We encouraged them to express their feelings about us or anything we were doing at anytime. We let them move about whenever they wanted to explore the studio. They were free to desert the group activities and talk out whenever they wished. Special attempts were made to avoid negative evaluations among pupils or between leaders and pupils. Ample opportunity for role-playing gave the children freedom to express their ideas through the guise of another person.

In our program, we encouraged playfulness and humour at all times. When children realised that they were free to express themselves as they wished, fun, humour, silliness and goofing came naturally. Our joining in their playfulness was supportive. Finally, playing charades and viewing performances in video playback also created a sense of fun and humour.

This sounds like a utopia for the 16 fifth to seventh graders who attended these sessions twice a week for six weeks one summer. I like the style of the authors - it has me considering my study in different ways. Possibly not the way they might have intended, but I don't think they would mind! The warmth in the story made me smile. I will let their conclusions speak for themselves:

From this experience and from the other types of evaluation presented earlier, we formulated a set of general conclusions.

First, we concluded that we survived quite well. We came out of the sessions unscathed, even though we started as novices in this kind of learning situation in which total freedom prevails. We entered into the venture with trepidation. We had not taught in this way before and feared that complete freedom might breed complete chaos. It did not. The children were orderly and close to us and enjoyed the sessions.

Second, it was fun. The children were funny and productive. It was fun to see them doing their thing, open up, and generate ideas.

Third, we and the experienced some discomfort during the first few weeks. We felt that we should be "working" and producing "something". There was also a feeling that work and fun are really not compatible. But in time we seemed to get over these feelings.

Fourth, we saw individual children open up and express themselves more freely during this brief program of creative freedom. The unfolding of individual children seemed to be an intensely personal thing, undoubtedly dependent on each childs background and experience. We believe that this personal unfolding paves the way to more and better thinking.

Fifth, working with children in this way fostered warm interpersonal relationships. These relationships afforded a richly rewarding affect, added to the pleasure of working together, and reduced anxiey among all of us. Use of first names also brought us closer together.

Sixth, and finally, we concluded that we have just scratched the surface. We have much more to do in our effort to understand creative behaviour, how it develops, and how to teach it. Our major concern at this stage was to specify teachers' behaviours and pupils' activities that would be productive of creative thinking. It remains to be seen whether the system can be replicated by others who wish to teach creative thinking. Above all, it remains to be shown that the system, if replicable, helps children become better creative thinkers.

Tutoring, playing and learning (paper)

2006-02-17T11:16:00.000-05:00

The features of playfulness in the pedagogical model of TPL – tutoring, playing and learning

Pirkko Hyvönen and Heli Ruokamo (2005)

Selected quotes:

In this article we define the pedagogical TPL model that represents the processes of tutoring, playing and learning. We also introduce the concept of playfulness and its six salient features.

Playing is understood to cover both playing and a variety of games, including digital games. The pedagogical TPL model interlinks with the Let’s Play project, where three doctoral thes es have examined how playing is utilised in the processes of learning and growing and what kinds of qualities playfulness requires of the learning environment.

We examined the concept of playfulness from different perspectives and have found six salient features. They are embodiment, collaboration, action, narration, creativity and insight. Our examination is based on theories of playing and learning and on our empirical data from: 1) creative sessions, 2) test playing and 3) story-crafting...

We have listened to children’s voice. Through this data, we get close to their unique culture that they construct through stories and playing...

Intentional tutoring can be called education that implies pedagogical and intentional actions whose aim is to influence a child...

Another view of tutoring deals with environments that afford tutoring.

Playing and games are creative processes where children may produce something else than imaginative things, e.g. handicrafts, piece of arts, posters, stories or songs. We see that playing is not limited to the actions that can be seen as playing, but also planning, preparing and ending are part of the activity of playing.

Event though the TLP model emphasises the significance of playing and games, they are not automatically beneficial processes.

The concept of embodiment refers to what a person experiences, knows and feels in her/his body and how she/he interacts through her/his body with other people and the environment...

In the context of playfulness, collaboration refers to different manners of social cohesion and cooperation and collaborative construction of knowledge.

Through language, an intellectual network is set up; in this network experiences and problem-solving processes become meaningful.

We define action primarily as physical activity that, in view of the other features of playfulness, invariably is experiential.

In playing and games, plotted stories are created and acted out, which allows a multiple means of creating narration, for example, with rhyming, gestures, music or pictorial collages.

As knowledge is constructed collaboratively… …creativity is similarly constructed according to our observations. Here one needs to pay attention to imitation and humour because they can free up thinking and imagination and generate an atmosphere conducive to creativity.

Insight refers to problem-solving situations and to making observations and conclusions.

I really like the way this study was conducted and I think this really does explore many facets of playfulness. There are heaps of references from this I would (and should) follow up.

This refines (reinforces?) my questioning on playfulness and I return to playfulness and freedom to learn, freedom to be playful, playfulness as freedom and freedom as playfulness.

Evaluating Playfulness (paper)

2006-02-17T10:34:00.000-05:00

Construct Validity of the Children’s Playfulness Scale (CPS)

Efthimios Trevlas et al (Sept. 2003)

Some selected quotes:

Contemporary research on children’s play approaches it as a personality trait. A generally accepted definition of playfulness in young children is an internal predisposition to bring a playful quality to interactions and episodes. This trait is an individual characteristic and its expression, relatively stable, reproducible and recognisable.

While many authors wrote about the need to focus not on the external environment but on the internal disposition of player, few methodological efforts in this direction have been successful.

Lieberman (1965) was among the first who defined playfulness as a characteristic of the player and supported the existence of the playfulness trait in young children. Asking preschool teachers to rate the children in their classes, she identified five components of this playfulness quality: (a) physical spontaneity, (b) social spontaneity, (c) cognitive spontaneity, (d) manifest joy, and (e) sense of humour.

Specifically, it was hypothesized a priori that five measured variances item variables (motor, social, mental, humor, and joy) were manifestations of a latent variable “playfulness.”

The CPS instrument in this study required teachers to rate young children's 'playfulness' across the five point scale. They conclude:

The results of the present study supported the construct validity of the CPS proposed by Barnett (1991), encouraging educators to use it as one useful tool in the comprehensive assessment of children’s play behavior.

The authors touch on playfulness as an internal condition, but the study is based on observed behaviour.

Does this affect the possibility of authenticity in considering playfulness?

What about freedom?

What about shared playfulness?

Playfulness in blogosphere...

2006-02-15T15:41:00.000-05:00

There was little to work with from wikipedia on playfulness. What happens when I look to the blogosphere and see who has playfulness listed as one of their interests - as I have.

There are two other bloggers out there:

Paschal Baute is a pastor and psychologist who describes himself with:

I love empowering people by building bridges between psychology, science and the Wisdom traditions.

He has numerous blogs, many of which are related to spirituality - particularly with, but not limited to, a Christian perspective.

The other playful blogger out there is Wo.andeRan whose blog and website also show an intense interest in spirituality, although a little more alternative than Pashal.

What might be made of this, the three of us, in the blogosphere - all professing an interest in playfulness. Clearly the others have a deeper respect for playfulness than is often encountered.

Possibly playfulness can be a place where the sublime meets (or is) the ridiculous... hmmm...

In reference to Wikipedia...

2006-02-09T18:32:00.000-05:00

In my short life of blogging I have linked to Wikipedia several times to help illustrate terms I have used. Just about every time it has been quite useful. How useful it is for freedom and playfulness?

Freedom refers, in a very general sense, to the state of being free (i.e. unrestricted, unconfined or unfettered). Also, liberation from restraint or from the power of another: independence.

Fair enough, here we find lots of examples of how the word freedom is used, but not much on how we can be free. I am delving into what enables us to be free to learn. This has a depth that is not explored in Wikipedia. To have the freedom to learn people seem to need to be distanced from those parts of being that constrain, and be aware of those that empower. What is constraining and what is empowering is contextual. Context, in this case, is shared and particular; the pasts, presents and futures brought to the learning.

That being-in-the-world thing appears to be creeping in again.

Playfulness is a little easier - there was no direct hit. There was only one hit of 'high relevancy' though: Playful Little Audrey coming in at 100%.

I guess that means you can call me Audrey now - oh well...

Being with playfulness...

2006-02-09T14:03:00.000-05:00

Let us throw around a couple of quotes from 'Being and Time' and question playfulness and freedom in light of them:

Thus we must keep in mind that the expression 'phenomenon' signifies that which shows itself in itself, the manifest (p.51)

There appears to be great value in considering 'freedom' and 'playfulness' as phenomena in this sense. Where does this lead us? What do we lose by considering them this way?

The phenomenology of Dasein is a hermeneutic in the primordial signification of the word, where it designates this business of interpreting (p. 62)

Dasein is an entity which, in its very being, comports itself understandingly towards that being. In saying this, we are calling attention to the formal concept of existence. (p.79)

Not until we understand Dasein's Being-in-the-world as an essential sturcture of Dasein can we have any insight into Dasein's existential spatiality. (p. 82)

How does Dasein's being-in-the-world relate to playfulness?
How does Dasein's being-in-the-world relate to freedom?
Do playfulness and freedom have their own existential spatialities?

The inconnections between these seem strong and I wish to inquire into shared, yet individual, playfulness and freedom to learn.

Is one practical implication that participants in my inquiry need to have a deep sense of being-in-the-inquiry?

I am glad the next section I am grappling with is on being-in-the-world!

Reflection and direction with a blog...

2006-02-07T08:54:00.000-05:00

Ulises Ali Mejias has posted something interesting:

In this post, I employ the rubric proposed by Boote & Beile (2005) to determine whether blogging can be considered a form of literature review. I also make some suggestions for how blogging may be incorporated formally into the research and writing activities of some doctoral students, although it certainly might not be useful to others. I am not suggesting that this single post is my literature review; I am merely providing a map that outlines how my blogging during the past years constitutes a form of ongoing literature review

Even though a 'literature review' is not part of my thinking I feel that his arguments are analogous to the application for candidacy that I have to submit by the end of the year. It is also worth having a look at the comments people have made in response to his ideas.

While this blog is useful for me, guidance from Kathy Sierra is very welcome on what may be in it for other people in this is a potentially very public forum. She gives us a Crash Course in Learning Theory and blogs.

Providing a balance...

2006-02-06T17:22:00.000-05:00

I was just looking at a summary by Ian Jukes on Daniel Pink's A Whole New Mind. According to Ian this book focuses on what Daniel percieves to be the shift from the 'Information Age' to the 'Conceptual Age' and:

More specifically, he suggests we work toward developing in ourselves (and I hope by implication, our students), six right brain “senses,” to complement our left-brain, analytic skills. He suggests we will need realize the value of:

1. Not just function, but also DESIGN
2. Not just argument, but also STORY.
3. Not just focus, but also SYMPHONY.
4. Not just logic, but also EMPATHY.
5. Not just seriousness, but also PLAY.
6. Not just accumulation, but also MEANING.

______________________________________

It is interesting the separation of these into 'left' and 'right' brain - does that sit easily with moving into the 'Conceptual Age'?

Here play appears to be 'locked' out of the eleven elements listed - where does play fit?

I suspect play is more significant than this and the book is not quite as simplistic as portrayed here.

I have to start somewhere...

2006-02-03T13:06:00.000-05:00

I am reading, with the help of some people, Heidegger's Being and Time as I am interested in what it is to be free and be playful. His Dasein appears to require a playfulness and freedom within being to consider being itself.

I am pursuing this philosophical aspect while exploring examples of the use of the word freedom and playfulness and their associated words.

Ockham's Razor recently had Prof. Mark Dodgon speaking on the Language of Inovation. One of the things he said was:

...firms play around with innovation the whole time, and workplaces where people are enjoying their work, encouraging that close relation of play, fun, are the most productive and creative organisations around.

Do we 'play around' the whole time? Mark's book Think, Play, Do : Innovation, Technology, and Organization looks interesting enough for me to keep an eye out for his name elsewhere.