Representations of the Academic: Challenging Assumptions in Higher Education 2022042132, 2022042133, 9781138483989, 9781032440316, 9781351053372

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
Contributors
1. Introduction
2. Gamification of personal learning trajectories
3. Unruly thought: Valuing and supporting academics who manage mental health issues
4. Whose knowledge counts? The academic, academic knowledge and epistemic justice
5. Encouraging teachers and learning support assistants (LSAs) to see themselves as researchers
6. Truth in a time of untruth: The academic as public educator
7. Cross-cultural doctoral PhD-supervision as transformative academic practice
8. Wrighting an academic life as a practitioner researcher: Constructing knowledge on the home front, at the university, throughout the Americas, and in our global community
9. The cut: Women and the practice of female genital mutilation in Kuria, Kenya
10. Developing teacher professionalism in an era of neo-liberalism
11. Total nursing: Reclaiming nursing for the patient
12. Developing new research networks in Latvia
13. Afterword
Index

Citation preview

Routledge Research in Higher Education

REPRESENTATIONS OF THE ACADEMIC CHALLENGING ASSUMPTIONS IN HIGHER EDUCATION Edited by Jean McNiff

Representations of the Academic

This thoughtful volume challenges widely accepted, traditionalist scientific notions of ‘the academic’ – prevalent in higher education institutions globally – in order to promote best practice, and redefine the field as accessible, inclusive and forward thinking. This book situates itself away from the dominant discourse on academia and eschews the common tropes that have proved prohibitive to furthering the field and research within. By releasing ‘the academic’ from the restrictive, narrow boundaries typically imposed, Representations of the Academic opens up a form of public sphere where the contributors bring together their innovative views to propose a new normative form. Chapters explore examples of good practice that demonstrate alternatives ways of thinking and, in doing so, the book continues an emergent tradition of investigating the origins, nature and purposes of academic work at a time when critical values are under threat. The book will be of interest to students, academics and researchers in the fields of education, educational research and higher and professional education more broadly. Those involved with interdisciplinary and intercultural studies, ethics and values in research will also benefit from this volume. Jean McNiff is Professor Emerita of Educational Research at York St John University, UK.

Routledge Research in Higher Education

Supporting Student and Faculty Wellbeing in Graduate Education Teaching, Learning, Policy, and Praxis Snežana Obradović-Ratković, Mirjana Bajovic, Ayse Pinar Sen, Vera Woloshyn, Michael Savage Optimising the Third Space in Higher Education Case Studies of Intercultural and Cross-Boundary Collaboration Natalia Veles How Organisational Change Influences Academic Work The Academic Predicament Model for a Conducive Work Environment Sureetha De Silva, Donna Pendergast and Christopher Klopper University Autonomy Decline Causes, Responses, and Implications for Academic Freedom Kirsten Roberts Lyer, Ilyas Saliba and Janika Spannagel The Experience of Examining the PhD An International Comparative Study of Processes and Standards of Doctoral Examination Edited by Michael Byram and Maria Stoicheva Internationalising Higher Education and the Role of Virtual Exchange Robert O’Dowd A Conversation Analytic Approach to Doctoral Supervision Feedback, Advice and Guidance Binh Thanh Ta Representations of the Academic Challenging Assumptions in Higher Education Edited by Jean McNiff For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/ Routledge-Research-in-Higher-Education/book-series/RRHE

Representations of the Academic

Challenging Assumptions in Higher Education Edited by Jean McNiff

First published 2023 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2023 selection and editorial matter, Jean McNiff; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Jean McNiff to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: McNiff, Jean, editor. Title: Representations of the academic : challenging assumptions in higher education / edited by Jean McNiff. Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2023. | Series: Routledge research in higher education | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2022042132 (print) | LCCN 2022042133 (ebook) | ISBN 9781138483989 (hardback) | ISBN 9781032440316 (paperback) | ISBN 9781351053372 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Learning and scholarlship. | Education, Higher. | Action research. Classification: LCC AZ103 .R46 2023 (print) | LCC AZ103 (ebook) | DDC 001.2--dc23/eng/20221025 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022042132 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022042133 ISBN: 978-1-138-48398-9 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-44031-6 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-351-05337-2 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781351053372 Typeset in Galliard by KnowledgeWorks Global Ltd.

Contents

Contributorsvii

1 Introduction

1

JEAN McNIFF

2 Gamification of personal learning trajectories

10

CAMILLA GYLDENDAHL-JENSEN

3 Unruly thought: Valuing and supporting academics who manage mental health issues

26

WELBY INGS

4 Whose knowledge counts? The academic, academic knowledge and epistemic justice

41

MARGARET MEREDITH

5 Encouraging teachers and learning support assistants (LSAs) to see themselves as researchers

58

CATHERINE McPARTLAND

6 Truth in a time of untruth: The academic as public educator

74

JON NIXON

7 Cross-cultural doctoral PhD-supervision as transformative academic practice SIGRID GJØTTERUD AND ATHMAN KYARUZI AHMAD

91

vi  Contents

8 Wrighting an academic life as a practitioner researcher: Constructing knowledge on the home front, at the university, throughout the Americas, and in our global community

106

JOSEPH M. SHOSH

9 The cut: Women and the practice of female genital mutilation in Kuria, Kenya

120

BOKE JOYCE WAMBURA

10 Developing teacher professionalism in an era of neo-liberalism

135

HILDE HIIM

11 Total nursing: Reclaiming nursing for the patient

151

PETER McDONNELL

12 Developing new research networks in Latvia

167

LINDA PAVĪTOLA AND LĀSMA LATSONE

13 Afterword

182

JEAN McNIFF

Index

185

Contributors

Athman Kyaruzi Ahmad (PhD) is a Senior lecturer with the Department of Agricultural Extension and Community Development at Sokoine University of Agriculture, Tanzania. Ahmad has practiced and researched on school agriculture for almost 15 years. His research mainly focuses on school agriculture, agricultural extension, communication of rural innovations and in Africa. Action research is his main approach to research, both as a way of researching and enhancing personal competence and as co-operative research to develop and improve teaching, learning, and community development. Sigrid Gjøtterud is a Professor of Education, working at Norwegian University of Life Sciences. Her teaching and research are within teacher education and higher education. Supervising PhD students doing research at all levels of the educational system in Norway, Africa and Nepal is a main interest. Hilde Hiim is Professor at Oslo Metropolitan University, Faculty of Teacher Education and International Studies. Her fields of interest are teacher education, vocational education, practical pedagogy and action research. She is the author of several books and articles, some of which are widely used in Norwegian and Danish teacher education. She has led several extensive curriculum research projects in vocational education programs. Welby Ings is a Professor in Design at Auckland University of Technology. He holds a Ph.D. in narratology and is an elected Fellow of the British Royal Society of Arts. His research navigates trajectories across linguistics, typography, education, ethics and visual communication design. Welby is also a multiaward winning filmmaker, designer and author. In 2002, he received the New Zealand Prime Minister’s award for Tertiary Teaching Excellence and in 2013, the inaugural AUT University medal for his research and teaching. He has in publication over 50 books, book chapters or research articles that are accessible here: https://academics.aut.ac.nz/ welby.ings Camilla Gyldendahl Jensen is a PhD, Associate Professor and Post-doc at UCN University College. Camilla has a Master of Science in Architecture and Design (Cand.polyt) and works through her research with “design thinking”

viii  Contributors in relation to developing teaching concepts that support, among other things, Reflective Practice-based Learning, professional didactics and PBL. In her research, Camilla also has a special focus on game-based learning and digital learning processes. La¯sma Latsone is an Associate Professor with the Department of Education and Social Work at Liepaja University (Latvia). She obtained her MSc and PhD from Fordham University (New York, USA). She is an expert for the Scientific Council of Latvia in Educational Science. A main context and focus of her research is teaching and adult education, with strong links to inter-cultural issues in society and education, socio-emotional interactions and spirituality. Peter McDonnell is a registered nurse who has spent many years in the NHS, in general and psychiatric settings. He has researched and written on the changing face of nursing as it evolves. Jean McNiff is an independent researcher and writer. She is Professor Emerita at York St John University, UK, and also Visiting Professor at universities in China, Malaysia and South Africa. Dr Catherine McPartland has over 25 years’ experience of working in the Further Education Sector and has worked in a number of roles. Her last role in FE was as a Higher Education course leader supporting students undertaking BA and teaching qualifications, something she greatly enjoyed. Currently, she is involved in mentoring action research projects as part of the ETF’s Outstanding Teaching, Learning and Assessment initiative. Margaret Meredith is a Senior Lecturer at York St John University, UK. Her research currently focuses on her responsibility as an academic to work for meaningful social change within and through higher education and the opportunity for universities to deepen their role in serving the wider public. Jon Nixon is a Visiting Professor at Middlesex University, UK. His main research and scholarly interests lie in the field of intellectual history particularly as it relates to educational and political thought. He is the author of Erich Auerbach and the Secular World: Literary Criticism, Historiography, Post-Colonial Theory and Beyond (Routledge, 2022); Hannah Arendt: The Promise of Education (Springer, 2020); Rosa Luxemburg and the Struggle for Democratic Renewal (Pluto Press, 2018); Hans-Georg Gadamer: The Hermeneutical Imagination (Springer, 2017); and Hannah Arendt and the Politics of Friendship (Bloomsbury, 2015). He is also the author of a trio of books on higher education: Interpretive Pedagogies for Higher Education (Continuum, 2012); Higher Education and the Public Good (Continuum, 2011); and Towards the Virtuous University (Routledge, 2008). He is currently working on a study of mid-20th and early-21st century literary fiction entitled Narratives of Memory and Loss, which builds on his earlier work on hermeneutics and literary and cultural theory.

Contributors ix Linda Pavitola is a Professor and Dean of the Faculty of Pedagogy and Social Work at Liepaja University (Latvia). She is an expert of the Scientific Council of Latvia in Educational Science, with a focus on research in the field of education, and the development of teacher training programs and teaching at bachelors, masters and doctoral levels. Her research interests relate to dimensions of teacher education quality and transformative educational experiences. She believes that research outcomes are significant at both personal and professional levels and are needed for researchers as well as for larger communities. Dr. Joseph M. Shosh chairs the Executive Committee of the Action Research Network of the Americas (ARNA), an organization he co-founded with colleagues from Mexico, Canada and the United States. Co-editor of the Palgrave International Handbook of Action Research, he served as Professor of Education at Moravian College, where he was founding Director of the action research-based graduate education program. His contributions to teacher action research have appeared in Action Researcher in Education, Educational Action Research Journal, English Journal, Inquiry in Education, and Teaching Education, among others. Dr. Shosh is the recipient of the National Council of Teachers of English Paul and Kate Farmer English Journal Writing Award, the James N. Moffett Award for Classroom Research, and Cornell University’s Merrill Scholar Teaching Award. Boke Joyce Wambura is a Lecturer at Tom Mboya University, Kenya. She holds a PhD (Linguistics) from the University of Leeds (UK). Her main areas of interest include Language and Gender, Discourse Analysis and Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) studies. She is a member of the British Association of Applied Linguistics (BAAL), and a pioneer member of the Language Association of Eastern Africa (LAEA) and the Association of English Language Educators & Researchers (ASELER), Kenya.

1

Introduction Jean McNiff

This book is about what Doxtader (2009), writing at the time of the demolition of the Apartheid state in South Africa and the establishment of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, refers to as ‘the work of words’. He writes: … in the midst of historical division that seems to fate endless violence, how is it possible to weave a unity in difference that can make history? This is a rhetorical question. In the name of a beginning, reconciliation begins with a belief that there are words which hold the potential for all things to become new. Such faith is not easy. Its work comes with no guarantees. (ix) The real work of words, for him, is to: constitute the potential of politics and a politics of potential. (ix) So it is in this book, written also at a time of historical divisions and alarms, including a crisis of irreversible damage to the planet, small wars everywhere and threats of greater wars ever-present: a worldwide case of the rich getting rich through the exploitation of the poor and the normalisation of self-serving lies, through control of the media and the ruthlessly manipulative imposition of thought control. The book is specifically about two keywords, ‘the academic’ and ‘representation’, two big ideas that can have multiple meanings and interpretations, depending on the writer/speaker’s and reader/hearer’s aims and positioning. The first keyword is about how ‘the academic’, usually understood as to do with advanced level study, may be construed; the second is about how ‘the academic’, too often seen as separate from everyday life, is to be represented in the public domain. This can make for some slippery situations, given that everyone has different life and discursive experiences, so these words are contested, frequently so, sometimes fairly, sometimes not. In this book, somewhat contrary to the dominant culture, a key message throughout is that academics, however the term may be understood, can do DOI: 10.4324/9781351053372-1

2  Jean McNiff much to challenge and change the situation. It is their job to use words meaningfully and vigorously for the purpose of improving the quality of life for the living planet and the living forms it supports. This is what the authors of the book do – they show the potentials of speaking for yourself when doing research, in spite of what Polanyi (1958) describes as ‘the hazards involved’ when crossing ‘a gap, a heuristic gap, that lies between problem and discovery’ (143): they tell stories of what can happen when intellectuals really fulfil and execute their responsibilities (see also Chomsky’s [1996] views about the responsibility of intellectuals). The book is written for both academic and professional practitioners, inside and outside formal education settings, who are involved and interested in scholarly work: this may include lecturers, students, professional developers and concerned citizens. It is written by two kinds of author: one kind is established academics who tend to position themselves as practitioners in workplaces (as in MacFarlane’s [1995] concept of ‘the academic citizen’) and all of whom have something to say about their own current social and political situations; the other is those positioned as ‘everyday citizens’ but who have experience of academic life, say by studying for a higher degree or by delivering and monitoring higher level professional education programmes, an experience that often provides opportunities for using elements from academic life in front line workplace-­ based situations. Now to consider more deeply the power of the words, ‘the academic’ and ‘representation’, the two big ideas that constitute the golden thread throughout this book. The first idea is that ‘the academic’, whether the term refers to a person, a concept or an intellectual culture, should apply as equally to everyday situations and settings as to those that deal with specific forms of scholarly discourse and the production of published texts. The assumption throughout is that so-called ‘ordinary’ people are as capable of high-quality intellectual work as those in universities and think tanks, with their own subject-specific literatures and traditions. This view, however, is contrary to much popular thinking that sees the term ‘the academic’ as applicable only to those people in higher education institutions who deal with the literatures of specialist scholarship, but who are not necessarily connected with what de Certeau (1984) calls ‘the practices of every day life’. The chapters in the book shows such positioning not to be the case: on the contrary, the chapter authors, working in a range of social situations, have much to say about the contribution that third-level academics, often working collaboratively with other informed citizens, can make to others’ experience of everyday life. In relation to the second idea of representation, the book raises questions about who can or should represent whom. A useful definition of ‘representation’ is offered by Pitkin (1972): she points out that the everyday concept of ‘representation’ can have two meanings: ‘stand as’ and ‘stand for’. ‘Stand as’ tends to imply that one thing stands in place of another – one person may represent their entire family when booking a holiday, and a spokesperson may represent one or a hundred people – whereas ‘stand for’ tends to be used in relation to

Introduction 3 Table 1.1  The idea of ‘representation’ Represent (legal, political) Represent (symbolic)

Stand as: e.g. ‘She stands as our candidate: she represents us.’ Stand for: e.g. ‘She stands for justice: she communicates our views.’

values-oriented words: a person may stand for a tradition or belief; they may stand for oligarchy or democracy. Thus ‘representation’ can refer to both ‘standing as’ in a political/legalistic sense, where one person may represent others, as in government, and also ‘standing for’ in a symbolic sense, as portraying something, including values and commitments (Table 1.1). Further, what a person stands as usually communicates what they stand for: a person standing as a political candidate will stand for what their party stands for, whether to conserve the status quo or to change the situation; a spokesperson standing as an advocate for the oppressed will stand for their right to be heard. In this book, authors are clear about what they stand as and what they stand for: they stand as themselves; they do not claim to represent an institution, or perhaps traditionalist notions of Academia; and they are clear about the need to stand for courage, honesty and compassion, the right of all to speak for themselves and to combat prejudice and unfairness. They speak for themselves, and what they have to say should be noted and acted upon by other academics, about how they also might revisit their thinking about what their job involves and what they stand for in academic life. A key aim promoted throughout the book, then, is to communicate the view that the task of an academic is to engage both in scholarly thinking work and in the kind of practical other-oriented work that will influence democratically cooperative developments in the social world. This means that academics should use their knowledge and skills to help others, whatever their circumstances, to achieve the highest standards of work within their reach, and who will in turn use the knowledge they acquire in the service of human and non-human others and for the future of the planet. It is the task of academics to engage in scholarly work; to work with ideas and to communicate those ideas in ways that others may access them easily and use them for social good, the realisation of what Rorty (1999) calls ‘social hope’; and to challenge voices that claim that some people are entitled to be called ‘an academic’ simply because of their personal, social or institutional positioning. However, these views tend to go against the current climate of the need for universities to serve the interests of business as a primary concern (see, for example, Giroux, 2020) and the conflicts that may subsequently arise. Many stories in the literatures show that academics themselves experience their work differently: while some do communicate their less favourable experiences of higher education as stories to leave by (as in Schaefer et al., 2014, see also Fitzpatrick, 2019), others focus on celebrating the positive, to communicate their experiences as stories to live by (Clandinin and Connelly, 1998). This second stance is the one

4  Jean McNiff adopted by the authors of this book: while they acknowledge the frequent tensions experienced in academic life and work, they choose to celebrate the positive aspects that brought them into higher education in the first place, and find ways of ensuring that others will do so too. They espouse the idea promoted by Joelle Fanghanel (2012), that: [A]cademic roles are not scripted; they are constructed and inhabited through navigating the tensions between structures, the communities in which practice takes place, and academics’ own positions towards structures. (2) So they choose to script their own roles and lives, and by doing so, they navigate the difficult waters of managerialism (Deem et al., 2007), performativity (Lyotard, 1986), and the frequent pressures of acting as an income stream for the institution: the establishment of a deficit tradition that can all too often affect the quality and enjoyment of academic work with a consequent reduction in ­wellbeing and work-life enjoyment. They recognise that the nature of much academic work itself has narrowed, as recorded by Rolfe (2013: 11), that ‘Academic research has become a technology, an information machine driven by the ethos of efficiency and administration rather than intellectual craftsmanship, the desire for knowledge and the building and testing of theory’, with the result that ‘The university is therefore moving away from the values of the academy towards the rules and rigours of manufacturing industry and the production line’ (op cit. 11). So they choose instead also to locate academic work in the cultures of everyday life, celebrating the transformation of potentially ruinous academic cultures (Readings, 1996) into life-affirming cultures of enquiry, as set out in Nixon’s (2008) ‘Virtuous University’ and Rowland’s (2006) ‘Enquiring University’. But still thinking about the work of words, consider what might happen when ‘representation’ and ‘academic’ are put together, and the relevance for this book.

Linking ‘representation’ and ‘the academic’ Two points must be borne in mind: first, the concept of ‘representation’ takes on different meanings depending on the political will of the speaker or hearer, as the case may be, and second, while the concept of ‘the academic’ has always been, and continues to be understood as to do with demonstrating critical and scholarly engagement, the person referred to today as an ‘academic’ may be seen quite differently and have quite different commitments from times gone by. Even as recently as, perhaps, 20 years ago, an academic would have been understood as located in a university, an institution of higher learning, not in a college or industrial setting, except in the role of a visitor. But the ground has shifted: things have changed. An academic today can occupy many roles, and work in a range of settings, including as support worker or professional tutor for workplace-based practitioners (as recorded in the chapters of this book): while their soul may still be at ease in a scholarly setting or with a text containing words

Introduction 5 and ideas, their bodies may be equally comfortable in the everyday contexts of hospitals, schools and farmyards, all with their own texts and traditions. Here, in this book, as well as considering what is generally understood by the terms ‘representation’ and ‘academic’, the focus shifts to how the terms are interpreted and used by authors, some institution-bound and others not. All have personal and professional associations with and experience of academic and workplace cultures; they are also experienced writers, so are able to communicate ideas coherently and with authority, while also speaking from within their own professional contexts and traditions. Some authors are positioned as representing others, others as those being represented: nevertheless, in this book, all take the view that they represent and speak for themselves rather than colleagues or their institution. Questions then arise about their credentials and the believability of what they say. Are they qualified to speak with authority about the matter? Who says, and on whose authority do they claim to be authorised to say it? Difficult matters these, all historically and culturally informed: they require recognising that one is located within one’s own cultural tradition and that all such traditions are informed by their histories and values. Here, authors speak for themselves, from their own experience, while recognising that their own understandings may be different from others’; they have learned on the job, the hard way, appreciating the need to involve others in their everyday work and where possible to build communities of practice. These ideas have implications also for questions of legitimation, as in Habermas (1975), especially the legitimation of opinion. It raises questions such as: who says what is right? And who says they are right to make such judgements? The matter of legitimising the validity of words and works, and of legitimising legitimacy itself is especially relevant to the matter of who is able and authorised to speak for themselves, or on behalf of others. It is a contested issue, given that it is to do with identity, self-esteem and authority to speak, and so is bound to involve some negotiation between different perspectives. On the one hand is the idea that all people can and are entitled to speak for themselves, privately and in the public domain, when their views may be listened to and debated, though not necessarily condoned, and legitimised according to what is held as the right action for the context, at least in principle (Berlin, 2013); on the other, an understanding that the enactment of this idea is not automatic. Too often the voices of ‘ordinary people’ are suppressed or outnumbered by more authoritarian written and spoken texts that maintain that people cannot think for themselves: Walter Lippman (Cole, 2022), for example, held this view: he spoke about everyday people as ‘the bewildered herd’. Further, power-holders often maintain that those in power have the right to speak for others, a view held today by many contemporary governments and institutions: see, for example, Ball’s (2007: 27) comments on how performance management works: see also the comment by Marx referring to ‘everyday people’ (in Said, 1995: xiii), that ‘They cannot represent themselves; they must be represented’. While this statement may have been true at the time of Marx’s writing, in 1852,1 given that they had little access to education

6  Jean McNiff or Parliament, it is no longer necessarily true today. Yet it remains contested, especially by those traditionalist academics in elitist third-level institutions that wish to achieve the highest scores on international leagues tables, many of whom would still perceive ‘everyday workers’ as not appropriate for higher education. Another perspective altogether, the one promoted in this book, is the idea that all people can and are entitled to speak for themselves, in the public domain, when their views may be listened to and debated, and legitimised according to what is held as the right action for the social and cultural context. This view provides the bedrock assumptions for the book; all authors may be seen as qualified to speak about such matters. Each is experienced and involved in academic work, though their interpretations of what their work involves and how they are positioned may be different from that presented in the orthodox literatures. They represent a new kind of academic who assumes a range of roles and positions: whereas previously an academic was seen mainly as a higher education practitioner, nowadays they are seen as including informed citizens who have something to say about the nature and aims of politically and socially oriented intellectual work. Their workplaces are as much social media and digital and populist platforms as physical buildings; their audience is the wider populace, unconstrained by institutional roles. A debate arises about the nature and purpose of the public sphere itself, whether its purposes should be to foster informed critical engagement by all or whether to colonise intellectual and social spaces in the interests of the privileged few: these issues are touched on throughout. It is a complex field indeed. And, given all these twists and turns of the meanings and uses of words, it is important to keep Doxtader’s caution above in mind: that the work of words is to ‘constitute the potential for politics and a politics of potential’. The authors of this book know this.

The relevance of these matters for this book The book is written for a range of readers, most perhaps working as professional practitioners inside and outside higher education settings. These include lecturers, students, professional developers and similarly concerned citizens, all involved and interested in investigating the nature and purposes of politically oriented thinking work. It takes the form of a collection of essays and statements by people who have something to say about the matter that may be useful and relevant to others who find themselves in similar situations. Those people are dual professionals, with experience of their own practice settings as well as higher education settings. They are deeply knowledgeable about their subject matters; they have read the books and served their apprenticeships. As scholars they maintain high academic standards: they demonstrate expert knowledge of their topics and capacity in writing and communicating, including literary conventions such as accurate spelling and correct textual referencing, high-quality grammatical work and well-presented arguments. All aspects are needed: high-quality professional work deserves an informed and refined quality of presentation.

Introduction 7 All authors speak for themselves: their chapters represent their own views. Theirs is the real ‘work of words’, as outlined by Doxtader (see above). They believe in specific values and commitments that influence what counts as legitimate knowledge and who counts as a legitimate knower. They believe that an academic (more broadly, in Said’s 1994 terms, an intellectual) is a person who is unafraid to speak for themselves and tell their own truths: … someone whose whole being is staked on a critical sense, a sense of being unwilling to accept easy formulas, or ready-made clichés, or the smooth, ever-so, accommodating confirmations of what the powerful or conventional have to say, and what they do. Not just passively unwilling, but actively willing to say so in public. (Said, 1994: 17) As editor, I also have adopted a specific stance: I take the view that I do not represent authors in the sense of speaking for them so much as create an opportunity for them to speak for and represent themselves. They stand as themselves: their words are their own, though I have fulfilled my job as editor and copyeditor in ensuring that the language and content throughout is accessible to all readers and error-free. Understandably authors and I as editor share many of the values that inform their work, otherwise we would not have agreed to work together; all hold strongly egalitarian values and come from a context where they promote a democratic culture, where all voices are valued and respected. This provides strong unifying themes and currents. To repeat, the book itself is timely and important, given the rapid and powerful trends discussed above in terms of conceptualisations of what counts as academic practice and who counts as an academic. A fairly consistent view remains in relation to what counts as ‘good practice’: it means demonstrating critical and scholarly engagement and knowledge of the field under study and related domains; observing the conventions of good texts, including those of accurate spelling and grammar and appropriate paragraphing, and of good ethical conduct. By ‘critical’ is meant that one does not take things at face value, including one’s own texts, but interrogates them with discernment. By ‘scholarly’ is meant demonstrating knowledge of the field and engagement with appropriate and related and cognate literatures. However, in relation to who counts as an academic, opinions are much more divergent. As noted throughout, on the one hand, representing (in my view) a more positive, egalitarian perspective, the demographic of higher education has changed and is now interrelated with other sectors and professions (see also Collins and Bilge, 2016, on intersectionality): people in everyday professional practices such as nursing and engineering are part of the higher education workforce, especially in professional education contexts. Some of those people who are part of this process are present here: they are represented by their words – the real ‘work of words’, as outlined by Doxtader (above). They believe in specific values and commitments: like Appadurai (2006),

8  Jean McNiff the authors believe in the power of global cultural and epistemological flows that influence what counts as legitimate knowledge and who counts as a legitimate knower. Their commitments include the idea of ‘the academy’ as constituting a public sphere that provides an inclusional space for ongoing dialogue among concerned and committed participants, as a possible site for the institutionalisation of social hope (Rorty, 1999). They believe that ‘the academic’ should be about promoting the development of a critical (Said, 1994) and, where necessary, an adversarial culture (Altschull, 1980) that challenges the current hegemony of the market place. The main task of the academic, for them, is to transform the current mood of the demoralisation of the Academy, especially in higher education, into one of hope and optimism; to realise the need for ‘the academic practitioner’ to be seen as advocate for the values of freedom and pluralism (Berlin, 1998) and epistemic responsibility (Code, 1987), while acknowledging that these values themselves must be open to critique as well as the current philosophical tradition that supports the idea of a uniformly agreed aim for human and non-human living.

Envoi And this is who we are, we authors who have written this book. Like Rorty (1999), we have a good sense of social hope, a realisation perhaps of the responsibility of those who can speak for themselves to speak on behalf of others who have not such opportunities: that if positioned as ‘an academic’, whether sought or unsought, they have a responsibility to strive to influence the direction of those global cultural and epistemological flows mentioned above, and perhaps redirect them away from the elites-only context and towards the common good. And this is how we work with words: this is what we do.

Note 1 https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/ch07.htm

References Altschull (1980) Agents of Power. New York: Routledge. Appadurai (2006) ‘The right to research’; in Globalisation, Societies and Education 4:2: pp. 167–177; doi: 10.1080/14767720600750696. Ball, S. (2007) Education Plc: Understanding Private Sector Participation in Public Sector Education. Abingdon: Oxford. Routledge. Ball, S. (2012) Global Education Inc. Abingdon: Routledge. Berlin, I. (2013) The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the History of Ideas (ed. H. Hardy). London: Pimlico. Chomsky, N. (1996) ‘The responsibility of intellectuals’; reprinted in N. Chomsky (1988) The Chomsky Reader (ed. J. Peck). London: Serpent’s Tail. Clandinin, J. and Connelly, M. (1998) ‘Stories to Live By: Narrative Inquiry and School Reform’; in Curriculum Inquiry 28:2: pp. 149–164.

Introduction 9 Code, L. (1987) Epistemic Responsibility (1st ed.) Brown University Press. New York: SUNY. Cole, D. (2022) ‘In the Midst of Our Civic Crisis, Walter Lippmann’s “Public Opinion” Still Speaks’; in 3 Quarks Daily; https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/ 2022/01/in-the-midst-of-our-civic-crisis-walter-lippmanns-public-opinion-stillspeaks.html; accessed 24.10.2022. Collins, P. H. and Bilge, S. (2016) Intersectionality. Cambridge: Polity. de Certeau, M. (1984) The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press. Deem, R., Hillyard, S. and Reed, M. (2007) Knowledge, Higher Education and the New Managerialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Doxtader, E. (2009) With Faith in the Work of Words: The beginnings of reconciliation in South Africa, 1985-1995. Claremont, SA: David Philip Publishers. Fanghanel, J. (2012) Being an Academic. London: Routledge. Fitzpatrick, K. (2019) Generous Thinking: A Radical Approach to Saving the University. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Giroux, H. (2020) Neoliberalism’s War on Higher Education. Haymarket: Chicago. Habermas, J. (1975) Legitimation Crisis. New York: Beacon Books. Lyotard, J.-F. (1986) The Postmodern Condition. Manchester: Manchester University Press. MacFarlane, B. (1995) The Academic Citizen: The Virtue of Service in University Life. Abingdon: Routledge. Nixon, J. (2008) Towards the Virtuous University. Abingdon: Routledge. Pitkin, H. F. (1972) The Concept of Representation. University of California. Polanyi, M. (1958) Personal Knowledge. London: Routledge, Kegan and Paul. Readings, B. (1996) The University in Ruins. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Rolfe, G. (2013) The University in Dissent: Scholarship in the Corporate University. Abingdon: Routledge, and Society for Research into Higher Education. Rorty, R. (1999) Philosophy and Social Hope. London: Penguin. Rowland, S. (2006) The Enquiring University. Maidenhead: Open University. Said, E. (1994) Representations of the Intellectual. London: Vintage. Said, E. (1995) Orientalism. London: Vintage. Schaefer, L., Downey, C. A. and Clandinin, D. J. (2014) ‘Shifting from Stories to Live By to Stories to Leave By: Early Career Teacher Attrition’; In Teacher Education Quarterly, pp. 9–27; available online at https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1072103. pdf; accessed 16.9.2021.

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Gamification of personal learning trajectories Camilla Gyldendahl-Jensen

Introduction In this chapter, I consider and develop ideas about how game-based learning can challenge normative traditional instructional practices, still commonplace in many Higher Education (HE) contexts, where content is usually delivered from teacher to students. As an educator in HE, I have encountered many instances where students fail to create individual learning trajectories, that is, decisions and plans about how they are going to proceed in light of what they have already learned. I explain how game-based learning can provide new opportunities for how academic practices, including reflection and analysis, can be learned in a more individualised, exploratory way. I argue that this approach to learning tends to support the development of reflective and individual learning trajectories and can lead to the development of an innovative learning culture. The chapter therefore presents a design strategy for how game mechanisms, such as Quest, Levels and Game Over, can inspire the creation of new innovative forms of what are often referred to as academic or scholarly practices.

Current approaches to personalised learning practices In my experience, many students lack specific learning strategies for how to develop enquiry-based attitudes and behaviours appropriate for engaging with the in-depth analysis of learning content that can lead to meaningful learning experiences. Often this means that students need to work out for themselves how to bridge the gap between theory and practice though analytical disciplines, a process that can be difficult and frustrating for many. One of my PhD students describes the frustration of having to define a personal learning pathway using an enquiry-based approach to their project: … you felt that it was unstructured… what is the final goal? And so often, the teachers keep it open, like their attitude is, ‘How do you want to proceed? What do you think might be exciting?’ But those teachers already know what they want to see. So it would be very nice if they just said, ‘Do this and this.’ DOI: 10.4324/9781351053372-2

Gamification of personal learning trajectories 11 Another student explains how becoming analytic and adopting exploratory appoaches as an individual learning goal is not a priority: Not one of us had ‘analysis’ as a learning goal. We simply identified learning goals relevant to the specific knowledge to be learned, and then we dived into the topic under consideration. This approach from students suggests a lack of understanding of the meaning of context, given that the development of innovative knowledge requires both a critical and analytical processing of a combination of practice and theory. Moreover, a large number of my students in the technology programmes at my University have a vocational background as their entry point into HE. Their previous training has led them to become experts in following instructions with a primary focus on finding the ‘right solution’, and then drawing on this experience when developing a framework appropriate for an HE context. At the same time, in HE, they encounter an educational system that tends to consider learning and the acquisition of knowledge through a professional and linear progression of isolated activities. Consequently, if these students are to become reflective, adopt an analytical approach to a project and become innovative and creative, they must be able to collaborate and share their knowledge across programmes, disciplines and nationalities while developing and maintaining a critical approach to their subject matter. A concern for me, therefore, is that, if teachers’ pedagogical approaches are based on the traditional dissemination of specific knowledges, they may experience difficulties in motivating students to become enthusiastic about developing an enquirybased approach to academic study, much less be interested in disciplines whose relevance they might not even see. Further, such approaches to teaching and learning do not support the development of what I call would ‘academic competencies’, such as the ability to challenge existing academic content through the kind of critical, analytical, curious questioning and critical reflective practices involved in the risky business of moving into unknown territory (Figure 2.1). Rather, I maintain that it is necessary for HE-based professional educators to develop teaching strategies that will encourage new teachers to develop reflexive and innovative teaching approaches that encourage students to develop both a high degree of personal management as well as a high level of problem solving capacity. I also maintain that, drawing on interpretations from Practice Theory, Dreier’s (2016) description of learning as ‘landscapes of practice’ suggests that education should be understood and designed as the formation of complex and personal learning trajectories. Thus I argue that a consideration of learning as a complex landscape of personal learning trajectories can provide an opportunity to think in terms of design strategies that might more effectively help students to develop meaningful learning experiences through enquiry-oriented approaches to the study of traditional academic disciplines. In this context, I see future visions of gamebased learning as a great source of inspiration, especially the principles behind ‘Serious games’, ‘Quest to learn’ or any kind of games based on a constructivist/ enquiry-based approach. What interests me in particular is how it might be possible

12  Camilla Gyldendahl-Jensen

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Figure 2.1  Schematic overview of academic disciplines or activities that point towards a reflexive, innovative and exploratory learning culture.

to encourage the acquisition of generic academic skills through enquiry-based learning, as found in game-based learning, as an overall design for an appropriate teaching strategy. Game-based learning involves the indirect facilitation of processes combined with playful aspects that motivate its users to develop persistence, daring to make mistakes, as well as aiming for others’ acceptance of innovative new ideas. Game-based learning, therefore, can provide new ideas and opportunities for thinking about how academic topics can be learned in a much more innovative and exploratory way. I see this proposed new way of learning as a useful strategy for supporting the development of reflective and individualised learning trajectories and at the same time creating an innovative learning culture. Here, therefore, I present a design strategy for how game mechanisms can inspire the creation of innovative approaches to academic study through providing the freedom to challenge existing content and develop new approaches and understandings. First I explain what ‘individual learning trajectories’ means and how engaging with practice theory can challenge what counts as acceptable knowledge. Then, in the next section, I will discuss how the design of individual learning trajectories through game thinking can point towards a new way of teaching academic topics. In the last section, based on my own work, I will present a theoretical model for how game-based learning can be reconceptualised through the presentation of six game principles.

The meaning of individual learning trajectories As an educator in HE, I often experience how the established educational community approaches learning, and how the restrictive demands and tight rules about what counts as content can constrain free thinking. The Committee for

Gamification of personal learning trajectories 13 Quality and Relevance in HE, set up by the Danish Research and Education Ministry, reached the same conclusion in 2014. Their report suggests that it is crucial that students should be supported in applying professional knowledge in a creative and innovative way in order to ensure the continued development of the profession’s practice. The report has this to say, among other things: A basic professionalism is not necessarily enough to ensure the relevance of the programs. The research literature on what makes graduates attractive in the job market points to the fact that some general competencies linked to professional knowledge often determine whether graduates find jobs. In addition to academic understanding and abilities, the Dimitry students must be inventive, creative and able to apply the basic skills to the greatest possible benefit. (Kvalitetsudvalget, 2014) In other words, during their studies, students must be expert at transforming their basic skills into a project-oriented context (Kvalitetsudvalget, 2014). The report of the Quality Committee provides an opportunity to discuss how HE institutions can develop new teaching strategies that will help future students to transform and explore their professionalism; they can do this for themselves, actively and independently, through their own critical analysis and process of reflection. However, based on my own experience as an educator in HE, I have found that the process of building bridges between theory and practice through reflection processes works best when delegated solely to the students. Consequently, if students do not have the specific learning strategies needed for working in depth with their analyses, they are often put in the position where they do not know what the next step is. This is a situation all too often strengthened by a view that students should not have the freedom to challenge the prescribed curriculum but should stick with normative rules and procedures. This problem is also noted by the Quality Committee, which points out that: Higher education programs have a major responsibility for [ensuring that] students develop general competencies that are complementary, transforming and possible. (Kvalitetsudvalget, 2014) One of the committee’s main arguments is precisely that it is restrictive requirements and rules regarding content of the educational system that challenges professional quality, as well as students’ freedom to challenge the accepted syllabus, as noted in the following comment: It is the opinion of the Committee that a number of systemic mechanisms in recent years have put the quality of higher education under pressure. (Kvalitetsudvalget, 2014)

14  Camilla Gyldendahl-Jensen Based on the application of practice theory to learning, I therefore argue that future forms of teacher professional education should be based largely on facilitating different multimodal learning activities and learning spaces. These activities will together provide and strengthen teachers’ ability to act professionally in a changing reality. Further, while the traditions of practice theory maintain that learning occurs as a gradual, cumulative or anticipated process of development that follows predictable pathways (trajectories), it is also recognised that sudden obstructions and disturbances can trigger reflection and thereby initiate a new phase of knowledge development (Dreier, 2016; Schatzki, 2017b). For example, Theodore Schatzki describes learning as a process that follows a metaphorical path consisting of different knowledges and episodes of experiences that overlap and build upon each other. In practice, this would take the form of a series of multimodal activities that are constantly challenged by obstructions and disturbances (Schatzki, 2017b). Therefore, over time, the chosen path would reflect opportunities for achieving specific learnings based on the dependency relationship between the two concepts Proceed and Depends: these communicate ideas about how students are going to proceed, depending on what they have already learned (Schatzki, 2017b). In my view, considering learning as a complex landscape of personal learning trajectories provides an opportunity to think in terms of design strategies; to a large degree, these can help students understand how to navigate complex learning processes that point to new insights, and thereby inspire innovative representations of what counts as ‘the academic’ as a concept (Dreier, 2016; Schatzki, 2017b). It represents a way of thinking that encourages educators to change their focus from the dissemination of knowledge to a process form of thinking. I am not saying that process activities should replace traditional lectures: rather that there is need for a holistic educational approach where the deliberate facilitation of traditional academic disciplines supplement the teacher’s capacity for the dissemination of knowledge (see Figure 2.2). By ‘deliberate facilitation’, I mean the targetted and purposeful selection of academic activities that provide personal

Reading

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Different academic disciplines

Personal learning trajectories

Figure 2.2  Schematic overview of how academic disciplines can be combined into personal learning trajectories.

Gamification of personal learning trajectories 15 learning trajectories within the broader learning environment. It is my view that it is precisely through the identification and complexification of processual and multimodal activities that provides the teacher with the opportunity to challenge the students’ capacity for enquiry by obstructing and disturbing their conventional ways of thinking and thereby creating opportunities for new learning. The teacher thus sets the framework for learning where the individual trajectories are consistently interrupted and made discontinuous so that the student’s agency, capacity and ability to act in the learning process are brought into play (Dreier, 2016; Schatzki, 2017b) Within this framework, students have the freedom independently and actively to combine activities and thereby create learning trajectories that follow individual formulations of problems or project descriptions. It is crucial that the choices that draw and affect the development of personal learning trajectories are so clear that they allow the student to reflect on the relationship between Proceed and Depends. The teacher needs to be confident that the activities chosen will automatically direct the student towards new knowledge pathways, and will therefore appreciate that they do not have control over which pathways the student chooses. It thus becomes the role of the teacher to design the teaching situation so that students are helped to build bridges between theory and practice through the interaction of reflection processes combined with analytical and exploratory forms of behaviour.

Design of individual learning trajectories through game thinking In this section, I elaborate on how the principles of game-based learning can inspire the development of a teaching design based on a new interpretation of how the academic element might be represented when students follow personal learning trajectories. First, however, I introduce the theoretical perspective of game-based learning as a concept. Game-based learning has the specific structure of defining traits as its characteristics, such as the indirect facilitation of processes through playful and motivating aspects, where goals that change at different levels demand the student’s attention. Several studies have demonstrated how game-based learning can create behavioral persistence, the capacity to make mistakes as well as to develop innovative new ideas in a social context. These motivational elements are directly embedded in a game structure: curiosity is especially seen as a key incentive for exploratory behavior (Deterding, 2012; Erenli, 2013; Gyldendahl-Jensen and Dau, 2019; McGonigal, 2011; Morris et al., 2013; Schreier et al., 2016; Sourmelis et al., 2017). In 2014, Charlotte Lærke Weitze explained the link between how a learning goal can interact with a game goal and provide a way to define the limits and available opportunities through the mechanics used in the game: according to Weitze (2014): The game mechanics support the goal since the rules, possibilities, and challenges in the game are constructed in a way such that the player has to gain knowledge to experience and practice how they reach the end goal.

16  Camilla Gyldendahl-Jensen I see a strong and interesting match between the learning comprehension of practice theory and the structure that, as described, characterises game-based learning (Schatzki, 2017b) Entire series of multimodal and academic activities can be constantly challenged by the teacher through game thinking, given that the design of sub-goals supports whatever obstacles or challenges have to be overcome for learning to take place. Rules and sub-goals will thus influence, shape and develop a learning trajectory that, over time, will reflect possibilities for achieving new knowledge and skills based on the dependency relationship between Proceed and Depends (Schatzki, 2017b; Weitze, 2014). Video games often contain various types of ‘LevelUp’ systems, designed to ensure continuous progress through a form of self-monitoring, where instant feedback provides students with valuable information about progress (Deterding, 2012; Erenli, 2013; Gyldendahl-Jensen, 2016; Gyldendahl-Jensen, and Dau, 2019; McGonigal, 2011; Morris et al., 2013). It therefore becomes clear that the impact of gamebased learning within education is about affording different levels of knowledge abstraction though applying the concepts of level thinking, badges, time constraint, limited resources, clear goals and various game styles in a holistic game system (Deterding, 2012; Farber, 2015; Schreier et al., 2016). A literature review by Sourmelis et al. (2017) refers to several studies that indicate how gaming activities can facilitate the development of particular problem-­ solving skills among the users; and … can instigate players to analyze new situations, interact with people that don’t really know, solve problems, think strategically, and collaborate effectively, all of which are essential skills for the knowledge workers of the 21st century workspace. (Sourmelis et al., 2017) In my view, the capacity of video games to lessen the fear of failure by providing a framework that serves as a kind of safe zone is markedly different from the conditions that apply to problem- and process-oriented teaching, where errors often lead to a lack of motivation (Gyldendahl-Jensen, 2018; Illeris, 2007; Madsen, 2013). This difference is just one of the reasons why I am so interested in gamebased learning as a concept. In games, there is even a culture where the process is repeated until the goal is reached, leading users continually to force errors, and through that develop new solutions, thus creating continual momentum in the game (Deterding, 2012; Erenli, 2013; McGonigal, 2011; Morris et al., 2013). In particular, I think this behaviour can be characterised as being innovative, analytical and reflective, a view also confirmed by two anthropological studies by Bonnie A. Nardi (2010) and Mark Chen (2012). My own work with game based-learning has primarily been inspired by the genre of ‘Serious games’, ‘Quest to learn’ or any other kind of games based on the premises of construction and exploration. I am particularly interested in those genres of game-based learning, in light of the fact that the embedded game mechanisms combine different types of quest-activities, which in turn

Gamification of personal learning trajectories 17 create a narrative and process-oriented trajectory. Game-based learning therefore provides new opportunities for how academic topics can be learned in a much more process-oriented and exploratory way. What interests me especially is how it is possible to facilitate the acquisition of generic academic skills through exploratory learning, inspired by game-based learning as a specifically-designed overall teaching strategy. A discussion between Matthew Farber and Katie Salen (Farber, 2015), the founders of the concept Quest to learn, describes the link between problem-based learning and game-based learning: Games are spaces of inquiry, spaces of problem-solving. Games have a couple of particular affordances to them, like you know when a game is over. That’s where the notion of an endpoint is really important. The notion is a stylization of behavior or mechanic that gets repeated over and over again – it affords choice to the player. Students feel like they driving the space. You can constrain the problem space enough so you can anticipate types of choices a player might make. There are really specific things to games… the philosophy of learning is the same – it’s problem-based, it’s inquiry-based. (Farber 2015) Traditionally, game-based learning is built around a narrative based on a particular curriculum. However, I think it is far more interesting to work with game-based learning through a vision of the students’ experience of how the freedom of their own learning processes provides direction for the game and thus becomes the narrative. This vision means that the actual design of the game has to contain many different types of multimodal activities that can be combined arbitrarily while motivating students to work in depth through different paced strategies, where they are able to work with slow and fast processes as the situation demands. It’s not just about winning the game: doing the project is itself the end goal.

The design of a game-based learning framework What I now want to explore is how the design of a gamification framework can support the vision of creating a new representation of the concept ‘academic’ through individual learning trajectories. This teaching design is the result of an iterative process at the education of architectural and construction management (ATCM), at the University College of Northern Denmark. The interaction between the development of game designs and practical teaching session took place over three years (2003–2006) in which a total of 400 students participated. The study is thus based on a case study that aims to develop conceptual designs of learning games. The Educational Research Design method (Gynther et al., 2012; McKenney and Reeves, 2018) has been used as the overarching research strategy, where both teachers and I as a researcher have taken part in both developing processes and data collection through the practical testing of the game designs. The developed learning design

18  Camilla Gyldendahl-Jensen

Creating flow

Creating Curiosity

Established forms of thinking Creating Situatedness

Creating Reflecting

Creating Meta-strategy

Figure 2.3  The design of a game-based learning framework, consisting of six gaming principles that together create a holistic learning situation.

has thus been tested continuously in a range of situations that have varied according to number of students, amount of time and content or degree of interdisciplinarity. The focus of all the practical teaching sessions has been either what is known as a ‘problem-based semester project’ or ‘intensive innovation workshop’. My work, located at the University College of Northern Denmark, has a special focus on the themes of Architectural Technology and Construction Management. I have been mixing and crossing-referencing different gaming principles with the goal of generating new knowledge about how they interact with each other, in order to develop a generic design for the use of gamebased learning in HE. Throughout this process, it has been crucial for me to ­create new knowledge about how game-based learning can inform and inspire the development of individual learning trajectories, especially those that challenge the traditional understanding of academic representations as being only about knowledge dissemination. The model I have developed consists of six gaming principles that together create a holistic design for a game-based learning situation (Figure 2.3). Although the six principles are presented and explained separately, they should be seen as interactive aspects of an overall unit that both informs and supports the student’s learning process.

Using Quest to stimulate curiosity The model presented in Figure 2.3 is based on a game-based learning design that consists of different types of quest that mediate and support the student’s learning. In this context, Quest will be understood as comprising different kinds

Gamification of personal learning trajectories 19 of activities whose purpose is to stimulate the student’s curiosity when following their own process of problematising. Through understanding the curriculum as a quest, the students may be continually supported by the provision of academic activities that challenge the learning process on several levels, thus allowing the students to create their own individual learning trajectories. Such quest-activities introduce students to new fields of study and theories that constitute potential obstructions to their learning and challenge them to seek innovative solutions. They encourage a puzzle mindset where the possibilities of combining different elements can contribute to a more in-depth learning process. Each quest activity triggers points that allow new levels to be reached and thereby new quests. A student describes how they experienced being rewarded for working in depth with their project: So you are rewarded for going in depth; you get a quick reward for going in depth with something that you may not have spent much time on before. If quest is to stimulate the students’ desire to challenge the prescribed syllabus, it is crucial that the selected quest is not built around a narrative story that is guided by a particular curriculum. Instead, each quest should be focused on generic academic tools that strengthen and support the student’s freedom to challenge their own learning process. A student describes the experience by using quest as a facilitating tool as follows: I really think it’s a great help: we made some things we would not have made otherwise. And we described a lot of things we normally would not have described so well. It helped us work out what we really need to consider. This approach implies a constant shift of positions for the students created by the game activities, combined with one specific direction that will help them achieve the final goals of their projects.

Using level up as a way to create flow Nardi (2010) explains the relationship between ‘game design’ and the feeling of flow as active participation towards a final goal, which, at the same time, is also experienced as the process of interacting with the present moment. The idea of Level Up can in this context be described as ‘successive phases’ that use colours to represent different quest activities as sequential structures. Dividing activities into levels, as in Figure 2.4, provides students with the option of reviewing the next step. Consider how this student describes how a level thinking helps to ensure that the learning process is continually challenged: And it made sense and, as we discussed earlier, we work with things that we would never have dared to do before. And if I had 100 questions, then it would have been clear which one I would want to take.

20  Camilla Gyldendahl-Jensen

Figure 2.4  Academic activities organised as levels that give students the opportunity to review the next step.

In other words, if the students had already had a list of suggestions for possible activities, they would have chosen the most obvious ones. When the activities are divided into levels, it creates a form of flow where the students actively and critically choose and select activities based on relevant criteria. They are forced to consider activities whose purpose they would not normally see. At the same time, the teacher has the option of influencing this process, given that the student will be dependent on having to work with a certain number of activities in order to accumulate enough points to get to the next level. Here is how students describe how the selection of activities gives ownership while still challenged by the rules of the game: But I think especially the fact that we have been doing things we would not otherwise have done. At least I think so. There are many things we would have just skipped or not even thought about if the game had not challenged us. It helps to have a good start, where you follow it a lot at the beginning but then, as time goes by, you might walk away from it more and more. But if you look in the envelopes to see what is in there, then some of it is activities you will work with. Some of the parts make you much more selective as time goes by, but I also think that it is when you get into your own project. Level thinking thus allows the student initially only to consider smaller parts of the process, which become ever more complex and meaningful as new levels are reached.

Using crafting/farming to challenge established forms of thinking and knowing Much of the game activities in video games is about crafting new items, which involves spending many hours collecting material, a process also called farming. The collection of items contributes to solving complex tasks which in themselves

Gamification of personal learning trajectories 21 can stand as a reward. The idea behind crafting could be viewed as activities that support concepts about the development of ideas or the acquisition of knowledge, leading to an innovative view of curriculum and thereby challenging the current unproblematised status of existing knowledge. The quality of the creative process is often dependent on the number of available new ideas and angles to a problem. Using a crafting principle provides a natural opportunity to incorporate fun-failure as a way to launch a fast idea generations (a term drawn from innovation pedagogy). In this process, students brainstorm relevant concepts and words for their project within a fixed time limit and thus ‘farm’ potentially new topics, directions or ideas that can subsequently challenge their project. In the following example, a student describes how their idea generation process was influenced by fun-failure thinking: We did that downstairs in the auditorium where we were to write the 50 ideas. We thought this would be cool … and we had a specific time to brainstorm in, and if we did not reach it, we should start over again. I think we had to do that two or three times … Well, it meant that the second time you did it, the ideas were much stronger. To stimulate the flow of creative ideas, it is important to use different types of tools for generating ideas. The students describe here how game-based learning has contributed to their being inspired to use tools they previously would not have chosen: Normally we would not have played with LEGO blocks … No, we would just not have had time to do that. Crafting/farming thinking is thus about creating quests based on activities with a specific focus on tools for collecting material that can challenge the process or content. The material collected can start-up a process of reflection, knowledge building, development of ideas or creating progress.

Using mission to create situatedness Another important element central to the game-based learning model is the principle of missions. A mission refers to a defined and bounded activity where students in groups coordinate their efforts to overcome specific challenges. Missions are characterised by specific contents that require specific skills and systems to succeed. A mission is thus a more complex form of activity, often taking the form of a bundle of activities. These bundles of activities represent what could be called ‘semiotic domains’, which are defined through the range of activities that people do in a certain way. Thus, mission represents a form of practice that draws on more than one modality, communicating different types of meaning. Each mission can be seen partly from a theoretical perspective relating to the type of content (facts, theories, principles) and partly from a practical

22  Camilla Gyldendahl-Jensen

Figure 2.5  M issions will affect and challenge existing activities – even create new ones, which will create horizontal levels where the students must work in depth through reflection processes to find solutions and thereby establish new knowledge.

perspective (the way in which people interact in the field). Missions are therefore crucial for building a bridge between theory and practice; the student therefore needs to know about the situated meaning of a practice or an activity in order to understand the situated significance of the individual elements, and how they can/should combine knowledge, ideas and perspectives. Missions thus affect and challenge the other activities, and this in turn can create new understandings and assumptions (Figure 2.5). The influence of the missions makes new activities meaningful and encourages further reflexive and critical changes in the learning trajectories. The size of the mission also leads to the students being kept in what I would call a horizontal learning process, in which the student is keener to explore and experiment with a chosen subtopic than to contribute to the process.

Using achievements to create reflection One of the unique reward systems in computer games is the possibility of obtaining achievements. An achievement can be defined as the realization of independent goals. Achievement is available in several variants where some merely require specific actions, such as completing an identified quest, while others are more time-consuming. The latter can be seen as a kind of meta-result that guides the students in particular directions or initiates more extended quest series. The use of a game-based learning design based on quest and level provides indirect motivation which can create a positive momentum towards reaching a final goal; but it can also stand as a negative experience by creating a loop effect

Gamification of personal learning trajectories 23 where the launch of the new quest can become a form of deliberate delay. Here is an example of a student explaining how to cheat the system. He uses the word ‘grind’ as a metaphor for a dynamic process that loops around itself where the process of getting points becomes the goal in itself. If you wanted to, then you could easily have ‘grinded’ through and then created an awful lot of points, but this was not our goal. It was more important for us to create a product instead of accumulating points. The use of a reward system based on both quest activities and also achievements is a way of preventing the students from playing or cheating the system. To achieve achievement, the student needs to have a holistic focus on the learning process. The teacher can use specific ‘achievement setups’ that set limits and requirements throughout the process, where reflection becomes the key to finding a solution. Contrary to quests and missions, achievement needs to be undertaken as part of completing a course or period of study. Also, achievement often follows a form of time sequence: for example, the student needs to achieve level x by an agreed date.

Using ‘Game Over’ to create a meta-strategy Game Over as a design principle is, in my opinion, overlooked when it comes to creating new game-based learning design. The possibility of ‘dying’, and thus being forced to start over with an activity triggers a series of interesting processes. The motivation to win the game, indirectly, pushes the students towards working at a metacognitive level through a reflexive discussion about how to solve the task. This can be done, for instance, by asking: in how many ways can this be done? And what methods are the most appropriate in relation to creating useful knowledge? In the following example of a conversation between some of my students, the concept of ‘Game Over’ triggers awareness of the need for a strategy to be decided in advance of a battle. Later, they take this analogy with them into their project work: PERSON 2:  It’s a good idea to use these extra minutes, because otherwise you

could easily risking starting all over again. PERSON 1:  You prepare by agreeing a strategy before starting PERSON 2:  And then you go to war PERSON 2:  Then you just shoot the enemy PERSON 3:  We are making a strategy PERSON 2:  This is what it is all about

When the decision is made specifically to couple crafting and farming with the Game Over principle, it sets strategic planning in operation: for example, the idea-generating process. This could happen by establishing rules to ensure a

24  Camilla Gyldendahl-Jensen professional approach to brainstorming. These rules are about how the outcome makes sense regarding the breadth and complexity of the projects. These discussions, now operating at a more metacognitive level, are essential for maintaining the professional quality of the work and reducing the temptation to finish and hasten towards the final goal. The principle, Game Over, thus supports a form of Sequential Constructive Learning, where a step-by-step approach supports students’ work. A Sequential Constructive Learning process is greatly facilitated through the capacity of the game mechanism to modify and shorten the amount of time involved. It promotes a learning process where the student’s thoughts are continually shaped and reshaped through experience, thus creating new knowledge and deeper understanding of their professionalism.

Conclusion This essay has aimed to communicate ideas about how the use of gaming principles can challenge the current established culture within HE. It can also inspire further developments for how academic topics, including reflection and analysis, can be learned in a much more exploratory way through the development of individual learning trajectories. Here the theoretical discussion points to the fact that the effectiveness of learning games seems to depend on showing how students can create opportunities to use their reflections and choices to draw up and direct the development of their personal learning trajectories. I conclude that games can inspire a culture of reflective, exploratory and innovative forms of learning in HE through the idea of learning trajectories, provided that the teacher, as a designer, understands the need for a strong and embedded relationship between Proceed and Depends in the learning design. If game-based learning is to have an impact on students’ capacity to develop reflective, exploratory and innovative competencies, it is thus crucial that the field of game design supports the intended learning processes through a holistic design strategy. There is therefore a special need for empirical research into how game mechanisms can inspire the creation of new innovative representations of the academic in a meaningful way, together with the freedom to challenge established content and create new, improved versions that better suit the needs of students in a wider fast-changing world.

References Chen, M. (2012) Leet noobs, the life and death of an expert player group in World of Warcraft. Peter Lang. Deterding, S. (2012) ‘Gamification, designing for motivation’, Interactions, 19(4), p. 14. Dreier, O. (2016) ‘Conduct of everyday life: Implications for critical psychology’, In Psychology and the conduct of everyday life (pp. 15–33). Erenli, K. (2013) ‘The impact of gamification-recommending education scenarios’, International Journal of Emerging Technologies in Learning (iJET), 8(2013).

Gamification of personal learning trajectories 25 Farber, M. (2015) Gamify your classroom - a field guide to game-based learning. New York: Peter Lang Publishing, Inc. Gyldendahl-Jensen, C. (2016) ‘Gamification of innovation processes by bringing World of Warcraft into the real world’, In EDUlearn16 (pp. 59–68). IATED. Gyldendahl-Jensen, C. (2018) ‘Modstand mod innovationsundervisning’, In Begribe Og Gøre (pp. 239–264). Frydenlund Academic. Gyldendahl-Jensen, C. and Dau, S. (2019) ‘A Framework for Game-Based Learning Design in Higher Education’, Proceedings of the 13th International Conference. Gynther, K., Christensen, O., & Petersen, T. B. (2012) Design-Based Research: introduktion til en forskningsmetode i udvikling af nye E-læringskoncepter og didaktisk design medieret af digitale teknologier. Læring og Medier, (Årg 5 nr. 9). Deterding et al. 2011. Illeris, K. (2007) Læring. 2. edition. Roskilde Universitetsforlag, p. 297. Kvalitetsudvalget (2014) ‘Høje mål - Analyserapport’, pp. 1–158. Madsen, B. (2013) ‘Om modstand – generelt og i relation til aktionslæring’, (September 2012), pp. 1–23. McGonigal, J. (2011) Reality is broken: Why games make us better and how they can change the world. London: Penguin. McKenney, S. & Reeves, T. C. (2018) Conducting educational design research. Abingdon: Routledge. Morris, B. J., Croker, S., Zimmerman, C., Gill, D., Romig, C. (2013) ‘Gaming science: the “Gamification” of scientific thinking’, Frontiers in Psychology, 4, pp. 1–16. Nardi, B. A. (2010) My life as a night elf priest: An anthropological account of World of Warcraft. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press (Technologies of the imagination), pp. 1 online resource (236 pages), illustrations. Schatzki, T. (2016) Practice theory as flat ontology. In Practice theory and research (pp. 44–58). Routledge. Schatzki, T. (2017a) Practices and learning. In Practice theory perspectives on pedagogy and education. Springer: Singapore. Schatzki, T. (2017b) Practices and learning. In Practice theory perspectives on pedagogy and education. Springer: Singapore, pp. 23–43. Schreier, K. (2016) Knowledge games: How playing games can solve problems, create insight, and make change. JHU Press. Sourmelis, T., Ioannou, A. and Zaphiris, P. (2017) ‘Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPGs) and the 21st century skills: A comprehensive research review from 2010 to 2016’, Computers in Human Behavior, 67, pp. 41–48. Weitze, C. L. (2014). ‘Developing goals and objectives for gameplay and learning’, In Learning, education and games: Volume one: Curricular and design considerations (pp. 225–249). Carnegie Mellon University ETC Press.

3

Unruly thought Valuing and supporting academics who manage mental health issues Welby Ings

Introduction I have worked in the academy for over 20 years and in that time I have supervised over 80 postgraduate theses, been the Head of a large design school and mentored a wide range of research projects. I don’t claim to be a god. Like many academics, I navigate and support diverse journeys, often without a roadmap. We hope that people on these journeys encounter the university as a place that embraces and enables very diverse kinds of intelligence. Indeed, universities have historically benefited from a broad spectrum of neurodiversity. This includes the contributions of men and women whose intellectual capacity has also engaged with instability and erratic genius. Thinkers like John Forbes Nash Jr., Kurt Gödel, Ludwig Boltzmann, Max Weber, Friedrich Nietzsche, Sylvia Plath and Neil Cole have all made extensive and profound contributions to the academy. They represent part of a rich neurodiversity that has proven both beneficial and problematic to academic values and the research journeys they support. In this chapter, I would like to ask two questions. First, how are researchers who manage diverse conditions of mental health perceived by the academy? Second, given the origin of the word University (from the Latin universitas meaning ‘the whole’), how might a university embrace and support researchers who navigate uneven mental health? So let us begin with two definitions. I use the word ‘academic’ to embrace diverse levels of research-based scholarship produced by postgraduate students, untenured staff, professors and adjunct scholars whose work resources or extends thinking in the academy. In considering mental health, I would like to adopt the World Health Organization’s (2004) definition of … a state of well-being in which the individual realises his or her own abilities, can cope with the normal stresses of life, can work productively and fruitfully, and is able to make a contribution to his or her community. (10) These definitions are things I thought about a great deal when last year two incidents occurred that made me reconsider how we engage with neurodiversity in DOI: 10.4324/9781351053372-3

Unruly thought 27 the academy. First, I received an email from an ex-student. Tim had completed a thesis under my supervision some years ago. He sent me a draft of an interactive novel he was working on that narrated the story of how he tried to manage an Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD) condition during his time at university. Second, a colleague became mentally unwell and she was anxious to hide it. We might call her Sharon. She held tenure in a university and she was afraid that her declining mental health might impact on her application for promotion. Both of these researchers had extraordinary intellects: indeed sometimes I came away from conversations with them feeling like my brain had been turned to porridge. They were able to synthesise information in very complex ways and find correlations in data where other people saw no potential connection. Statistically, academics like Tim and Sharon are not unusual. Guthrie et al. (2017) note that although there is very little available evidence based on objective clinical assessment about the prevalence of clinically defined mental health conditions in universities, ‘the most common diagnosable difficulties among working age adults are anxiety and depression’ followed by mental health diagnoses, ‘including personality disorders and psychoses such as bipolar disorder and schizophrenia’ (xiii). In the UK, it has been estimated that over six million working age people have mental health issues (McManus et al., 2009) and large proportions (>40 percent) of postgraduate students report symptoms of depression, emotional or stress-related problems (Guthrie et al. 2017). This same concern has been discussed by a range of researchers who note a higher prevalence of psychological distress and mental illness among university students than in the general population (Bayram and Bilgel 2008; Cleary, Horsfall, Baines and Happell 2011; Hunt and Eisenberg 2010; Shankar, Martin and McDonald 2009). In 2017, UK national statistics indicated that academics were found to be among the occupational groups with the highest levels of common mental disorders with prevalence around 37 percent (Guthrie et al. 2017: xv). So we might ask, given a significant and increasing proportion of academics who manage mental health conditions, how does the academy view neurodiversity and variable mental health? On the one hand, we might consider the academy from an Aristotelian position that values and promotes rational thinking, control over natural feelings and the use of stable judgment in finding an effective balance between extremes. Here, the emphasis would be on the ordered mind, and what is disordered, ‘irrational’, would be excluded. Conversely, we might consider the academy from the position of a discipline existing within it, like Disability Studies. This argues for a ‘… realisation that minds are best understood in terms of variety and difference rather than as deviations from an imagined norm’ (Price, 2011: 4). Inside this alternative paradigm, different kinds of thinking may be conceived ‘as a critical resource for higher education, not as a form of deviancy that obstructs learning or needs to be eliminated from academic life’ (Siebers in Price 2011: xi). My own thinking now gravitates towards this position, and here is the reason why. It appears to me that neurodiversity is part of the spectrum of normal life outside the academy. Our families, our neighbours and our communities engage

28  Welby Ings with this diversity as a normal consequence of being social human beings. We do not argue that ‘we are not therapists’ and assume that we should therefore exile such thinkers. Where expert help is available, we try to access it, but we also take the ‘Duty of Care’ (that is a legal requirement of universities) as a natural and ongoing responsibility. I would argue that working in the academy should not be any different. Given then, a social responsibility to accommodate a spectrum of neurodiversity when it appears in complex thinking processes in higher education environments, let us return to Tim and Sharon as a way of considering how the academy might work in productive ways to embrace and support researchers who negotiate fluctuating levels of mental health.

Tim Tim has asked that his real name be used in this chapter and what I have written about him has been constructed collaboratively and is included with his consent. For political reasons associated with visibility and ownership, he refuses to use pseudonyms in his work or allow anything to be written about him that masks his identity or wellbeing. He believes that it is only through visibility that study in tertiary education will improve for students who manage mental health conditions. Tim currently works as a graphic designer in New York. He is a highly insightful and complex thinker. In conjunction with his professional work, he runs a website that he uses as a public platform for discussing OCD and its relationship to creativity. On this site he says: I have experienced Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder since I was twelve, and with it comes extreme anxiety and at times, depression. A lot of people don’t know that I have a history of it. I hide it well. I’ve learnt to since I was young, for fear of alienation, which in turn alienated me even more. Prozac and psychiatrists don’t tend to sit well with fourteen-year old boys. Through this alienation comes a vicious cycle of fear and self-loathing, where detachment from the world around you is slow but progressive and only stopped by the realisation at adulthood that you aren’t, and were never, any different from the person sitting next to you in maths class. So, I decided to take a huge step and talk about my mental health issues in a very public domain – at University. ‘Coming out’ about my mental distress has been an enlightening experience for me. It has been the culmination of years of secrecy and guilt about a condition that is more common than anyone could know, but is side lined to the cold shoulder of whispers and blanketed condescension, all because of historical misrepresentations and fear of the unknown. This fear is a major factor in the stigmatization of mental health issues, and I believe it needs to be dealt with appropriately, and publicly, because putting a human face on a condition helps to elevate it from the realms of misconception. (Hagan n.d.: para. 3)

Unruly thought 29 Before Tim undertook postgraduate study, he came to see me. He talked about his desire to use research as a way of designing a poetic short film that might be eventually posted on YouTube. He recalled as a boy, sitting anxiously at his computer trying to locate information and finding nothing that linked his condition to anything positive, most usefully, to his creativity. He wanted to make this link for other people. Without being aware of the emerging research in the field (Ryan, Shochet and Stallman 2010; Piper and MacDonald 2008), he already knew that many students seek the comparative privacy of online environments to find out information about personal issues that cause them anxiety. When discussing this situation on his website he says: The film is targeted at a younger audience. It is designed to be accessible, going places that the written word can’t explore. With the advent of new media technologies such as YouTube and Facebook, distribution can be fast and international. This means that work can be accessible to people who it might never have reached before. The fourteen-year old boy in his room with a computer will have access to something that may talk to him in a language he understands. He may see that he is not alone and that mental health conditions can be approached in a positive way. (Hagan n.d.: para. 14) Throughout his undergraduate degree, despite sometimes debilitating episodes, Tim’s OCD had gone undetected by his peers and lecturers. This was partly because he had developed effective strategies for managing or hiding its symptoms. Nondisclosure had been important because he knew that disapproving attitudes could impact negatively on both his psycho-emotional wellbeing and recovery (Reeve 2002). Interestingly, Lloyd and Waghorn (2007) and Venville, Street and Fossey (2014) note that like Tim, a significant number of tertiary education students choose not to disclose mental illness, despite the fact that most institutional support is predicated on declaration. Leading up to his enrolment on the programme, my discussions with Tim were largely shaped by a decade of previous involvement with students who trusted me enough to talk about their mental health and its potential impact on their study. I had learned that this trust requires respect and careful handling because these students are very strategic about to whom, and under what conditions, they confide information. McAuliffe, Boddy, McLennan, and Stewart (2012) note a significant ‘reluctance of young university students with mental health concerns to engage in help-seeking behaviours’ (120). Their findings may be compared to Cranford, Eisenberg and Serras’ (2009) research which found that although 67% of college students perceived a need for mental health services, only 38% sought such services in the preceding year. The point is, most students choose not to ‘come out’ about their need to manage mental health issues. If they do, their decision needs to be taken seriously because it is part of our obligation as part of a university’s Duty of Care

30  Welby Ings requirements to respond to any disability issues that impact on a student’s health. However, I would suggest it is also part of our responsibility as educators who conceive our profession as an agent for supporting intellectual growth and ensuring social equity. Accordingly, I had learned early in any research trajectory to discuss with students the construction of a safe support team that they can wrap around their project. This team might include professionals, family and friends. The latter I have discovered are important because, as Saks (2009) notes, sometimes close associates will see early warning signs of illness before the person does. In this instance, Tim was systematic in setting up support for his study soon after he discussed applying for the programme. Initially he scoped the support systems existing in the university and beyond. Then he met with individuals who he felt would be helpful and explained the nature of his intended research. While he was doing this, we talked through his triggers and early warning signs of illness, and how he might deal with these if they arose. Saks (2009) discusses this strategy as one of the fundamental steps anyone with a mental illness in a university should take. She says it is important to ‘understand how your illness affects you [because] you are in the best position to determine what works for you’ (para. 22). In terms of designing an effective learning environment, Tim requested a system of regular supervision meetings. Because his project was relatively complex, we agreed that feedback should be timely and face-to-face, especially when he was working with potentially high anxiety phases of his project. This form of feedback ensured timely support and a safer environment that limited potentials for misinterpretation. Unlike some students who manage high levels of anxiety, in Tim’s case, it was unnecessary to seek alternative ways of meeting learning and assessment requirements. Often when working with students who manage anxiety-related conditions, I have had to renegotiate certain assessment tasks so evidence of learning can still be evaluated. Most commonly, this issue occurs in relation to seminar presentations to large groups of unknown people where sometimes what ends up inadvertently being examined is not knowledge, but the ability to report and perform in a public setting. I also discovered that with Tim it was useful to structure times for meetings from the outset. For instance, because his medication made him tired, we scheduled supervision sessions in the afternoon. We also planned a project trajectory so he was initially ahead of time with his research requirements. In other words, we proactively factored in time, in case he might need it to manage his health unexpectedly during the duration of his thesis. This may seem like a small thing but I have found that sometimes knowing that they are ahead of schedule on a complex project can help students to reduce unnecessary anxiety around their study. As with all students who disclose the need to manage their mental health, I talked through with Tim what would be done if he became seriously unwell. I discussed my professional guidelines and where agreements of

Unruly thought 31 confidentiality might end (normally these terminate if issues of harm arise). As an extension of this, I explained my limitations, including the time I could reasonably apportion to him and the limitation of my abilities. Most importantly, as with all students, I emphasised that a thesis is not therapy and I am not a therapist. My job was to help him meet the requirements of the degree. This said, I let Tim know that I cared about him and I respected what he was trying to do. In this discussion, consideration was given to the potential demands of the thesis on his wellbeing, including the implications of coming out in studio tutorials to a group of students who he didn’t know. We also discussed the implications of outing himself in a thesis that would be placed online, would be unalterable, and could be downloaded by people in the future who might form opinions about him based on what he wrote. In all situations where I work with such students, I negotiate behind the scenes so any short-term extension or request for a leave of absence does not draw unnecessary attention to their mental health. When such circumstances arise, I meet with faculty representatives personally and explain the situation so the university is assured of the necessity for a time adjustment. When a formal application is made, it contains a cover letter that attests to this necessity, but documents contain no specifics and wherever possible I work things, so a medical certificate does not need to accompany a request. This strategy has proved useful on numerous occasions because students are often afraid that organisations will file information on a mental health disability if they declare it (Venville et al., 2014). Tim’s project asked how a lived experience of OCD, particularly the anxiety and intense emotion it produces, might be translated into a distinctive, moving image text. It endeavoured to communicate a reality of living in a world affected by OCD and to question assumptions made about the condition. His work was a sophisticated orchestration of poetry, typography, film, sound and animation design that fused elegant, decorative devices with notions of the body as transforming thought. (His seven-minute film A Life Less Travelled [2009]1) Throughout the project, Tim’s level of emotional reactivity was demonstrably high. He ‘felt’ his thinking. On his website he wrote: Understanding my mental distress has involved … often excruciatingly unpleasant discoveries and self-reflection. From the dark depths of depression to the utter loss of control in OCD, understanding and accepting my distress as part of who I am has been painful. But with the help of a caring network of friends, family and the right professional help, such a negative experience has turned into a unique and ultimately distinguished world-view. I have moved past the negative aspects, and delved into the rich resources of a unique perspective that I can use in all aspects of life. (Hagan n.d.: para. 6)

32  Welby Ings Although Tim’s research project was awarded First Class Honours by external examiners and his film was a finalist in a number of international awards, it was the study itself that became transformative. Significantly his coming out changed the other students on the programme. Over time, a number of them talked to him discreetly about their own mental health issues or those of close friends and family. His strength gave them permission. By extension, following the success of his study, I was increasingly approached by other students across the faculty to be a supervisor or to discreetly mentor their theses. In these projects, some candidates chose to declare their condition publicly but most were simply looking for somewhere safe to strategise their way through worries and seek discipline-focused advice beyond that supplied by university health services. Of course, Tim’s story and how he navigated his research journey inside the academy cannot be used to speak for all students, but perhaps summarising the approaches to the design of a supportive learning environment might warrant some consideration. As I said, I am not a god. I am an educator who tries to build effective learning environments around people. However, here are ten useful things that I learned while working with Tim. Some had their roots in approaches I discovered years before and some we worked out while he was undertaking his study. 1 Know what support already exists in your institution and beyond, and discuss this with your student so the best possible support networks are considered. 2 Talk confidentially with students about their triggers, early warning signs and what they currently do to minimise symptoms. 3 Encourage them to construct an insightful support team around their thesis, including professionals, family and friends. For many students, such networks often extend through blogs and online support groups like Studentminds.org.uk, Youngminds.org.uk and NHS.uk 4 Help them to structure a proposed timeline for their study so they are wherever possible working ahead of schedule. This allows additional space to manage their condition. If this doesn’t work, let them know that there may be facilities for extending time available for their research. 5 Where you can, develop approaches with the university so records of their mental health management need not appear on official documents. 6 Consider alternative ways of meeting learning and assessment requirements, so if necessary, anxiety-generating situations can be restructured while learning outcomes are still addressed. 7 Discuss what will be done if the student becomes seriously unwell. Be clear about your professional guidelines and where agreements of confidentiality might end. Also clarify your limitations, including the time you can reasonably apportion to them and the limitations of your abilities. 8 Provide timely, face-to-face feedback on work in progress. A personal discussion allows you to present critique in a safe, supportive environment that can limit the potential for misinterpretation.

Unruly thought 33 9 Carefully talk through the implications of declaration, both in relation to the research process and the research’s final lodgement. A student’s thesis is an unalterable testament that will be available at the click of a mouse at any time in the future. Accordingly, I have found it useful to ask people to think about the implications of declaration in the light of possibilities that in the future a prospective employer, or a parent, son or daughter or somebody yet unknown to them will read their thesis. 10 If a student decides to ‘come out’ to their peers in a programme, let them control the pace and nature of the process, but be clear to all parties about your support for managing illness, irrespective of its nature. Be prepared in these circumstances for other forms of declaration to begin surfacing as higher levels of trust and support in the group become evident.

Sharon So now I’d like to look at another kind of researcher. For privacy reasons, I am using neither her real name nor the name of her university. She lectures in a different institution to the one Tim attended, and within her faculty and discipline she is highly respected both as an educator and researcher. Sharon had been working in a department that had undergone significant change since she began her academic career. In this time her faculty had experienced two waves of staff redundancies and four changes of school leadership, each with a distinctive ideological shift. Sharon was considered a highly committed academic. Students flocked to join her courses and she was generous and unquestioning in her support of colleagues who found themselves in difficulties. Last year when I rang her to check on a scheduled doctoral thesis she had agreed to examine, she told me she would be unable to do it. Although it was only four days away from submission, I could hear from her voice that something was obviously wrong. I quickly assured her that we would be able to find a replacement and while I was doing this, she burst into tears. She told me she had been away from work for three weeks. Even though she couldn’t sleep, she could barely get out of bed. Her world had collapsed. Few people would have suspected that Sharon managed bouts of depression. She was a perfectionist and in the performance reviews that had increasingly become the device by which she and her colleagues were measured in the faculty, she displayed a succession of effective, scrupulously accounted outcomes. Because she was so accomplished she was often asked to step in when things fell apart in other programmes. However, recently her line manager had asked her if she had considered early retirement because ideologically he felt that she wasn’t ‘up with the play’ in an environment that had become increasingly competitive and focused on ensuring a high number of international publications in high ranking research journals. Although Sharon contributed chapters to a number of books, helped staff by editing their publications and co-presented numerous bodies of work at national conferences, she was told that these didn’t really ‘count’ as significant contributions in the new climate. She was also told that

34  Welby Ings she hadn’t brought in enough external research funding. In the end, due to the stress of an increasing workload, instability around the expectations of her faculty, failure to gain a full professorship and a dissolving sense of self-worth, she became unwell. Sometime after the bout of depression, Sharon talked with me about what she experienced. I use her description here with permission because it shows us something beyond statistics and overview. She described her illness this way: The depression was like a slowly descending cloud and underneath it the voice of reason made less and less sense. I was exhausted and the only safe place was bed. I just crawled in and nestled into the safety of inertia. Some part of me knew I needed friends and family … help … but I knew this would disturb the only safe place I could find. But the weight just kept growing heavier. I slept a lot. I had no appetite, I felt I was worthless and bruised … I was living in a dream made of vaporous lead but at the same time I was not really a part of it. I knew that people would find out that I was a failure, that all of my work at the university was a fake display and I was actually weak and incapable. I believed that my rational mind and critical faculties had been exposed as a sham in a world where you had to be perfect … where I had performed perfection. But I was a lie. I couldn’t tell anyone because if even a whisper of my depression surfaced, I would never get promoted. I had burned out. At best, I would end up in one of those backwaters where the awkward academics go … the adjunct professors and the independent scholars. Exiled at arm’s length … or even ‘let go’. In my mind the possibility moved to a probability, and then to an assured outcome. So in a small darkened room, I pulled the curtains and lived with criticism, real and imagined, that circled and settled. Silently and progressively I was crushed beneath its weight. (‘Sharon’ 2017, personal communication: 8 May) Sharon’s journey out of depression was not a smooth and rapid redemption narrative, but she did get help and she slowly became well again. Her university does not know what she experienced and she continues to manage depression as an ongoing condition of her health. Today she works in the same world she temporarily left. She runs a complex department and students still seek her out as a preferred supervisor of their research journeys. Research suggests that Sharon’s story is not atypical. Guthrie et al.’s (2017) evidence assessment study of mental health in the research environment found that burnout appears higher among university staff than in general working populations (being comparable to ‘high-risk’ groups such as healthcare workers). Sharon’s decision not to discuss her mental health with her employer also appears to correlate with UK statistics indicating that as few as 6.2 percent of staff disclose a mental health condition to their university (The Equality Challenge Unit 2012). The debilitating effect of shifting expectations that Sharon experienced within the academy is discussed in two further studies: Waddell, Britain and

Unruly thought 35 Burton (2006) and Butterworth et al. (2011). These suggest that insecurity, including ongoing changes in the work environment, can either cause or exacerbate mental health problems. So too can a sense of lack of control and institutional bullying. Sharon’s perceived expectations of high-level performance has also profiled in discussions surrounding the mental health in universities. Pat Hunt, the head of Nottingham University’s counselling service, observes: There are increasing levels of anxiety, both generalised and acute, levels of stress, of depression and levels of what I would call perfectionism … by that I mean when someone is aiming for and constantly expecting really high standards, so that even when there is a positive outcome they feel they have fallen short. So instead of internal aspiration helping them to do well it actually hinders them. (Hunt, cited in Shaw and Ward 2014: para. 8–9) This phenomenon has also been highlighted in research suggesting that in universities ‘self-critical personalities are often more susceptible to stress’ (Guthrie et al. 2017: 31). Gail Kinman, on behalf of the University and College Union (UCU), suggests that poor work-life balance is also ‘a key factor, with academics putting in increasing hours as they attempt to respond to high levels of internal and external scrutiny, a fast pace of change and the notion of students as ­customers – ­leading to demands such as 24-hour limit for responses to student queries’ (Kinman, cited in Shaw and Ward 2014: para. 22). So given such phenomena we might ask, ‘How might a university embrace and support academics who navigate uneven mental health?’ Although on one side of the spectrum critics like Linda Ware (2017) suggest, ‘Ableism is alive and well in higher education, we do not know how to abandon the myth of the pure (ivory) tower that props up and is propped up by ableist ideology’ (para. 5), an increasing number of academics who manage mental health conditions tell more hopeful stories. Professor Elyn Saks who has publicly discussed her schizophrenia in relation to her academic position describes the USC Law School in Los Angeles as: An enormously supportive work place … this is a place that not only accommodates my needs but actually embraces them. It’s also a very intellectually stimulating place and occupying my mind with complex problems has been my best, most powerful and reliable defence against my mental illness. (Saks 2012) It would be reasonable to suggest that somewhere between these poles, much of the academy is positioned. If we take seriously the idea of research environments effectively embracing and supporting researchers who navigate uneven mental health, it is useful to consider some of the things that current writing

36  Welby Ings tells us. Although the five points below are not exhaustive, they are attitudes and approaches I have seen work effectively for people. 1 First, if you think you are becoming unwell, seek help when you need it. Saks (2009) notes, Mental illness is a no-fault disease like any other, such as cancer or diabetes. Help is available, but you need to ask for it. Don’t let the threat of stigma deter you. You shouldn’t have to suffer … and you shouldn’t allow mental illness to stand in the way of the wonderful contributions you are poised to make to your students and to your field. (para. 35) 2 If you or a colleague decide to seek help inside your institution, think through the implications of declaration. This can be a challenging issue. There are arguments both in favour of and against such a decision. Saks suggests that there are advantages in the psychological benefit of not having a secret and being able to be open with people. She also notes that you may be more able to access extra support or formal accommodation. In addition, she argues that you may increase the quality of the environment in which you work by becoming a useful role model. However, she also admits there are arguments against such a decision. In academia, there can still be significant stigma around people who manage mental health conditions. She says: People may believe, consciously or not, that you are unreliable or even dangerous, and they may fear you. They may think you can’t do the work or your scholarship isn’t good, even if it is very good. That may not be intentional on their part but it can nonetheless have a big impact on your work life and your prospects for tenure. (Saks 2009: para. 18) Saks’ approach, before publishing and speaking publicly on the issue of her mental health, was to choose to tell only her closest friends in the faculty. She did this because she discovered that even this limited disclosure served her well when she became unwell, because there were people at work to whom she could turn. 3 Becoming more exposed to other academics talking about their lived experience of managing their mental health can help to alleviate a sense of isolation or collegial ignorance. Many recent narratives available online and in print are from high achieving academics and professionals. Significant among them are Associate Professor Margaret Price’s (2011) discussion of living with madness in the academy, Professor Elyn Saks’ (2009 and 2012) accounts of how she manages her schizophrenia, Sangu Delle’s (2017) talk about caring for his mental health and creativity and Nikki Webber Allen’s (2017) discussion about managing the relationship between high achievement and depression.

Unruly thought 37 4 It is useful to think about the nature of your research and the extent to which it may render you vulnerable. A significant body of literature suggests that if an academic is undertaking research on a sensitive topic such as trauma or abuse, there is a higher chance that the material encountered may have negative emotional effects. Accordingly, at the outset of an inquiry, take care to establish an attentive support facility to mitigate against potential negative impacts (Coles, Astbury, Dartnall and Limjerwala 2014; Kiyimba and O’Reilly 2016; Taylor et al. 2016). 5 Think critically about your work environment. Research from the UK suggests there are six key factors that appear to impact negatively on workers’ stress. They are work demands, job control, change management, work relationships, support provided by managers and colleagues and clarity about your role (Health and Safety Executive 2017). These aspects of your work environment can either increase stress or, if well managed, counteract it. Conversely, factors like job autonomy, involvement in decision making and supportive management appear to be linked to greater job satisfaction among academics, as is the amount of time spent on research and opportunities for professional development (Guthrie et al. 2017: 39). So where does this take us? Well I remember in her 2012 TED talk, Saks stated, ‘There are not schizophrenics, there are people with schizophrenia and these people may be your spouse, they may be your child, they may be your neighbour, they may be your friend, they may be your co-worker.’ What she was talking about is of course expandable into a wide range of neuro and physically diverse aspects of being human. Such features profile inside and outside of the academy. Although there is a considerable body of research that discusses institutional changes that can be implemented to support the mental health and wellbeing of academics (Brems 2015; Grawitch, Trares and Kohler 2007; Hayter, Tinline and Robertson 2011; Indelicato, Mirsu-Paun and Griffin 2011; Koncz et al. 2016; Pignata and Winefield 2013; Reavley, McCann, Cvetkovski and Jorm 2014; Shutler-Jones 2011), in this chapter, I have tried to approach the issue differently. From the position of the ordinary, day-to-day experience of neurodiversity, I have asked what we as academics might do to improve situations we encounter. In doing this I am not claiming to be a therapist. I am just an academic who works with other academics and, probably like you, I care about people who are both similar to, and different from me – both inside and outside of the academy. The people I live and work with manage phobias, panic attacks, depression (including postnatal depression), generalised anxiety disorders, OCDs, bipolar disorders, eating disorders, nervous breakdowns, psychosis or schizophrenia, attention deficit-hyperactivity disorders, attention deficit ­d isorders and dementia. While some of these qualities can be pathologised, I think of them simply as diverse conditions that may become manifest in a thinking human being. I experience such things in my grandmother’s confusion about who I am, in my partner’s fear of spiders and my own terror of heights, in  a student’s anxiety about public speaking, in the reason for a requested extension or in the origin

38  Welby Ings of a particular kind of empathy. I think as academics we exist in a spectrum of cognitive and social processes. Sometimes within this, people become unwell. This can be serious and it is not helped by either euphemising the nature of mental health away or by allowing ignorance and fear to elevate a condition beyond what it actually is. So this chapter suggests that as academics we might conceive ourselves as reaching beyond the concerns of service provision; we might also be guided by issues of equity and social responsibility. Such a conception and its implications warrant wider discussion in the academy, both on collegial and institutional levels.

Note 1 https://vimeo.com/31318390

References Bayram, N. and Bilgel, N. (2008) ‘The prevalence and socio-demographic correlations of depression, anxiety and stress among a group of university students’, Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology, 43(8): 667–672. Brems, C. (2015) ‘A yoga stress reduction intervention for university faculty, staff, and graduate students’, International Journal of Yoga Therapy, 25(1): 61–77. Butterworth, P., Leach, L. S., Strazdins, L., Olesen, S. C., Rodgers, B. and Broom, D. H. (2011) ‘The psychosocial quality of work determines whether employment has benefits for mental health: results from a longitudinal national household panel survey’, Occupational and Environment Medicine, 68(11): 806–812. Cleary, M., Horsfall, J., Baines, J. and Happell, B. (2011) ‘Mental health behaviours among undergraduate nursing students: Issues for consideration’, Nurse Education Today, 32(8): 951–955. Coles, J., Astbury, J., Dartnall, E. and Limjerwala, S. (2014) ‘A qualitative exploration of researcher trauma and researchers’ responses to investigating sexual violence’, Violence Against Women, 20(1): 95–117. Cranford, J. A., Eisenberg, D. and Serras, A. M. (2009) ‘Substance use behaviours, mental health problems, and use of mental health services in a probability sample of college students’, Addictive Behaviors, 34(2): 134–145. Delle, S. (2017) There’s no shame in taking care of your mental health, video recording, YouTube. Available online at https://www.ted.com/talks/sangu_delle_there_s_ no_shame_in_taking_care_of_your_mental_health (accessed 2 October 2021). Grawitch, M. J., Trares, S. and Kohler, J. M. (2007) ‘Healthy workplace practices and employee outcomes’, International Journal of Stress Management, 14(3): 275–293. Guthrie, S., Lichten, C., van Belle, J., Ball, S., Knack, A. and Hofman, J. (2017) Understanding mental health in the research environment: A rapid evidence assessment. R AND Europe: Available online at https://www.rand.org/pubs/ research_reports/RR2022.html (accessed 2 October 2021). Hagan, T. (2009) A life less travelled: an exploration of obsessive compulsive disorder through moving image text. (Honours dissertation, Auckland University of Technology, Auckland, New Zealand). Available online at http://hdl.handle. net/10292/8815 (accessed 2 October 2021).

Unruly thought 39 Hagan, T. (n.d.) Tim Hagan - A life less travelled. Available online at http://rethink. org.nz/?page_id=545 (accessed 2 October 2021). Hayter, N., Tinline, G. and Robertson, I. (2011) ‘Improving performance through wellbeing and engagement: Wellbeing and engagement interventions summary report.’ Available online at http://www.ucea.ac.uk/download.cfm/ docid/61E30F58-41EF-4332-A58F260C5ED90259 (accessed 2 October 2021). Health and Safety Executive (HSE). (2017) ‘What are the management standards for work related stress?’ Available online at http://www.hse.gov.uk/stress/standards/ index.htm (accessed 2 October 2021). Hunt, J. and Eisenberg, D. (2010) ‘Mental health problems and help-seeking behavior among college students’, The Journal of Adolescent Health, 46(1): 3–10. Indelicato, N. A., Mirsu-Paun, A. and Griffin, W. D. (2011) ‘Outcomes of a suicide prevention gatekeeper training on a university campus’, Journal of College Student Development, 52(3): 350–361. Kiyimba, N. and O’Reilly, M. (2016) ‘The risk of secondary traumatic stress in the qualitative transcription process: A research note’, Qualitative Research, 16(4): 468–476. Koncz, R., Wolfenden, F., Hassed, C., Chambers, R., Cohen, J. and Glozier, N. (2016) ‘Mindfulness based stress release program for university employees: A pilot, waitlist-controlled trial and implementation replication’, Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, 58(10): 1021–1027. Lloyd, C. and Waghorn, G. (2007) ‘The importance of vocation in recovery of young people with psychiatric disabilities’, British Journal of Occupational Therapy, 70(2): 50–59. McAuliffe, D., Boddy, J., McLennan, V. and Stewart, V. (2012) ‘Keeping the door open: Exploring experiences of, and responses to, university students who disclose mental illness’, Journal of Social Inclusion, 3(1): 117–129. McManus, I. C., Winder, B. C. and Gordon, D. (1999) ‘Are UK doctors particularly stressed?’, The Lancet, 354(9187): 1358–1359. McManus, S., Meltzer H., Brugha, T., Bebbington, P. and Jenkins, R., (2009) ‘Adult psychiatric morbidity in England, 2007: Results of a household survey’, The Health and Social Care Information Centre, Social Care Statistics. Available online https://www.researchgate.net/publication/266299241_ Adult_psychiatric_ morbidity_in_England_2007_Results_of_a_household_survey (accessed 2 October 2021). Pignata, S. and Winefield, A. H. (2013) ‘Stress-reduction interventions in an Australian university: a case study,’ Stress and Health, 31(1):24–34. Piper, F. and MacDonald, B. (2008) ‘Sometimes it’s harder to speak out things’: How first year New Zealand tertiary students use informal online communication to help solve significant problems’, The Australian e-Journal for the Advancement of Mental Health, 7(3): 135–142. Price, M. (2011) Mad at school: Rhetorics of mental disability and academic life. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Reavley, N. J., McCann, T. V., Cvetkovski, S. and Jorm, A. F. (2014) ‘A multifaceted intervention to improve mental health literacy in employees of a multi-campus university: A cluster randomised trial’, Journal of Public Mental Health, 13(1): 25–39. Reeve, D. (2002) ‘Negotiating psycho-emotional dimensions of disability and their influence on identity constructions’, Disability & Society, 17(5): 493–508.

40  Welby Ings Ryan, M. L., Shochet, I. M. and Stallman, H. M. (2010) ‘Universal online interventions might engage psychologically distressed university students who are unlikely to seek formal help’, Advances in Mental Health, 9(1): 73–83. Saks, E. R. (2009) Mental illness in academe. The chronicle of higher education. Available online at http://chronicle.com/article/Mental-Illness-in-Academe/49233/ (accessed 2 October 2021). Saks, E. R. (2012) A tale of mental illness from the inside, video recording, TEDGlobal Talk. Available online at https://www.ted.com/talks/elyn_saks_seeing_mental_ illness (accessed 2 October 2021). Shankar, J., Martin, J., and McDonald, C. (2009) Emerging areas of practice for mental health social workers: Education and employment’, Australian Social Work, 62(1): 28–44. Shaw, C. and Ward, L. (2014) ‘Dark thoughts: why mental illness is on the rise in academia.’ Available online at https://www.theguardian.com/higher-educationnetwork/2014/mar/06/mental-health-academics-growing-problem-pressureuniversity (accessed 2 October 2021). Shutler-Jones, K. (2011) Improving performance through well-being and engagement. Available online at http://www.qub.ac.uk/safety-reps/sr_webpages/safety_ downloads/wellbeing-final-report-2011-web.pdf (accessed 2 October 2021). Taylor, J., Bradbury-Jones, C., Breckenridge, J. P., Jones, C. and Herber, O. R. (2016) ‘Risk of vicarious trauma in nursing research: a focused mapping review and synthesis’, Journal of Clinical Nursing, 25(19–20): 2768–2777. The Equality Challenge Unit. (2012) ‘Equality in higher education: statistical report.’ Available online at http://www.ecu.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/external/ equality-in-he-stats-report-2012-staff.pdf (accessed 2 October 2021). Venville, A., Street, A. and Fossey, E. (2014) ‘Student perspectives on disclosure of mental illness in post-compulsory education: Displacing doxa’, Disability & Society, 29(5): 792–807. Waddell, G., Britain, G. and Burton, K. (2006) Is work good for your health and wellbeing? London: The Stationary Office. Ware, L. (2017) Review of mad at school: Rhetorics of mental disability and academic life. Available online at https://www.press.umich.edu/1612837/mad_at_school (accessed 2 October 2021). Webber Allen, N. (2017) Don’t suffer from your depression in silence video recording, YouTube. Available online at https://www.ted.com/talks/nikki_webber_allen_ don_t_suffer_from_your_depression_in_silence#t-383495 (accessed 2 October 2021). World Health Organization. (2004) Promoting mental health: concepts, emerging evidence, practice (Summary Report). Geneva: World Health Organization. Available online at http://www.who.int/mental_health/evidence/en/promoting_mhh.pdf (accessed 2 October 2021).

4

Whose knowledge counts? The academic, academic knowledge and epistemic justice Margaret Meredith

In this chapter, I consider how the person with the title ‘academic’ might be represented in relation to understandings of what might count as academic knowledge. I argue that notions of what is widely accepted as ‘the academic’ are linked to a specific form of knowledge: this is a form of knowledge that is considered ‘legitimate’ by universities, based upon Western knowledge frameworks, and privileged at the expense of the legitimacy of ‘other’ knowledges. In the chapter, I draw upon my experiences as an academic working in a higher education institution. In higher education settings, legitimate knowledge creation tends to be seen as the prerogative of those academics who prefer to view knowledge creation as a specialised activity and use theoretical frameworks developed in the Western world. This can lead to the injustice of the exclusion of many other knowers who use other types of knowledge and ways of coming to know (epistemologies). These others include people such as academics working in universities in the so-called ‘global South,’ practitioners using practical forms of knowledge developed in their fields and those who draw upon traditional or indigenous ways of knowing. This all amounts to a type of injustice which Fricker (2007) terms ‘epistemic injustice’. I argue that this form of (in)justice is highly relevant to academics in their role as generators and disseminators of knowledge. I also argue that an important role of the university, and the academic within it, is to engage with a diversity of knowledges in a world of plurality. I argue that academics can lead, and model for society, forms of engagement between people in which all people can be considered equally different. This is important, I believe, because it can offer the possibility of hopeful, shared human futures. To exemplify my arguments, I use a case study of an international research project about the ‘social and solidarity economy’ (a term to be explained later). Throughout the project, I worked collaboratively with academics and practitioners from the global North and South to make more visible those multiple expressions of values and knowledges within the social and solidarity economy which tend to be marginalised in academia and mainstream discourses. The project was premised on the idea that forms of knowledge currently dominant in academia are too narrow and have failed to address pressing social, environmental and economic concerns. DOI: 10.4324/9781351053372-4

42  Margaret Meredith I make the argument that, if international partnerships take place only within unquestioned, Western-based knowledge frameworks, they can reinforce the neo-colonial practices of epistemic injustice. As an alternative to this, I explore practices in which participation is based on the assumption that all participants are equals in their capacity to create knowledge. Moving beyond critique and into other ways of conceptualising the practice of academics, I explain how, through the project, spaces were created for collaboration between international partners that valued local paradigms whilst generating new understandings together. The chapter has the following structure: 1 I set out the conceptual framework to explain the dominance of Westernbased knowledge and of the frequently unequal relationships of power between academics in the so-called global North and global South. I say why this can be construed as problematic and advocate the need for academics to acknowledge the importance of plurality in forms of legitimate knowledge. 2 Next, I describe an international collaborative project about the social and solidarity economy, which included academics and practitioners from the global North and South; I explain the rationale behind the project in relation to the role of the academic. This serves as a case study from which my data is drawn. 3 I then explain some thinking between myself and my fellow project coordinator about how project participants might collaborate in a peer-to-peer approach to knowledge creation. I explain how this worked out in practice and highlight some of the outcomes. 4 Finally, I argue that a key responsibility of academics is to create spaces of knowledge creation in which epistemic justice can be enacted.

Academics and the dominance of Westernbased knowledge frameworks In this section, I consider the main characteristics of the forms of knowledge which tend to be favoured by academics. I then discuss the relationships of power that result in such forms of knowledge being used and applied in contexts where they are not always appropriate. I argue for the importance of acknowledging and working with diverse knowledges and knowers that exist in the world. Finally, I discuss the responsibility of the academic to recognise and work with diverse knowledges. I explain the concept of dialogism, which offers an approach that enables new knowledge and understandings to emerge from within a context of plurality in which participants are understood as equally different. According to Toulmin (1990), a belief underpinning what many term ‘Western’ forms of knowledge is that human nature and society can be fitted into exact rational categories. Further, Berlin (2003) argues that these forms are based upon a belief that certainty in knowing is possible. Such an epistemology, perhaps suited to scientific forms of knowledge, prioritises the theoretical or abstract over practical and personal knowledge, according to McNiff (2017: 49).

Whose knowledge counts? 43 It is also premised on the idea that objects are best understood if separated from their context. The assumption is that knowledge of the individual parts enables an understanding of the whole, in the same way as one might understand the workings of a machine. Such knowledge, sometimes called ‘techno-rationalist’, also claims to be objective, universal and values-free. A premise of this chapter is that this form of techno-rationalist knowledge can be inadequate and inappropriate in helping us understand the social world, which is complex and dependent upon multiple influences and contexts, as well as the values and purposes of its actors. Western epistemologies, based on such techno-rationalism, are one type of knowledge amongst many in what de Sousa Santos (2016) refers to as the ‘ecologies of knowledges’ which exist in the world. Like Code, I believe that this dominant model of knowledge and epistemology in Anglo-American philosophy produces an epistemological monoculture both in the academy and in everyday life, whose consequences are to suppress and choke out ways of knowing that depart from the stringent dictates of an exaggerated ideal of scientific knowledge making. (Code, 2006: 8–9) The logic of this epistemology is that the act of ‘knowing’ is always best left to ‘experts’ who develop a narrow technical focus in their field (Easterly, 2013). This makes it less likely that members of the public will feel able to contribute to research with the aim of transforming situations of concern to them. Yet it is a form of knowledge often treated as containing universally applicable truths and it is favoured, generated, disseminated and applied by many higher education-­ based academics. Michael Apple calls such knowledge ‘official knowledge’, a term which aims to make explicit the link between power and certain types of knowledge (Apple, 2000). Discourses and power relationships, which inform the legitimacy or otherwise of different knowledges, have practical consequences for the acceptance and circulation of knowledge. They lay the foundations for the kind of knowledge that counts, that is considered important and relevant to our lives, and establish a type of ‘monopoly of truth’, according to Connell (2007). This epistemology of the powerful is supported with power in hard forms – financial, institutional and military, for example – and is also imposed in its soft forms within culture, norms, values and epistemology, according to writers such as Mignolo (2002) and Connell (2007). Western universities, as powerful institutions, are part of a system that can reinforce such dominant forms of knowledge. Academics therefore run the risk of reinforcing unjust and exclusionary practices and norms at an epistemic level. For example, discourses within higher education and elsewhere are often based on assumptions of the need by the global North to address supposed deficits in the global South: ideas such as ‘capacity building’ in universities (EACEA, 2019) and ‘empowerment’ of people are conceptualised as being a one-way flow,

44  Margaret Meredith such that lack of capacity and the powerlessness of academics in the global South are unquestioned in the way in which issues are framed and are acted out in practices (Djerasimovic, 2014: 207). This dominant epistemology can be internalised by many in the global South, who often merely set out to test existing theories from the global North with what Sun (2019: no page) characterises as ‘little or no consideration for cultural or situational influences’. This adoption of an inappropriate form of theory, generated elsewhere, can be damaging to the idea that academics may generate knowledges and understandings of local significance and benefit, with local people, but who in turn may feel alienated from ‘official’ research processes. The diversity of knowledges and the role of academics This leads me to argue that an important role of the university, and the academic within it, is to engage with a diversity of knowledges and values in a world of plurality. Issues such as environmental degradation, and social and economic inequality and marginalisation are some of the pressing issues for our age. The knowledge required to address such issues needs to be ‘adaptable and epistemologically pluralistic’ according to Gaventa and Bivens (2014: 72) and needs to draw upon the fullness of experiences and diversity of the world. I believe that if academics maintain only a narrow view of what counts as legitimate knowledge, they will become increasingly irrelevant in addressing some of the most serious challenges faced by communities and humanity. The acknowledgement of such plurality means that a variety of perspectives can enhance our understandings and the bases from which knowledge can be generated and applied. This is at a time when the generation of knowledges and understandings to address critical issues facing humanity should be a priority; and I believe that there is a pressing need for academics to find ways of envisaging and enacting a vision of how we can ‘make the present into a richer future’ (Rorty, 1999: 30). This raises issues about how spaces could be created by academics in which participants from a variety of backgrounds participate as peers in the co-­creation of knowledge around a matter of concern. It poses questions about how all ­participants in such collaborations can have the opportunity to frame issues based on their own epistemologies and not have their mental frameworks and ways of seeing the world underplayed or delegitimised. When working in contexts of plurality, one challenge for the academic is to create spaces in which difference can be expressed whilst maintaining a whole which is meaningful to participants. Dialogic approaches offer an opportunity for this, and I now briefly explain what I mean by this. Dialogic approaches Academia is sometimes associated with finding the right answer – ‘the truth’ – or at least one good answer and asserting the rightness of one’s position to win an argument. A dialogic approach, on the other hand, views truth as pluralistic. It is

Whose knowledge counts? 45 based on the idea of the possibility of multiple truths. It is, I believe, an approach which is highly appropriate for participative research in the social sphere, where practices are usually driven by the values people and communities have and their meaning making within complex situations. The process of dialogic engagement with the other can enable the creation of new thinking and new understandings because what is realized …. is the process of coming to know one’s own language as it is perceived in someone else’s language, coming to know one’s own belief system in someone else’s system. (Bakhtin, 1981: 365) A dialogical approach does not seek to overcome difference and suppress it in order to reach an answer and a consensus; rather, it finds meaning within the difference. In dialogism ‘differences remain yet the dialogue continues’ according to Stern (2016: 19). It therefore seems to be an approach consistent with working towards addressing issues of common concern in participative ways in which difference is seen as an asset rather than a problem.

An international project about the social and solidarity economy In the introduction to this chapter, I stated that the practical context for this chapter was an international research project about the ‘social and solidarity economy’. In the project, academics and practitioners in the global North and South collaborated to make more visible the multiple expressions of values and knowledges in the economic life of communities – knowledges which tend to be marginalised in academia and mainstream discourses. This current section starts with a brief explanation of what is meant by the term ‘social and solidarity economy’. I will then explain how partners in the project collaborated in ways that showed how they valued plurality and local paradigms, whilst generating new understandings together. The social and solidarity economy – a brief explanation The term ‘social and solidarity economy’ combines two complementary aspects. First, the ‘social economy’ is characterised by its aim to balance three factors – the economic, the social and the environmental – according to Amin (2009). Organisations within the social economy have diverse identities depending on geographical context and the local factors from which they emerged. Such identities are reflected in the UK and Europe in terms such as ‘social enterprise’, the ‘third sector’ and the ‘not-for-profit sector’ (Ridley-Duff and Bull, 2015). Second, the descriptor ‘solidarity’ is mainly used in Latin America and emphasises both systems and processes of democratisation as well as the idea of equality in relation to the recognition of people as more than merely economic

46  Margaret Meredith subjects (Quiroz-Niño and Murga-Menoyo, 2017: 3). The project I am describing here included significant contributions from people in both Europe and Latin America, so the term ‘social and solidarity economy’ acknowledged both traditions. The social and solidarity economy project To explore the issue of collaboration in practice in which people can participate as equals in knowledge creation around an issue of concern, I will next describe the project which was designed and coordinated by myself, together with Catalina Quiroz-Niño, social psychologist and research partner. Representing a UK university, we brought a consortium together that involved academics from universities in Bolivia, Peru, Portugal (representing a centre for African Studies) and Spain. These academics were termed ‘partners’ in the application for funding and subsequent contract. Academics from other institutions and practitioners in the social and solidarity economy field also became involved. I will refer to this wider group of all who participated as ‘collaborators’. Our purpose was to carry out a research project called ‘Enhancing Studies and Practice of the Social Economy in Higher Education’, funded by the European Union’s Erasmus Mundus programme. The project ran from 2012 to 2015. The project was envisaged as a practical critique of the extent to which academia was complicit in the events that led up to the financial crash of 2008, in, for example, the reliance on mathematical models and the quest for ‘simple ways of thinking about highly complex phenomena that cannot really be taken apart and studied in a systematic way’, according to economist Robert Shiller (2010: 407), and the potential consequences of this. Academia seemed to have no practical response to the crisis and there seemed to be little critique or discussion of the role and purposes of academics and the kinds of techno-rationalist knowledge frameworks used in traditionalist academia and which seemed to underpin the financial crisis. The aim of the project was to make visible the many ways of expressing value and values in our economic activities, encapsulated by the notion of the social and solidarity economy. The intention was to take a broad and international view that would enable an understanding of the kinds of knowledges and practices created at a local level which prioritised community and well-being, and how these were explained and theorised by people working in their local context. The project went beyond a straightforward critique of the events leading up to the financial crash and demonstrated also that practical examples were available that showed communities and organisations working with different epistemologies, values and practices. These topics would be reflected in a handbook, co-created by the project partners and other collaborating academics and practitioners in the field, from the three regions of the project – Africa, Europe and Latina America – and in the three main languages of the regions encompassed by the project: English, Portuguese and Spanish. This would enable anyone to access the knowledge and practices from many regions in languages spoken in those regions.

Whose knowledge counts? 47 In another sense, too, the project went beyond critique. As project partners and collaborators, we found ways of working which showed that it is possible to draw upon ‘multiple and global sources of knowledge’ (Leask and de Wit, 2016: no page). We worked in ways that assumed that Western knowledge paradigms are just one part of the ‘ecologies of knowledges’ referred to above. The project focused on creating spaces of participation for knowledge creation by a wide range of people, from a wide range of backgrounds in academia and in practice in the field and with a wide range of experiences. The academics from Peru had first-hand experience of European projects in their university. Project partner and co-author of the project handbook, Ana María Villafuerte, explained the usual approach taken by the Western partners in her university in the Peruvian Andes: What generally happens is that when projects come from Europe to my university, we are merely the collectors of data. The research questions, the theoretical framework and the analysis of the data – those happen in Europe. (Personal correspondence, 14.2.18. Translated from Spanish) This phenomenon, echoing the kind of power relationship outlined above meant that there was little conceptual or values-based input from those regions in which people may have entirely different traditions and understandings from European ones. The Peruvian partners were not positioned as epistemic equals in those previous projects and were not recognised in their capacity as knowers and generators of knowledge. This meant that they experienced epistemic injustice. Further, this lack of the wider dissemination and acceptance of knowledges, values and practices could be seen as a loss to humanity, as alluded to by Leask and de Wit above. Ways of knowing which are directly linked to well-being and which value harmony and reciprocity between human beings and their natural environment (termed Sumak Kawsay in Quechua – one of the languages of the Andes, meaning ‘good living’) form part of the epistemology of this region (UNESCO 2015: 31), but this important way of understanding life was not afforded space in the previous European-initiated projects. So with these matters in mind, in the next section I will address how, within the project, partners aimed to work in ways that enabled all to value their local knowledges and understandings whilst generating new meanings together.

Creating knowledge dialogically, as peers At the start of the project, the academics from the partner institutions came to the lead university in the UK for five days to participate in the strategic planning meetings to plan for its three-year duration. The encounter would be a space in which diverse perspectives would be represented: we were ten partners in total, representing four different universities, in the UK, Peru, Spain and from a centre for African studies in Portugal.

48  Margaret Meredith Considerations to inform setting the agenda As project coordinators, Catalina and I were aware that we needed to have an agreed, coherent action plan with which to proceed by the end of the five days. On a conceptual level, we could see the importance of all partners gaining a common understanding of the knowledge and experiences of the social and solidarity economy of each group, given the diversity of our backgrounds. From there, it would be important to find ways to move forward as a single group. We were also aware of the need to foster a sense of ownership around the structure and content of the main output of the project, the handbook, in order to promote full participation in which there would be space to accommodate our different knowledge traditions and experiences. Having done this, the plan was to work on how each of us, as partners, would develop our respective roles in the project. The less tangible aim was that we would develop trusting c­ ollaborative relationships based on open communication, which would be necessary to ensure progress. So, we saw that the challenge was to create spaces in which all could participate in ways that enabled each one to have the opportunity for conceptual input around the issue. The conceptual framework Catalina and I could provide would be derived only from our own socio-cultural experiences, and therefore would be limited to our own, inevitably limited, frames of reference. We gave a great deal of thought about how we would design processes which opened the space for partners to contribute knowledge and understandings from their own experiences and in so doing, broaden the field of possible understandings and interpretations of what the social and solidarity economy actually was in theory and practice. If a rigid conceptualisation of the focus of the project had been set before these strategic planning meetings, it would have been from the limited perspectives Catalina and I could have provided. It would have put the participation of others at the end of a set of pre-established givens: given definitions, given questions and a closed vision of the content of the handbook. In this sense, the opportunity to inform the conceptual framework, and to therefore set the parameters of understanding of the issue would have rested only with Catalina and myself, rather than with all partners. This would run the risk of repeating the pattern identified by Ana Maria Villafuerte above, in which the Peruvian partners could only contribute once the important conceptual parameters had been set. It may, of course, have been more straightforward to have held the planning meetings as a who, what, when type of logistics exercise: design the specific tasks towards the pre-engineered objectives, make sure they were assigned to different people, ensure that we agreed on how to go about them, and check that we all understood what was expected of us. This could have been participative in the sense of having discussions about how the tasks should be set up, by getting people to put their name against the tasks or areas they felt best able to work on and giving flexibility in the work plan itself according to personal working

Whose knowledge counts? 49 preferences. We could then have invited others to participate in the work of carrying out the vision and conceptual framework Catalina and I had established. However, this would have involved participation and dialogue only around the edges, taking perhaps a form of ‘technical dialogue’, or ‘monologue disguised as dialogue’ (Buber, 2002: 22–23), but it would have missed an opportunity for a deeper and more just form of participation and would not have given space for different conceptualisations, based upon different forms of knowledge. It could have been superficially participatory, but would actually have been asymmetrical, disempowering and hierarchical. It would have denied justice to other project partners at an epistemic level by finalising the way the issue was seen, and which aspects were relevant for investigation, before inviting the participation of others. Such practices would have reinforced a kind of neo-colonialism at the level of knowledge. So, we realised we needed to develop a different strategy, which would involve dedicating considerable time to the articulation of the different understandings of relevant concepts. Having done this, we would then have the challenge of weaving these different conceptual understandings into something we could all proceed with within the project. The alternative would be to work as parallel but separate (and potentially unequal) entities. This would possibly reinforce difference and fragmentation, where each asserts the truth of their individual understanding: an approach that would be along the lines of ‘Here’s a perspective from the UK’ and ‘Here’s one from Spain, Peru, etc.’ in a kind of parallel monologue. This disjointed information would barely add up to a bigger picture or involve dialogical learning and finding ways forward together. The challenge was to do this in ways which would highlight each partner’s contribution and ensure it was reflected in the whole.

The strategic planning meetings in practice The outline agenda for the five-day strategic planning meetings was shared with partners for their comments and agreed in advance of the event. Feedback from partners suggested they felt that arriving at a consensus of different understandings of the social and solidarity economy was highly important. Our agreed aims for the planning meetings included: to create a common ground for working; to set initial criteria for the field of study; and to get a clear picture of how to proceed within the first year. In what follows, I will explain how the collaborative work varied between different formations of small groups and the larger group that comprised all participants. During the activities, participants were free to contribute or not, and able to observe the work of other groups if they wished to do so. The aim was to ensure an environment in which participation was n ­ egotiated and fostered but not coerced. For Catalina and me, as coordinators, the overriding focus was on creating spaces and processes to enable the ­expression of difference whilst moving forward in ways everyone could accommodate and agree to.

50  Margaret Meredith In what follows I will explain the processes we followed in four main steps. These were informed by partners and agreed at each stage. A more detailed explanation can be found in Meredith (2020). Articulating concepts and understandings On the first day of the meetings, the team from each country gave a pre-prepared presentation about the social and solidarity economy in their region, answered questions and led whole group discussion about issues arising from their presentation. This enabled each national group to ‘set out their stall’ and explain concepts and practices from their own contexts. There was extensive debate and not insignificant disagreement about, for example, differing understandings of the responsibility of the state, the role of non-governmental organisations and the expediency of ‘the market’. These discussions involved differing theoretical approaches and experiences of practices. They also involved a political level, which owed much to personal outlook and could not necessarily be aligned to a perspective based on nationality or wider culture. An important outcome of this debate was to highlight the diverse and complex nature of the field. Developing criteria to identify organisations that partners would approach to work with Given the differences in the conceptualisations of the social and solidarity economy, both in the literature and in the experiences of partners, it would have been highly problematic to attempt to create a definition of it that would inform which organisations we would approach to work with as part of the project. Following the articulation of concepts around the social and solidarity economy, we divided ourselves into two geographical region-based groups (representatives from Africa and Latin America in one group and from Europe in the other, making the numbers of people equal in each). During this activity, we discussed and wrote on flip charts the aspects we considered to be important characteristics of organisations in the social and solidarity economy in the contexts we were familiar with. These were the criteria that partners felt they could use to identify organisations they would approach to work with within the project. The activity involved some discussion and clarification of ideas and concepts between members of each group and required each to think pragmatically about the types of organisations we might approach to work with and towards the preparation of the handbook. In this way, a list of criteria was generated by each group. In order to integrate the two lists of different criteria from the groups, we came back together as one larger group and questioned each other about the understandings and experiences leading to the identification of their criteria. As part of this dialogue, areas of commonality and those of difference were apparent. An aim of the discussion was to work collaboratively to interweave criteria from both groups. The resulting criteria for organisations we would approach

Whose knowledge counts? 51 to work with can be seen on the project website1 and encompass each one of the ideas expressed by the groups. The criteria we generated enabled us as a group of partners to move forward together. I would argue that generating criteria together was preferable to coming up with a set definition, which could have been exclusive and a denial of the diversity of the field. A definition would have left no room to redraw the parameters or accept a different framing of the issue and therefore reduce the possibilities inherent in any social context. By developing criteria dialogically for the types of organisations partners would approach, I believe we succeeded in creating a situation in which the partners could work with an element of fuzziness. This would potentially keep the dialogue open, and enable partners and collaborators to see their own contexts reflected in the project. The approach would also offer a spectrum of different criteria rather than a hard and fast definition, which, in its rigidity, might risk excluding some highly effective community-­oriented organisations. For this reason, in my view, the approach was conducive to promoting justice in its epistemic form because it kept the space open for the inclusion of a variety of types of knowledge, approaches and forms of practice. Creating the framework for the handbook In line with the participative intentions behind the project, Catalina and I aimed to use our coordination role to ensure that the structure of the handbook was open enough for all to have significant input into the theoretical underpinnings of how the social and solidarity economy might be envisaged and manifested in practices. Along with the project partners, we aimed to promote an approach in which new knowledge and understandings could emerge through the dialogical interaction between different people and perspectives. With this in mind, the next challenge was to use the criteria we had generated as a group in a way that informed the handbook as one of the main outputs of the project. Following previous work based on literature and her experiences of the field, Catalina had developed draft chapter titles for the handbook. These had been identified and presented as a starting point in the project funding bid. Partners had been able to give feedback on these at the bid preparation stage. During the meetings on the day following the presentations and the generation of criteria, we placed the draft chapter titles onto a ‘sticky wall’: this was a display board covered with ripstop nylon with spray glue on which papers would stick and could be placed, peeled off and replaced, which meant that papers could be organised and reorganised. As a group we discussed the criteria we had generated on the previous day and negotiated placing each one under the provisional chapter headings which best encapsulated the idea contained by the criterion. Following extensive debate, papers were arranged, rearranged and reordered by the group of partners into different chapters as a better thematic fit was negotiated and agreed upon. At the initiative of the group and with much discussion, some chapters were combined because they were considered by the

52  Margaret Meredith partners to be dealing with a similar, bigger theme, and some chapters were renamed to better reflect the themes emerging from the criteria generated by the partners. Reflection and debate around this led to the existing ten chapters becoming eight. As the last paper was placed to the satisfaction of the group, there was a sense of elation and some applause in the group. We were now beginning to flesh out the concepts in a series of chapters which could be seen to include everyone’s contribution. Each partner could claim some ownership and input into the whole and see their contribution towards setting the conceptual framework. By the end of this activity, we had chapter titles which reflected the conceptualisations and priorities of all partners, and we also had outline areas of focus for the handbook chapters based on the criteria we had generated together. Raising questions to inform the handbook chapters Finally, Catalina and I invited partners to place their names next to chapters they felt best able to contribute to, and to take the lead on one or more specific chapters which were of particular interest to them. In the emerging chapter-focused groups, we worked collaboratively on raising questions that we considered relevant for development as part of the research for the focus of each chapter. The only stipulation Catalina and I made as project co-ordinators was that the work on each chapter should be coordinated by a representative from both global North and South. In this way, we aimed to foster a diversity of approaches in each ­chapter as far as possible, to promote dialogue between partners and make more likely the need to check assumptions in the process of leading and creating the chapters. The process of each of us raising questions we considered relevant to investigate was another way of framing the issues and expressing what was important to us. The content of each chapter was based on key questions that were expressed, explained and framed by each small group. Question raising around an issue of concern is, I believe, an important aspect of the practice of epistemic justice. Following these processes, we proceeded as a group to discuss our action plan and the logistics that would be involved in carrying out the project. Partners’ evaluations of the strategic planning meetings In the processes described and explained above, the conceptual bases of our study were built up together. During these processes, there was a high level of engagement from partners. Their written evaluations at the end of the week alluded to the satisfaction of the processes and with the results of them. One stated, ‘It’s a matter of building from diversity (which is not easy but foundation stones were laid).’ Comments from other partners included ‘… the main objectives were achieved with in-depth debates which were necessary’; another that ‘The [outcomes] that we achieved were very positive and more than seemed possible’; and ‘I think it has been a fruitful week … to start to set concepts to … start to move the project’. Partners also expressed their sense of ownership of the outputs; for example, one stated, ‘I am very happy to have known and

Whose knowledge counts? 53 participated in the process and contributed to the results’ and another, ‘It gave me clarity about the project and I committed myself to it’. What did we learn and what were some of the outcomes? I have aimed so far to explain how Catalina and I, along with project partners, worked on and within a participative approach, and how this was fostered as near to the outset of the project as possible. This seemed to be a way of working towards epistemic justice in which all participants are recognised in their capacity as knowers. Such an approach, however, can be more complex and less certain than one in which concepts and approaches are pre-engineered and participants work within already established frameworks. I now aim to set out some of the learning from adopting such an approach, a main one of which was the value of a dialogical approach. The dialogical approach taken in the project processes generated new understandings on three levels. The first was that in articulating our understandings we learned about one another’s contexts and realities and found commonalities and differences. The second, a slower and more profound process, involved deconstructing our own assumptions as part of the dialogue. The third level was that in our dialogical space of new understandings of ourselves and others, new knowledge and frameworks for knowing emerged. For example, Ana María Villafuerte reflected: I learnt that a better world is possible, that our differences are not irreconcilable, that it is only necessary to learn and listen. I learnt that a dialogue of knowledges between different latitudes is possible, I learnt that no knowledge is better than another, they are simply different and therefore it is necessary to seek complementarities. (email communication, 2 October 2016. Translated from Spanish) So, on one level, it involved learning about one another’s contexts and worlds; on another level, it created a situation in which we could partially step out of our own context and view it as outsiders in a way that enabled a greater meta-­ understanding of our own frameworks of knowing. In this way, we learnt from and with one another. The handbook that was developed is publicly available (Meredith et al., 2015) and contains: literature reviews from the three geographical regions of the project: Africa, Europe and Latin America; examples from many contexts in each region in which practice was explicated by those working in the social and solidarity economy, together with academics from universities; and dialogical sections in which we articulated the new understandings we had gained together from our work in our local contexts. Working in this way gave the opportunity for collaborators to articulate those knowledges and practices that were unique to their context. Published in three languages (English, Spanish and Portuguese), the handbook was the result of the collaborative efforts of many

54  Margaret Meredith people committed to epistemologies and practices that viewed social and environmental considerations alongside, and as important, as economic ones, rather than placing economic priorities above all else. Over the three years of the project, many collaborators from universities and from organisations in the social and solidarity economy around the world collaborated in the work of the project and formed their own local ‘communities of inquiry’ (Eikeland 2006) between academics, students and those in practices in the field. They contributed to the work of creating and articulating knowledges and practices and the values and ways of thinking that underpin them. For example, Melba Quijano, an academic specialising in social communication from Colombia, created her own community of inquiry of academics, students and practitioners around the issue. She said: What most challenged me was the idea of the collective construction of knowledge. The project permitted me to approach these practices and get to know, for example, the knowledge that an organisation like Woman and Future has in the area of gender, and the work of organisations like the Cacao Cooperative with all its knowledge, the technical knowledge of the peasant, the more ‘popular’ knowledge of organisations like CoCuza. (Transcript of audio recording 2 May 2016. Translated from Spanish) Melba also stated that some of the organisations contacted through the project were prompted to engage in self-reflection about their own practices. She has subsequently worked with them, creating a community of inquiry. She commented about the response of some of the grassroots organisations: It opened a panorama of reflection from within – hey we’re important – how can we organise things better? … I don’t know if this applied to their actions in general, but certainly in the field of communication, they did reflect on what they were doing. (Transcript of audio recording 2 May 2016. Translated from Spanish) Different styles and approaches are apparent in the literature reviews, case studies, teaching activities and documentary evidence that make up each chapter of the handbook. In the introduction to the handbook, partners from two continents wrote collaboratively: The reader will come across these differences [in approach], illustrating lives running in parallel towards the same goal: to imagine and build a human and solidarity economy, with and for everyone. We should point out that our aim was never to generalise our interpretations of the information gathered from different geographical areas. We hope instead to create knowledge that is dynamic and dialogical on the theory and practice of the social and solidarity economy. (Meredith et al., 2015).

Whose knowledge counts? 55

Academics and epistemic justice As academics, we both represent what is widely considered to be ‘proper’, legitimate knowledge. This places a great responsibility upon us to consider the types of knowledge we value, who is considered to be a knower, and the processes we see as legitimate in creating knowledge. I have explained how within the project theme, and in our relationships with those involved, Catalina and I aimed to foster a participative and dialogical approach to knowledge creation which involved academics and those working in the field of the social and solidarity economy where each one has the capacity to contribute to domains of knowledge. I have explained a process of project partners engaging with different ‘others’ as peers in framing the issues for investigation and in working together to take action on matters of common concern. We worked together on conceptualisations of issues for investigation and collaboratively raised and investigated questions that were meaningful to us. In this way, I believe we developed democratic forms of knowledge creation and ‘create[d] new pathways for human development’ (Leask and de Wit 2016: no page). As academics, I argue that we have a responsibility to work towards epistemic justice, where all have a stake and a claim to participate in domains of the kind of knowledge that counts. After all, and as Nixon (2011) argues ‘any serious debate about higher education must also be a debate about how we are to live together’ (117). In this way, as academics, we can position ourselves towards public service in knowledge domains. Part of this knowledge is that which enables us to collaborate within our differences. The university environment in which many of us work is a privileged one and uniquely suited to facilitating and leading in the development of knowledges in pluralistic contexts, given its commitment to knowledge, to research, its social capital and its human and physical resources. As well as being places of dialogical learning and learning to think for oneself, higher education institutions could also be seen as deliberative spaces which are about helping ourselves to live together in a world of incommensurable difference and uncompromising contingency [because] the world is not going to stop being like this. On the contrary, it will become increasingly super-­ complex in its inter-connectivity and will make ever increasing demands on our human capacity to understand. (Nixon 2015: 174) The current global context is one of seemingly increasing polarisation and retrenchment into fixed positions based on political binaries and manifestations of inequalities. As an academic I believe it is my responsibility to create spaces for participation in knowledge creation which challenge exclusionary practices and reductive ways of addressing pressing issues of the day. My responsibility as an

56  Margaret Meredith academic is, I believe, to work in practical ways in efforts to enact and influence the broader social and political questions about the kind of society it is worth working towards. In this chapter, I have tried to illustrate this kind of society in practice by showing how participants, in our differences, were able to address a common concern in a way in which each person’s contribution was included and influenced the direction of the whole endeavour.

Acknowledgements The project was partially funded by the Erasmus Mundus programme of the European Union. I would like to express my gratitude to each of the partners and collaborators in the project who took on the challenge of working together to recognise and make visible the epistemologies, values and practices of many people and communities who work for a fairer and more sustainable world. A full list of acknowledgements is available on the website of the project handbook.2 The methodology used to facilitate our interactions in the project is based on the ‘Technology of Participation’ facilitation methods developed by the Institute of Cultural Affairs.3

Notes 1 https://www.yorksj.ac.uk/socialeconomy/what-is-the-social-economy/ 2 https://www.yorksj.ac.uk/socialeconomy/handbook/ 3 http://w w w.ica-international.org/top-facilitation/icas-technolog y-ofparticipation-top/

References Amin, A. (2009) The social economy: international perspectives on economic solidarity. London: Zed Books. Apple, M. (2000) Official knowledge: democratic education in a conservative age. 2nd edn. London: Routledge. Bakhtin, M.M. (1981) The dialogic imagination: four essays. In M. Holquist (ed.). Austin: University of Texas Press. Berlin, I. (2003 [1959]) The crooked timber of humanity: chapters in the history of ideas. London: John Murray. Buber, M. (2002 [1947]) Between man and man. Abingdon: Routledge. Code, L. (2006) Ecological thinking: the politics of epistemic location. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Connell, R. (2007) Southern theory: social science and the global dynamics of knowledge. Cambridge: Polity. de Sousa Santos, B. (2016) Epistemologies of the south: justice against epistemicide. London: Routledge. Djerasimovic, S. (2014) Examining the discourses of cross-cultural communication in transnational higher education: from imposition to transformation. Journal of Education for Teaching. 40 (3), pp. 204–216. DOI: 10.1080/02607476.2014.903022.

Whose knowledge counts? 57 EACEA (Education, Audiovisual and Culture Executive Agency). (2019) Capacity building in the field of higher education. European Commission. Available from https://eacea.ec.europa.eu/erasmus-plus/actions/key-action-2-cooperation-forinnovation-and-exchange-good-practices/capacity-building-projects-in-fieldhigher-education_en [Accessed 14th October 2020]. Easterly, W. (2013) The tyranny of experts: Economists, dictators, and the forgotten rights of the poor. New York: Basic Books. Eikeland, O. (2006) Condescending ethics and action research. Action Research. 4 (1), pp. 37–48. Fricker, M. (2007) Epistemic injustice: power and the ethics of knowing. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gaventa, J. and Bivens, F. (2014) Knowledge democracy, cognitive justice and the role of universities. In: Global University Network for Innovation (ed.). Higher education in the world 5: Knowledge, engagement & higher education: contributing to social change. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 69–73. Leask, B. and de Wit, H. (2016) Reimagining the HE curriculum for the 21st century. University World News. Available http://www.universityworldnews.com/ article.php?story=20161122185905336 (Accessed 14 Oct 2020). McNiff, J. (2017) Action research: All you need to know. 1st edn. Los Angeles: SAGE. Meredith, M. and Quiroz-Niño, C. (coords), Arando, S., Coelho, L., Silva, M.F. and Villafuerte Pezo, A.M. (2015) Enhancing studies and practice of the social and solidarity economy: A reference handbook. Available http://www.yorksj.ac.uk/ socialeconomy (Accessed 14 October 2020). Meredith, M. (2020) Creating spaces of dialogical action towards epistemic justice in higher education. Doctoral thesis. York St John University: York, UK. Available from https://ray.yorksj.ac.uk/id/eprint/4622/. Mignolo, W. (2002) The geopolitics of knowledge and the colonial difference. The South Atlantic Quarterly. 101 (1), pp. 57–96. Nixon, J. (2011) Higher education and the public good. London: Continuum. Nixon, J. (2015) Inequality and the erosion of the public good. In: O. Filippakou and G. Williams (eds.) Higher education and the public good: critical perspectives on theory, policy and practice. New York: Peter Lang. Quiroz-Niño, C. and Murga-Menoyo, M.A. (2017) Social and solidarity economy, sustainable development goals, and community development: the mission of adult education & training. Sustainability. 9 (12). https://doi.org/10.3390/su9122164. Ridley-Duff, R. and Bull, M. (2015) Understanding social enterprise: theory and practice. 2nd edn. London: SAGE. Rorty, R. (1999) Philosophy and social hope. London: Penguin. Shiller, R. (2010) How should the financial crisis change how we teach economics? The Journal of Economic Education. 41 (4), pp. 403–409. DOI: 10.1080/ 00220485.2010.510409. Stern, J. (2016) Virtuous educational research: conversations on ethical practice. Frankfurt am Maine: Peter Lang Edition. Sun, T. (2019) The problem with applying Western theories that don’t fit. University World News, 15 March 2019. Available https://www.universityworldnews.com/ post.php?story=20190312130941220 (Accessed 14th October 2020). Toulmin, S. (1990) Cosmopolis: the hidden agenda of modernity. New York: Free Press. UNESCO. (2015) Rethinking education: towards a global common good? Paris: UNESCO Publishing. Available http://www.unesco.org/new/fileadmin/MULTIMEDIA/ FIELD/Cairo/images/RethinkingEducation.pdf (Accessed 14 October 2020).

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Encouraging teachers and learning support assistants (LSAs) to see themselves as researchers Catherine McPartland

Introduction This chapter is about encouraging teachers and Learning Support Assistants (LSAs) who work in Further Education and Training (FET) to see and do research as part of their everyday teaching. This is easier said than done, because Further Education as a sector tends to have an antagonistic attitude towards the idea of research, and teachers are often hostile to the notion that they should be seen as researchers, frequently believing that subject knowledge itself is sufficient for their teaching role (Lucas, 2004; McNair, 1944; McPartland, 2014; Robson et al., 2004). The image many FET teachers have of themselves is that they are practice-oriented teachers, and that esoteric matters such as research should be left to those in the Higher Education sector whose job it is to research. For FET teachers, the job of teachers is to teach: they should be highly skilled and competent in practical matters of pedagogy – the ‘what’ of practice – and leave matters to do with knowledge creation – the ‘how and why’ of practice – to those who are paid to do it (McNiff, 2020). This view is frequently reinforced by elitist academics, notably John Hattie, whose view is that teachers should not try to be researchers and that research is best left to academics (Stewart, 2015). In my view, this attitude is ill-informed, and can contribute to a dangerously limiting culture where teachers deliberately stunt their own growth and mistakenly refuse to engage with new opportunities for thinking and advancement of their own and others’ knowledge. Further, it can be detrimental to the profession, to learners and to teachers themselves. However, not all is as bleak as the above might indicate. For example, the Teaching Standards set out by The Education and Training Foundation explicitly state that FET teachers should maintain and regularly update their knowledge of educational research in order to develop and promote evidence-based practice (Education and Training Foundation, 2014a). There can also be little doubt that recent years have seen an increasing emphasis on teacher development through reflective practice and action research (as in, for example, Connelly and Clandinin, 1999; Elliott, 1991; McNiff, 1993, 2013; Robinson, 2003), although this tendency is arguably more prevalent in the compulsory than the FET sector. Much of this trend is based on concepts such as those of DOI: 10.4324/9781351053372-5

Encouraging teachers and LSAs to see themselves as researchers 59 Stenhouse (1975) of the teacher-as-researcher and of Hoyle and John (1995) of the extended professional: such a professional is highly involved in professional activities such as reading professional literature and engaging in educational research, seeks to improve their work by learning from other teachers through collaborative practice, and engages in professional development activities. Such activities help them to develop a broader range of knowledge and skill in order better to contextualise and improve classroom practice on a regular basis (Clow, 2001). Other work such as that by MacFarlane and Hughes (2009), Muijs (2019) and Husband and Jones (2019) has further reinforced the need for teachers to research what they are doing in order to improve classroom practice. Given this emphasis on the need to support educational improvement through teacher education, I was delighted when an opportunity arose to engage in an action research project aimed at promoting more effective working relationships between teachers and LSAs. The story that follows is therefore about efforts to challenge the existing culture and promote the idea of FET educators as highly competent, capable thinkers and researchers as well as doers.

The context The context for the story is a medium-sized Further Education College in the North East of England, where I work as a teacher-educator and Advanced Teaching and Learning Practitioner. The job involves supporting and advising teachers in matters of pedagogy and administration, and ensuring that learning opportunities and overall college experiences are high quality. A further responsibility is to support and advise learning support staff whose job is to provide general classroom support, under the direction of the class teacher, in order to motivate and encourage learners, assist in weaker areas and promote learning skills. However, little training or continuing professional development (CPD) is available to enable individuals to carry out this very important role; nor is there, in my experience, any specific training for FET teachers in how to work effectively with LSAs, a view widely reinforced in the academic literatures (see, for example, Blatchford et al., 2009a, 2009b; Blatchford, Russell, and Webster, 2012; Bosanquet, Radford and Webster, 2016; O’Brien and O’Brien, 2010; Sharples, Webster and Blatchford, 2015). The project under consideration here was part of an Outstanding Teaching, Learning and Assessment (OTLA) Phase 3 programme funded by the UK Education and Training Foundation (ETF), a sector-owned, government-backed workforce development body for the FET sector. Its role is to commission and deliver professional learning and development for teachers, leaders and trainers in FET to support government policy and meet sector needs, as well as improve education and training for learners aged 14 and over (Education and Training Foundation, 2018a). Its core belief is that the key to improving education and training is by supporting teachers and their leaders to excel. The opportunity to embark on the project seemed to offer a host of opportunities for teaching and learning support teams and their learners. There would

60  Catherine McPartland also be potential to work collaboratively with a range of educational organisations in the area, possibly to promote and develop research skills as a regular feature of staff development, all aimed at providing enhanced opportunities for learners.

Project aims The aims of the project were: 1 To promote effective collaboration between teachers and LSAs so that LSAs could independently support teachers in encouraging learners to take responsibility for their learning. 2 To ensure that LSAs were fully prepared for their role in the classroom and enabled to carry this out effectively. 3 To encourage deeper, more engaged learning on the part of learners rather than a dependency on teachers and LSAs to enable them to gain their qualifications. A Project Team consisting of sixteen teachers and LSAs from the different curriculum areas of health and care, construction, early years, hair and beauty and maths and English was established to carry out the project. It included both experienced and relatively inexperienced staff and, as is typical of the sector, more females than males (Education and Training Foundation, 2014b). We were supported and mentored throughout by an experienced action research practitioner, Dr Andy Convery, who consistently provided valuable help, guidance and encouragement. The college operates in an area of social deprivation and has a history of providing support for learners with learning disabilities and difficulties. However, classroom observations by the college’s managers and myself showed that LSAs were often ineffectively involved in supporting learners’ progress. Further, some management observers expressed concern that LSAs frequently focused on task completion rather than on encouraging learners to complete tasks independently, crucial to developing a motivating sense of personal achievement. Those same observers noted that little evidence was available to show joint teacher/LSA planning in either lesson planning documentation or in observations of practice. The assessment of learners’ progress and subsequent planning for next stages between teachers and LSAs also appeared tenuous. To compound these difficulties, many learners had over time developed a negative attitude towards learning, believing they were unlikely to succeed on their own, so were reluctant to work independently, frequently relying on LSAs or teachers to provide them with solutions. This situation often resulted in learners’ disruptive behaviour, lack of engagement and failure to complete tasks successfully, thus compounding their lack of self-belief (Claxton, 2002; Dweck, 2012; Dweck and Master, 2009). To paraphrase William James, if you don’t try, you can’t fail and if you don’t fail there will be no shame; this applies to many of our learners who sought to avoid failure by not contributing to classroom work and activity (O’Brien, 2019).

Encouraging teachers and LSAs to see themselves as researchers 61 To address these complex issues of enabling teachers and LSAs to provide more focussed and helpful support for learners, and for learners to take advantage of the support, the project team introduced a scaffolded approach to learning (Bruner, 1966), intended to enable learners, with support, to develop their self-belief and sense of worth: this would be achieved through their identifying what they could do, where they needed to improve and outlining strategies on how they could improve. We decided to use formative feedback, appropriate praise and the setting of agreed, joint targets for improvement to encourage learners’ sense of achievement and belief that they could complete tasks successfully (Bandura, 1977; Black and Wiliam, 1998, 2004, 2018).

Co-researching in an anti-academic culture Although I knew this proposed action research project was a valuable opportunity to raise expectations of support staff, teachers and learners, I also had initial reservations, as noted, about how colleagues from across the different departments within the college would respond to engaging in an academically driven research project. It has to be remembered that the FET sector is highly complex, containing people from many different backgrounds, including Higher Education in Further Education (HE in FE), sixth form colleges, further education colleges, private and public sector training, community learning and development, workplace learning and 14-19 provision and offender learning. This means that staff within a college frequently identify themselves as different from one another rather than sharing a common experience (Bathmaker and Avis, 2007; Fisher and Simmons, 2010; Hodkinson et al., 2002; Maxwell, 2013; Orr and Simmons, 2011). They are, therefore, likely to have different expectations and experiences of project work, which can raise problems when trying to bring a team together to work towards a common, shared goal. Across my college (and the FE sector in general, where the educational focus is on the development of practical skills appropriate to future employment rather than theoretical learning), there can be antagonism to perceptions of the ‘academic world’. That world tends to be seen as more relevant to higher education and remote from the practical world of further education practitioners. The academic world may seem disconnected and irrelevant to many vocational teachers who have chosen a vocational route perhaps because of previous experiences in education or lack of academic success. Many lack confidence in their academic abilities and are reluctant to engage in or consider the theory behind their practice, perhaps though a deeply held fear of further exposing their supposed lack of academic ability. Further, there is a structural divide in the Further Education sector itself between academic and vocational subjects with specifically vocational routes. A government report into vocational education (Wolf, 2011) offers an umbrella definition of ‘vocational’ education as embracing ‘all qualifications other than GCSEs and A-levels’. Consequently, more academically inclined learners are often taught in separate, archaically named ‘Sixth-form Centres’, often physically adjacent to the vocational mainstream of the general FE college. Those learners

62  Catherine McPartland requiring help from support staff are almost always part of the ‘non-academic’ provision, and support staff often adopt their vocational colleagues’ shared allegiance to a proudly antagonistic practical culture, a culture that values the capacity to achieve concrete outcomes in the so-called ‘real world’ rather than privilege the capacity to adopt a critical stance to events. Indeed, for many designated as having a practical bent, there is a shared understanding that being critical means finding fault rather than evaluating what is worthwhile in an idea or activity. Such issues were endemic to our project. A number of participating vocational teachers and LSAs lacked capacity in degree-level academic writing, familiarity with research or confidence in doing research, while the project commissioners also appeared to lower their expectations of vocational practitioners, as set out in the working brief supplied by the ETF: OTLA is not a research programme, it is a practitioner-focussed research-­ informed development and activity programme with tangible teacher-led working, and visible outcomes for learners. (Education and Training Foundation, 2014c: 7) The reassurance that the work to be undertaken was not research in itself, but ‘research-informed’ embodies a view of research as produced on the ‘hard, high ground’ of professional practices, to follow Schön’s (1983) analogy, the aim of which can guide practitioners toiling in the ‘swampy lowlands’ towards producing measurably-improved practical activities and outputs. Such an instrumental relationship between researchers and practitioners was further endorsed by how the research community might view the hierarchical relationship between teachers and support assistants, and is apparent in the key guidance published by the UK Education Endowment Foundation’s ‘Making Best Use of Teaching Assistants’ (Sharples et al., 2015). The title of this publication (prompted by questioning of the cost-effective ‘value’ of support assistants) positions support assistants as largely devoid of agency. The challenge for our project, therefore, was to explore the extent to which teachers and LSAs could fully engage in developmental academic research activities in which they all conducted their own enquiries, drew upon research to improve their practice and contributed their research findings to both the research and teaching communities. I knew from previous experience as a teacher educator that vocational staff are often reluctant to engage with theory: there are numerous reasons why they are unwilling to do so. For example, the language used in academic research papers may be, or be perceived to be, inaccessible to practitioners; many lack the confidence or willingness to engage in educational research, compounded by the lack of time to do much beyond their teaching duties (MacLellan, 2016).

Responding to the challenge The task in our project was to break down these kinds of mental and social barriers, and develop a community that could find ways of taking control of their professional practices.

Encouraging teachers and LSAs to see themselves as researchers 63 Growing and nurturing a research team As noted earlier, although there has been increasing emphasis on the teacher as researcher in recent years, there is still a reluctance by teachers in FET to identify themselves like this. Many still identify themselves by their vocational expertise (McKelvey and Andrews, 1998; McPartland, 2014; Robson, 1998) and are disinclined to regard themselves as academic, shying away from the notion of themselves as active researchers. LSAs too shared this reluctance and lacked confidence in moving beyond their current role. To enable individuals to meet the challenges implicit within the project aims and facilitate their personal and professional development meant creating an environment in which they felt safe and had opportunity, time, space and support to actively engage in academic research, thus developing confidence in themselves and one another as researchers. Initially, this was something individuals struggled with as they grappled with new ideas and concepts. It is a view commensurable with LaBoskey’s (1994) idea that there is a continuum of growth, as the novice shifts from a ‘common sense thinker’  – one who focuses on self and personal experiences – to an ‘alert novice’ and finally a ‘pedagogical thinker’, whose focus is on teacher and learners’ learning processes rather than the self. LaBoskey stressed the need to be responsive to these stages by purposefully challenging and influencing individuals’ images of themselves as educators (Loughran, 2007). This is what I set out to do, encouraging project team members to move from dependency on my direction to becoming active participants in fashioning the research project as it evolved. For the first project meeting I held two separate focus groups: this would help me gain insight into how teachers and LSAs might feel about working together and their possible participation in the project. I hoped the meetings would also encourage participants to voice their opinions more freely than they would in a whole group. The meetings provided much food for thought. To my surprise, there seemed to be little common ground between the two groups: a lack of trust was evident, with neither teachers nor LSAs sure about what was expected of them and how they could develop together. Some teachers claimed that LSAs did not have sufficient subject-specific knowledge to support learners effectively, and were quite scathing about the potential limitations of their effect on student learning. LSAs, on the other hand, tended to feel unprepared for sessions, not necessarily through their own lack of knowledge, but because the lack of any meaningful communication and planning time with teachers before or after sessions left them unclear about what they should be doing. An initial task therefore was to build trust between the two groups and create an environment in which all saw themselves as equal partners whose expertise and knowledge were valued and shared throughout. Fostering the development of a research community meant encouraging participants to work together: it involved creating protected spaces outside the normal college environment and routines, giving the team and the project a sense of identity and status, vital if members were to develop a shared bond of

64  Catherine McPartland understanding and collegiality. This meant that many of our meetings were held off site; and team members also enjoyed meeting with staff from other projects at four practitioner research days organised by the OTLA project management team. A team culture gradually evolved, evident when the hesitation shown by a support assistant who asked at the initial registration for the first OTLA meeting, ‘Do we have to sit with our teachers?’ later transformed into working collaboratively as the project progressed. The venue for our first in-house meeting was a local hotel where we met for a shared lunch followed by a project meeting. To help teachers and LSAs engage with the idea of doing research, I began by asking them to complete a card-­sorting activity based upon Sharples et al.’s (2015) findings on the work of teaching assistants in schools (TAs in the terminology of the report), and to prioritise statements they particularly identified with. Interestingly many of the statements were similar to comments made in their introductory meetings, with both teachers and LSAs able to identify with perspectives such as: ‘The TA (Teaching Assistant) can’t really help because she doesn’t know and understand the subject.’ ‘I haven’t had any training on how to work effectively with TAs, so I’m not really sure of the best approach.’ ‘Communication between teachers and Teaching Assistants is largely ad hoc. Many TAs report feeling unprepared for the tasks they are given.’ ‘TAs are not adequately prepared for their role in classrooms and have little time for liaison with teachers.’ This initial card-sorting activity was crucial in identifying teachers and LSAs as people with worthwhile ideas, endorsed by the more abstract world of academia. It also helped to build their working confidence in sharing their ideas (often defensively as they attempted to make public their frustrations in helping learners), and to become more open to other ideas inspired by their appreciation that they were now possibly going to do their own research. Ideas they reluctantly acknowledged included: ‘TAs tend to be more concerned with task completion and less concerned with developing understanding’ and ‘Some evidence suggests that TA support may encourage dependency’. Discussing and then accepting the implications of these statements indicated to me their willingness to not only challenge their practice, but also to change and develop their practice to support learners more effectively. As part of the meeting, the action research process was explored and its cyclical nature clarified. We examined stages in the process, explaining the importance of building and developing knowledge, applying this to situations, critically reflecting on the outcomes of practice and planning next stages based on the results of our reflections. Most of the team were familiar with Kolb’s Reflective Cycle (1983), though they confessed they had not used it to any extent since their initial teacher training, but reference to the model did help their understanding of the action research process.

Encouraging teachers and LSAs to see themselves as researchers 65 The social context and confidence-building experience of these research awareness-raising sessions were all-important. Teachers and LSAs needed affirmation both within and between their groupings if they were to embrace research identities more actively. Importantly, although teachers and support staff had different roles, nevertheless relationships and identifications were complicated. Some teachers had closer relationships with those LSAs they knew than with some of the other teachers with the same role. And, understandably, LSAs still deferred to teachers; for example, when mixed groups of teachers and assistants were working on the research card-finding activities, the assistants typically deferred to the teachers in the group as the ones who moved the cards around the desks. But there was at least some exchange of views, and LSAs’ comments were solicited by the teachers, if not always acted on. In spite of the difficulties, we gradually began to establish a research culture and environment. I constantly reassured individuals they already had the qualities of a researcher as they consistently reflected on and strove to improve their practice. Our efforts focused on raising awareness that the issues identified in their initial meetings applied not only to them, and that there may be a co-­ operative way forward. Mixing the groups so that teachers and LSAs were now working together proved beneficial, and a great deal of fruitful discussion arose as the project progressed. However, significant barriers still had to be overcome if this so-diverse team were to come together to develop shared understandings and action plans about how to encourage learning skills and student metacognition. Further, by providing opportunities to challenge and rethink their currently taken-for-granted beliefs, practices, roles, relationships and behaviours (as in Gregson and Hillier, 2015; Hillier, 2002, we were able to overcome some of the barriers, thereby developing a shared understanding and action plan to promote learning skills and learner metacognition. There seemed to be an increasing awareness that the project was not merely an academic exercise, but also focused on developing solutions to real identified problems. A main difficulty everyone had to face up to was that both teachers and support assistants suffered from public, and their own, perceptions of low status. Teachers were constantly on edge, especially as their college had been deemed by Ofsted as ‘requiring improvement’, and job security was precarious. The situation of the LSAs was even worse; whilst some were on permanent contracts, most were on temporary part-time hourly contracts paying a minimum wage. It is testimony to their commitment to learners that they engaged with and were fully committed to the project. My role as project leader was to help participants to build confidence, to be able to stand back and analyse and review situations without fear of negative criticism and then to plan ways forward together. But things started to change. At first, there was an expectation that I as project leader would initiate and guide their actions, but gradually many participants began to plan their own actions, introducing new ideas and sharing these with colleagues.

66  Catherine McPartland Examples include: From a teacher: ‘I introduced learning mats and kept a detailed reflective journal on how things were going. The LSA and I made time to think about how these worked with the learners. This has given me a renewed sense of purpose and I’m really excited about this innovation and so pleased I’m part of it.’ From a Learning Support Assistant: ‘The teacher and I now work differently. We make time after the session to discuss what happened. Did it work? Do we need to change anything? The teacher now sends me resources before the session and explains in much more detail how I could use them with learners.’ In working through the action research cycle, participants commented that one of the most valuable aspects of the project was being given space to reflect on how far we had travelled together. We regularly met as a whole team to share our findings and discuss their implications. I had used some of the project money to purchase reflective notebooks for all team members: they used these as they proudly reflected on their work with learners and, importantly, engaged them in the research through the use of ‘exit tickets’: these were proformas in which learners reflected on their progress in lessons, identified any issues they were struggling with and what kinds of support would be most effective for their learning. In spite of some initial reluctance, this strategy became popular, both with learners and also LSAs. Many now felt they were positively contributing to and helping to direct learning to meet individual needs, rather than being largely passive in the classroom as had previously been the case. This gave a significant boost to their sense of purpose and usefulness as they grew in confidence. Teacher comments included the following: I was reluctant to use the exit tickets at first. I thought learners would hate them and see them as a test. I worked with the LSA and learners to help them recognise their achievements and areas where they needed more support. The learners were then readier to complete them and provided more detailed insights into their learning. These (exit tickets) helped me give the learners space to think and for me to encourage and support them, rather than my taking over the task. This helped learners’ confidence and encouraged them to work more independently. And learners commented: I’m not worried about asking for help now; the LSA really helps me to understand and I don’t feel daft for asking. She makes it easier to understand, she asks me questions and helps me to think things through.

Encouraging teachers and LSAs to see themselves as researchers 67 On-going support was vital for success and was initially provided in abundance, but as the project progressed, the team developed a greater sense of autonomy, so requiring less support. They learned from one another, through visiting each other’s classrooms and observing teaching sessions. This was something they had never done before. Further, LSAs appeared to benefit as much as teachers. One LSA wrote: I saw J. using an interesting approach with a small group of learners. She asked lots of probing questions, encouraging the learners to explore the issues and explain their ideas to each other. Another reflected: It’s enlightening to consider how effective relationships can enhance learning and the environment. Both during and at the end of the project, many opportunities were built in to encourage all participants to reflect on their personal and professional development. Activities such as padlets, three-minute conferences and shared reflections were used to support participants to evaluate their participation by identifying changes in their teaching, learning and assessment practices and checking their progress against the ETF Teaching Standards. All said they felt more confident about using the Standards; the points raised provided ample evidence of development in skills, knowledge and understanding for all. For example: LSAs commented: I understand what the lesson aims are now. This helps me support learners and I can ensure they are confident about what they have learned by the end of the session. Building rapport with the tutor; being valued, liaising, adapting resources and then reflecting on the impact and what effect it has on the classroom dynamics are all outcomes I have witnessed. A teacher commented: It has made me relook at my practice and reaffirmed via my reflections that I can change. Really made me think; I like being a teacher again. Learners commented: She seems more with it these days: much happier than before. There’s less mucking around in class so we can learn if we want to. The lessons are more interesting and we feel more like taking part. Don’t know what has happened, but whatever it is, it’s good.

68  Catherine McPartland

Main findings It is widely acknowledged that key to effective action research is active, purposeful reflection based on information that participants have systematically gathered (Ponte, 2002): doing this in collaboration with supportive and committed colleagues is invaluable in deepening the level of reflection and agreeing future action. This was all part of our team’s engaging in praxis, a cyclical process in which they were responsible for analysing and evaluating their learning, and then moving on to next stages which were again systematically evaluated. Overall, effective working relationships between teachers and LSAs were significantly developed and enhanced, as were those with learners. The new strategies clearly promoted learner confidence, encouraging them to discuss, question and engage in interactive learning. Supporting learners’ self-assessment and jointly planning the means of improving their learning appears to have helped them develop greater resilience, overcoming their previous fear of failure (O’Brien, 2019). They were now much more confident to ‘have a go’, rather than immediately giving up when presented with an unfamiliar or challenging task. LSAs generally believed their skills, knowledge and understanding had developed through attending meaningful CPD events and working with committed colleagues. By engaging in action research and evidence-based practice they had become better informed and more confident practitioners whose contributions were now more widely acknowledged and valued. They believed their teaching and learning support skills had been enhanced and they now consciously reflected on their work with learners, while drawing on other published research to further improve their practices. Although the project was relatively small scale, it has had significant recognition in the public domain, providing concrete evidence of the positive ­outcomes for project team members: these have included actively contributing to research papers and conferences and becoming confident to present their findings to an academic audience, an activity they would previously have shied away from for fear of being overwhelmed by the occasion and the ‘academic’ audience. The publication of findings and conference presentations include articles in the Intuition and Teaching in Lifelong Learning journals (McPartland, 2018a, 2018b), presentations at the British Educational Research Association Conference (McPartland, 2018c); the Collaborative Action Research Network Conference (McPartland, Greenwood and Walker, 2018) and The Teacher Education Advancement Network (McPartland and Pearson, 2018). These have helped to raise the profile and confidence of the team and their project and given our college, and the work we have done, some national recognition. Significantly, two members of the group were invited to join a National Advisory Group tasked with drawing up standards for Learning Support Staff in Further Education settings, an invitation they took up with alacrity. The LSA who contributed to the Advisory Group has since been promoted to Team Leader for Learning Support, partly as a result of her work on our project. When she discussed her involvement in the project at her job interview, the interview team told her they

Encouraging teachers and LSAs to see themselves as researchers 69 were ‘blown away’ by all she had achieved during the project and by her massively increased self-confidence. She now encourages her team of LSAs to engage in further research projects and they became actively involved in both a pilot project relating to changes in the Functional Skills Curriculum (Department for Education, 2018) and an Outstanding Teaching, Learning and Assessment Phase 5 Project: Achievement for All (Education and Training Foundation, 2018c).

Conclusion To sum up, being part of the action research project has had significant impact for participants, learners and the college as a whole. As a project team, we are clear that we have made considerable progress towards meeting our project’s aims. Despite the challenges which arose during the project, we have learned that it is possible to introduce change, and that even small changes can make a huge difference to how people work together to promote learning. Key issues to emerge were the importance of making time to plan together; recognising and meeting learning needs quickly, rather than picking these up at the end of a teaching session; making time to reflect deeply on what happens in sessions; and how improvements could be introduced. Significantly, teachers and LSAs have learned the importance of listening to each other and the ‘learner voice’, making all partners in learning; this has given everyone a deeper understanding of how learning can be enhanced. More planning, discussion and evaluation have taken place throughout the project than was previously the case, but there are still concerns, raised by the project team about the lack of time to continue activities and secure their longterm sustainability. There is an enhanced understanding of the learning process; but more concentrated training time needs to be allocated to build on the good work that has already taken place, ensuring that new learning and practices continue and are further embedded into classroom practice. The project team has become more familiar with the ETF Teaching Standards, which some were previously unaware of, and confidently monitoring their progress against these Standards using card-based activities, reflection and discussion. It is interesting to speculate how many qualified teachers and trainee teachers in FET engage with these Teaching Standards and are conscious of meeting them and applying them in their practice. Cushing, for example, in discussing his pre-­ service teaching placement, questions teachers’ knowledge of the standards and their impact on professionalism. Referring to colleagues in his placement, he states: … over the entire year I did not once hear the standards being talked about or referred to unless initiated by myself. (Cushing, 2012: 17) He further comments on these colleagues’ perceptions of the role of CPD, concluding ‘[it] is not considered a particularly important factor to other teachers in the setting’. The work undertaken on our college’s particular project, however,

70  Catherine McPartland could be seen as providing compelling evidence that discussing, reflecting on and applying the Teaching Standards, whilst participating in meaningful CPD, can have a substantial impact on practitioners’ agency and teaching, learning and assessment practices. Particularly, pleasing innovations within the college include the appointment of an overall team leader for Learning Support, as previously stated, whose responsibility it is to ensure continuity of provision and effective CPD for LSAs. The college now offers permanent contracts to LSAs, a great improvement on the previous ad-hoc arrangement, recognising the value of learning support, helping to ensure continuity of support and additionally increasing its status within the college. There is still some way to go before there is true synergy of teachers and LSAs working together. However, there is now a recognition of the importance of working towards this nationally, through recognition of the National Advisory Group’s recommendations on standards for Learning Support staff in Further Education settings: this has led to the publication of ‘Guidance for Leaders and Managers on the role of LSAs in Further Education and Training’ (Education and Training Foundation, 2018b). The Guidance contains five key recommendations intended to ensure maximum impact of LSAs in post-16 settings and is an important landmark in recognising the importance of effective learning support whilst raising the professional profile and status of LSAs in FET. In my college, there have been a number of CPD sessions to both disseminate the outcomes of the research and plan more effective teacher/LSA working partnerships. An example of this is teachers and LSAs now working together to carry out initial student assessment activities, together developing meaningful targets with learners and cooperating in lesson planning strategies. These were previously carried out by teachers working alone; the new approaches encourage the early development of teacher, LSA and learner relationships; something previously missing, but of obvious benefits to learning. The vital importance of involvement of staff in practitioner research and development projects has also been recognised by the college through supporting further involvement in research projects such as the OTLA 5 Outstanding Teaching, Learning and Assessment (ETF, 2018d) and in OTLA 6: English Phonics Project (2019). This will, hopefully, support further organic growth in the college, ensuring the good work from this particular research project will continue to be valued as a catalyst in promoting a culture in which teaching and learning staff see practitioner research as an integral part of everyday teaching practice.

References Bandura, A. (1977) Social learning theory. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Bathmaker, A.-M. and Avis, J. (2007) ‘How do I cope with that?’ The challenge of ‘schooling’ cultures in FE for trainee FE lecturers. British Educational Research Journal, 33(4), pp. 509–532. Black, P. and Wiliam, D. (1998) Inside the black box: Raising standards through classroom assessment. London: School of Education, King’s College.

Encouraging teachers and LSAs to see themselves as researchers 71 Black, P. and Wiliam, D. (2004) Working inside the black box: Assessment for learning in the classroom. Bloomington: Phi Delta Kappan. Black, P. and Wiliam, D. (2018) Classroom assessment and pedagogy. Assessment in Education: Principles, Policy & Practice, 2(6), pp. 551–575. Blatchford, P., Bassett, P., Brown, P., Martin, C., Russell, A. and Webster R. (2009a) The Deployment and Impact of Support Staff (DISS) project. London: Department for Children, Schools and Families. Blatchford, P., Bassett, P., Brown, P. and Webster, R. (2009b) The effect of support staff on pupil engagement and individual attention. British Educational Research Journal, 35(5), pp. 661–668. Blatchford, P., Russell, A. and Webster, R. (2012) Reassessing the impact of teaching assistants: How research challenges practice and policy. Abingdon: Routledge. Bosanquet, P., Radford, J. and Webster, R. (2016) A teaching assistant’s guide to effective interaction: How to maximise your impact. Abingdon: Routledge. Bruner, J. S. (1966). Toward a theory of instruction. Cambridge, MA: Belkapp Press. Claxton, G. (2002) Building learning power: Helping young people. London: TLO Ltd. Clow, R. (2001) Further education teachers’ constructions of professionalism. Journal of Vocational Education and Training, 53(3), pp. 407–420. Connelly, M. F. and Clandinin, D. J. (1999) Shaping a professional identity: Stories of educational practice. New York: Teachers College Press. Cushing, I. (2012) Working towards professionalism: A pathway into the post-compulsory community of practice. Teaching in Lifelong Learning, 4(1), pp. 13–20. Department for Education. (2018) Subject content functional skills: English. London: Df E. Dweck, C.S. (2012) How you can fulfil your potential. London: Robinson. Dweck, C.S. and Master, A. (2009) Self-theories and motivation: Students’ beliefs about intelligence. In K. R. Wenzel and A. Wigfield (Eds.), Educational psychology handbook series. Handbook of motivation at school (pp. 123–140). London: Routledge/Taylor & Francis Group. Education and Training Foundation. (2014a) Professional standards for teachers and trainers in education and training. London: ETF. Education and Training Foundation. (2014b) Further education workforce data for England: Analysis of the 2012–2013 staff individualised record data. London: ETF. Education and Training Foundation. (2014c) Invitation to tender specification document. Outstanding, Teaching, Learning and Assessment (OTLA) Phase 3 Regional Project: Attainment Retention and Progression. London: ETF. Education and Training Foundation. (2018a) ETF Strategy 2018–2021. Available on: https://www.et-foundation.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/StrategicPlan-Final-30-Nov.pdf, accessed: 28 April, 2019. Education and Training Foundation. (2018b) Guidance for leaders and managers on the role of learning support assistants in further education and training. London: ETF. Education and Training Foundation. (2018c) Outstanding teaching, learning and assessment phase 5 project. London: ETF. Elliott, J. (1991) Action research for educational change. Buckingham: Open University Press. Fisher, R. and Simmons, R. (2010) What is the lifelong learning sector? In J. Avis, R. Fisher and R. Thompson (Eds.), Teaching in lifelong learning: A guide to theory and practice. Maidenhead: Oxford University Press.

72  Catherine McPartland Gregson, M. and Hillier, Y. (2015) Reflective teaching in further, adult and vocational education. London: Bloomsbury. Hillier, Y. (2002) Reflective teaching in further and adult education. London: Continuum. Hodkinson, P., Colley, H. and Scaife, T. (2002) Transforming learning cultures in further education project. Interim progress report. May 2002. Leeds: Lifelong Learning Institute. Hoyle, E. and John, P.D. (1995) Professional knowledge and professional practice. London: Cassell. Husband, G. and Jones, S. (2019) Research in further education: Why we must make a fuss about it. InTuition: Research Society for Education and Training, Spring 2019. Kolb, D. (1983) Experiential learning: Experience as a source of learning. New Jersey: Prentice Hall. LaBoskey, V. (1994) Development of reflective practice: A study of preservice teachers. New York: Teachers College Press. Loughran, J.J. (2007) Developing a pedagogy of teacher education. London: Routledge. Lucas, N. (2004) The ‘FENTO Fandango’: National standards, compulsory teaching qualifications and the growing regulation of FE college teachers. Journal of Further and Higher Education, 28(1), pp. 35–51. MacFarlane, B. and Hughes, G. (2009) Turning teachers into academics? The role of educational development in fostering synergy between teaching and research. Innovations in Education and Teaching International, 46(1), pp. 5–14. MacLellan, P. (2016) Why don’t teachers use education research in teaching? Available on: http://edu.rsc.org/analysis/why-don‘t-teachers-use-education-research-in-teaching? 2010170.article, accessed: 11 January 2020. Maxwell, B. (2013) Improving workplace learning of lifelong learning sector trainee teachers in the UK. Journal of Further and Higher Education, 38(3), pp. 377–399. McKelvey, C. and Andrews, J. (1998) Why do they do it? A study into the perceptions and motivations of trainee further education lecturers. Research in PostCompulsory Education, 3(3), pp. 357–368. McNair, A. (1944) The McNair report teachers and youth leaders: Report of the committee appointed by the president of the board of education to consider the supply, recruitment and training of teachers and youth leaders. London: HMSO. McNiff, J. (1993) Teaching as learning: An action research approach. London: Routledge. McNiff, J. (2013) Action research: Principles and practice (3rd edn.), London: Routledge. McNiff, J. (2020) ‘Evaluation of the Outstanding Teaching, Learning and Assessment programme, 2019–2020’: On behalf of ccConsultancy for the Education and Training Foundation. London: ETF. Unpublished. McPartland, C. (2014) Towards a Better Understanding of Vocational FE Teachers’ Professional Development through Initial Teacher Education. Unpublished PhD Thesis, University of Sunderland. McPartland, C. (2018a) Synergy in learning, teachers and student support assistants working together to promote learner metacognition in post-compulsory education. Teaching in Lifelong Learning, 8(10). Available on: https://www.teachinginlife longlearning.org.uk/article/id/537/

Encouraging teachers and LSAs to see themselves as researchers 73 McPartland, C. (2018b) Strategy to improve the confidence of SSAs in helping students. InTuition Research, Spring 2018, p. 11. McPartland, C. (2018c) Effective use of Student Support Assistants. 13 September, Newcastle: British Educational Research Association. McPartland, C., Greenwood, G. and Walker, I. (2018) Effective use of student support assistants. 27 October, Manchester: Collaborative Action Research Network. McPartland, C. and Pearson, D. (2018) Synergy in learning: Teachers and student support assistants working together to promote student learning. 11 May, Birmingham: Teacher Education Advancement Network. Muijs, D. (2019) Why research is so vital for an evidence-informed profession. Intuition: Research Society for Education and Training, Spring 2019. O’Brien, J. (2019) Student refusing to work? It could be fear of failure. Times Educational Supplement, 30 June, 2019. O’Brien, A., and O’Brien, K. (2010). Enhancement of Learning Support: The Training and Development Needs of Learning Support Assistants. LSIS Report. Retrieved from: http://www.natspec.org.uk/fileadmin/_temp_/NatspecELSKeyFindings andRecommendations_.pdf Orr, K. and Simmons, R. (2011) Restrictive practice: The work-based experience of trainee teachers in English further education colleges. Journal of Workplace Learning, 23(4), pp. 243–257. Ponte, P. (2002) How teachers become action researchers and how teacher educators become their facilitators. Educational Action Research, 10(3), pp. 399–422. Robinson, V. (2003) Teachers as researchers: A professional necessity? SET: Research Information for Teachers, 1, pp. 27–29. Robson, J. (1998) A profession in crisis: Status, culture and identity in the further education college. Journal of Vocational Education and Training, 50(4), pp. 585–607. Robson, J., Bailey, B. and Larkin, S. (2004) Adding value: Investigating the discourse of professionalism adopted by vocational teachers in further education colleges. Journal of Education and Work, 17(2), pp. 183–195. Schön D. A. (1983) The reflective practitioner: How professionals think in action. New York: Basic Books. Sharples, J., Webster, R. and Blatchford, P. (2015) Making best use of teaching assistants. Guidance report – March 2015. London: Education Endowment Fund. Available at: http://maximisingtas.co.uk/eef-guidance.php Stenhouse, L. (1975) An introduction to curriculum research and development. London: Heinemann. Stewart, W. (2015) Leave the research to the academics, John Hattie tells teachers. Times Educational Supplement, 22 April 2015. Wolf, A. (2011) Review of Vocational Education. London: Department of Education.

6

Truth in a time of untruth The academic as public educator Jon Nixon

In thinking about ‘representations of the academic’ – the subject of this volume – it is worth recalling Edward W Said’s final paragraph in the penultimate chapter of the published version of his BBC 1993 Reith Lectures, Representations of the Intellectual: Speaking the truth to power is no Panglossian idealism: it is carefully weighing the alternatives, picking the right one, and then intelligently representing it where it can do the most good and cause the right change. (Said, 1994, 75) As Said intimated, we live in an uncertain world in which speaking the truth to power is becoming increasingly difficult and increasingly necessary. A decade ago – as I write1 – a global financial crisis shook the neoliberal consensus to its foundations, leaving much of the world precariously balanced between a discredited though still dominant neoliberal economic order and a populist and anti-liberal order that although as yet only emergent has gained not only influence but also political power.2 ‘We are entering’, as the historian Tony Judt (2010, 207) suggested in his final work, ‘upon a time of troubles’. In the decade following Judt’s valedictory utterance, his somewhat gloomy prognosis has been fully vindicated. Universities have a vital role to play in a ‘time of troubles’. How well or ill they fulfil that role will depend crucially on how they define their values and how well they represent them within the public domain. Universities are cosmopolitan spaces, spaces of dialogue, explorative spaces. But, above all, they are spaces where truth matters. By placing the quest for truth at the centre of their concerns, universities become places of trust (places within which truth matters), trusted places (places that are trusted to speak the truth) and places of freedom: places that not only espouse but practise the values of truthfulness, respect, authenticity and magnanimity – and, crucially, represent those values within the wider context of civil society. They become public institutions. The crucial question is whether – within an increasingly market-driven ­economy – universities are committed to upholding those values both in practice and in principle. That is the hard and inescapable choice facing the sector as DOI: 10.4324/9781351053372-6

Truth in a time of untruth 75 a whole: whether, as the historian, Timothy Snyder, puts it, to ‘believe in truth’ or to abandon freedom: To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis upon which to do so. If nothing is true, then all is spectacle. The biggest wallet pays for the most blinding lights … Post-truth is pre-fascism. (Snyder, 2017, 65–71)

A time of untruth Although broadcast more than twenty-five years ago, Said’s words quoted in the opening paragraph of this chapter continue to have resonance, particularly at a time when the notion of judgement implicit in his formulation – ‘carefully weighing the alternatives, picking the right ones, and then intelligently representing it where it can do the most good and cause the right change’ – is under threat from the demagogues of both left and right.3 Intellectuals, argues Said, are neither the advocates nor the custodians of any particular ideology, but, rather, the judicious critics of all ideology. They bear witness to – and indeed represent – the possibility of ascertaining the truth in a world in which the boundary between truth and untruth is becoming increasingly blurred. Three recent and major occurrences have contributed to the blurring of that boundary: the decision by the United Kingdom to exit the European Union4, the election of Donald Trump as the 45th President of the USA on 20 January 2017, and the re-entry of far right political groupings into mainstream politics across Europe and the USA.5 These are, of course, disparate occurrences, each with its own causality and consequences. But each arose in the aftermath of the global financial crisis of 2007/2008 and the austerity measures adopted in response to that crisis.6 Each also involved a shift in the public discourse from reasoned argument and persuasion to assertion and populist ‘post-truth’ rhetoric7: a shift that has been accompanied by the rise of a new wave of demagogues skilled in the use of that rhetoric on both traditional and social media platforms. Populism has become an increasingly influential voice within liberal democracy. Indeed, it threatens to overwhelm the pluralism implicit in liberalism and the due process inherent in democracy. The political theorist Jan-Werner Müller (2017) has suggested that populism involves two related claims. First, populists claim that ‘the voice of the people’ takes precedence over all other sources of legitimate political authority: the judiciary, parliament and local government. The complexity of democratic sovereignty is thereby collapsed into a notion of ‘the sovereignty of the people’ – a notion that licenses populists to decry any attempt by the courts to pursue their constitutional function, to demand that elected members adhere to a popular mandate rather than exercise their independent judgements and to inveigh against any sections of the free press that are critical of the supposed ‘will of the people’.

76  Jon Nixon The aim of the populist, writes Müller, is to pit an authentic expression of the populus as uninstitutionalized, nonproceduralized corpus mysticum against the actual results of an existing political system. In such circumstances, it is also plausible for them to say that the vox populi is one – and that checks and balances, divisions of power, and so on, cannot allow the singular, homogeneous people to emerge clearly. (62) The separation of powers – the constitutional cornerstone of liberal democracy – is thereby put at risk. Second, populists claim to know what constitutes ‘the people’. This, argues Müller, is the populists’ ‘one big lie: that there is a singular people of which they are the only representatives’ (114) Within populist political discourse ‘the people’ are variously defined as ‘ordinary people’, ‘decent people’ and even ‘real people’. ‘The people’, in other words, are invariably defined against ‘other people’, who by implication are not ‘ordinary’, not ‘decent’ and not ‘real’ (At a campaign rally in his bid to gain the US presidency, Trump announced that ‘the only important thing is the unification of the people – because the other people don’t matter’ – quoted in Müller, 2017, 22). It is these ‘other people’ who then become the targets – the scapegoats – of populist outrage: immigrants, refugees, religious minorities, recipients of state benefit, the unemployed … the list of potential scapegoats is endless. The point is to define ‘the people’ against some available ‘other’. Pluralism – the cultural heartbeat of liberal democracy – is thereby not only put at risk but denied. Anti-pluralism is the main charge levelled against populism by the political theorist and policy analyst, William A. Galston (2018). Having considered the dangers for liberal democracy of majoritarianism, he goes on to argue: ‘More dangerous still is the populists’ understanding of the “people” as homogeneous and unitary, which leans against the pluralism that characterizes all free societies in modernity’ (4–5). The rejection of pluralist policies, he writes, ‘challenges the liberal democratic order, which stands or falls with the recognition of individual rights, social diversity, and the need for reasonable compromise among competing interests’ (44). In its rejection of pluralism, populism is not only a threat to liberal democracy, but a threat to the basic tenets of social democracy. To these two claims a third should be added: namely, the claim to have a monopoly on the truth regardless of its factual accuracy. We are, writes American literary critic Michiko Kakutani, living in a world in which fake news and lies are pumped out in industrial volume … and sent flying across the world through social media accounts at lightning speed. Nationalism, tribalism, dislocation, fear of social change and the hatred of outsiders are on the rise again as people, locked in their partisan silos and filter bubbles, are losing a sense of shared reality and the ability to communicate across social and sectarian lines. (Kakutani, 2018, 11–12)

Truth in a time of untruth 77 Nor, as she points out, is it just ‘fake news’: ‘it’s also fake science (manufactured by climate change deniers and anti-vaxxers, who oppose vaccination), fake history (promoted by Holocaust revisionists and white supremacists), fake Americans on Facebook (created by Russian trolls) and fake followers and “likes” on social media (generated by bots)’ (12). The political strategy – deeply undemocratic and veering dangerously towards totalitarianism in its intent – is to assert power over truth. In this context, the traditional distinction between deception and self-deception is not particularly helpful. To tell an untruth with a view to deceiving others is one thing. To tell an untruth that we have wrongly persuaded ourselves to be true is another. But to state an untruth that neither seeks to deceive others nor is a consequence of self-deception is something different again. It is an expression of power and control, demanding unconditional assent. It assumes that assent matters more than truth; that to unite around an untruth is justifiable, and that truth-telling no longer matters8; that, on the contrary, what matter are so-called ‘alternative facts’, the rubbishing of serious investigative journalism as ‘fake news’, the disparagement of scientific expertise as ‘fake science’ and the denial of historic fact as ‘fake history’. The result is a discursive environment in which the deliberate obfuscation of meaning becomes the norm.9 Alan Rusbridger – who, as Editor-in-Chief of Guardian News and Media from 1995 to 2015, was not averse to speaking the truth to power – puts it very simply: ‘Populism is the denial of complexity’ (Rusbridger, 2018, 93). Populism simplifies that which is necessarily complex and multi-faceted; it reduces complexities to simplistic dichotomies (some or other version of ‘us’ versus ‘them’); and it advocates a return to nationalism and a focus on nationalistic values and narratives.

Public institutions The institutions of civil society stand as a defence against the anti-pluralist tendencies of populism and as a bulwark against the demagoguery that fuels and is fuelled by populist sentiment. That is why demagogues and populists invariably seek to co-opt, denigrate, speak-over or sidestep the institutional frameworks and mechanisms that sustain democracy. Of course, institutions frequently fail to live up to these high expectations. All too often they ossify, become inward looking or surrender to the allurements of managerialism and corporatism. Nevertheless, their democratic potential for ensuring our social freedoms remains of paramount importance. Those which realise that potential – or even, under unpropitious circumstances, aspire to do so – are what the social philosopher Axel Honneth (2014) terms ‘institutions of recognition’. Only on the basis of ‘intersubjectively binding rules and symbols’, argues Honneth, ‘can individuals agree to identify with each other as members of a general community and to realise their aims and intentions reciprocally’. Thus, ‘[i]nstitutions of recognition are … not mere addenda or an external condition of intersubjective freedom’. On the contrary, ‘[b]ecause subjects cannot

78  Jon Nixon become aware of their mutual dependency without such institutions, the latter are at once the basis and the space of realisation for this kind of freedom’ (49). ‘Institutions of recognition’ are the realisation of our potential as free agents to recognise our inter-dependence and, in so doing, learn to live together in a shared world of difference. They are public institutions: institutions unconditionally committed to the public interest. Universities have, historically and intermittently, aspired to be ‘institutions of recognition’: public institutions that embrace difference in a spirit of critical inquiry and argumentation. In practice, of course, they have colluded with privatisation, overseen a period of appalling professional atomisation and entered a neoliberal market place in which competition and consumerism reign supreme. They have bowed over and over again to what the acclaimed author and theatre director Richard Eyre characterised as ‘the three horsemen of the new ­apocalypse – management, money and marketing’ (Eyre, 2003, 22). But, historically, institutions of higher education – whether formally defined as universities, polytechnics or colleges – have always aspired a little higher. Their priorities have never quite accorded with the neoliberal agenda to which their over-paid vice-chancellors and managerial minions so assiduously adhere. It is those semi-dormant priorities, defining an alternative set of institutional responsibilities, which now urgently need to be re-affirmed, re-asserted and re-claimed. First, universities are – as the term suggests – universal. They are by definition inclusive. ‘Universal’ means much more than – and, indeed, something very different from – the international marketization of higher education with a view to the recruitment of overseas students. It means developing what Feng Su and Margaret Wood (2017) call a ‘cosmopolitan outlook’: an outlook that circumscribes both the local and the global and perceives the interplay between the two. This is what the philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah (2005, 213–271) terms ‘rooted cosmopolitanism’ or ‘tenable cosmopolitanism’: a cosmopolitanism that one can hold on to and that is grounded in the here and now. It resists insularity and any form of institutional belongingness that relies on exclusivity. It is responsible for, and committed to, the extension – and fusion – of our horizons of understanding. Second, universities are, within the broader framework of civil society, spaces of dialogue and critical reflection: spaces that acknowledge as their raison d’être the need for dissent and disagreement within an agreed framework of deliberative endeavour. Universities are places where we learn how to disagree and where disagreement forms the basis of rational discourse. Such discourse is impossible in the absence of mutual respect and the willingness to listen, which is why universities are also places of civility and civic engagement. It is undoubtedly true that, as Walter Benjamin ([1950] 1969, 256) put it, ‘[t]here is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism’, but it is also true that those same documents can enable us to construct a civic order that stands as a bulwark of hope against future acts of barbarism. Third, universities provide us with a distinctive idiom: explorative, nuanced, self-questioning, tentative, uncertain, and forever in search of fine distinctions.10

Truth in a time of untruth 79 It is an idiom – and a cast of mind – that has little or no place in a populist discourse in which the major protagonists are not only assured of certain certainties but assured of their right to assert those certainties. That idiom – the idiom of Socrates – has always fallen foul of regimes and political cultures that, even when democratic in name, obstruct the free interplay of ideas and arguments. Universities are responsible for encouraging and supporting this idiom, ensuring that it retains a presence in social and political discourse, and providing it with the wherewithal for present and future generations to speak truth to power. The university exists not only to remind us that uncertainty is intrinsic to the human condition, but to provide us with the wherewithal to acknowledge that uncertainty and dwell within it.

Truthful spaces Fourth, universities insist on the distinction between truth and untruth, verifiable belief and wishful thinking, fact and fantasy. ‘Our concern’, as the philosopher Bernard Williams (2002, 133) put it, ‘is with the virtues of truth’. Those virtues cannot be discovered ready made within a single ‘method’. As the philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer (2001, 42) insisted, truth resides in our commitment to ‘the questionableness of something and what this requires of us’. Methods matter, but they cannot provide us with a ladder of perfection that inevitably leads us to ‘the truth’. The quest for truth is always a messy and muddled affair characterised by false starts, blind alleys, occasional insights, provisional resolutions and leaps of ‘the hermeneutical imagination’.11 Higher education exists to provide us with the resources necessary to engage in this lifelong process of truthfulness. A distinction that Hannah Arendt made in her essay on ‘Truth and Politics’ highlights the importance of truth and what is at stake in losing from public memory even the more mundane facts. Indeed, she argues, it is the latter that are most vulnerable: ‘Facts and events are infinitely more fragile things than axioms, discoveries, theories – even the most wildly speculative ones – produced by the human mind’. Moreover, once a factual truth is lost, no rational effort will ever bring it back: Perhaps the chances that Euclidian mathematics or Einstein’s theory of relativity – let alone Plato’s philosophy – would have been reproduced in time if their authors had been prevented from handing them down to posterity are not very good either, yet they are infinitely better than the chances that a fact of importance, forgotten or, more likely, lied away, will one day be rediscovered. (Arendt, [1961] 1977, 231–232) Politicians and pundits are well aware of the fragility of ‘factual truth’, which is why the more unscrupulous among them routinely dismiss it as ‘fake news’ and seek to replace it with ‘alternative facts’. Lies have now become an unavoidable

80  Jon Nixon feature of the political landscape, as populist and authoritarian leaders seek to blur the distinction between truth and untruth. The philosopher Richard J. Bernstein, in commenting upon the continuing relevance of Arendt’s comments on truth and untruth, warns of the risk that the routine recourse to untruth has on democratic politics: What happened so blatantly in totalitarian societies is being practiced today by leading politicians. In short, there is the constant danger that powerful persuasive techniques are being used to deny factual truth, to transform fact into just another opinion, and to create a world of ‘alternative facts’. (Bernstein, 2018, 74) Democracy, within such a context, becomes – as the political thinker Sheldon S. Wolin puts it – ‘managed’, ‘incorporated’, ‘fugitive’. Ultimately, it runs the risk of becoming a form of what he termed ‘inverted totalitarianism’: populism coupled with authoritarianism operating as a totalising ideology (Wolin, 2010, 2016). The prime responsibility of the university, and all those who work within the higher education sector, is to insist, through both their espoused values and their pedagogical, research and scholarly practices, that truth matters – and to challenge any attempt, covert or otherwise, to blur the distinction between truth and untruth. This involves, to return to Williams’s philosophical inquiry into truth and truthfulness, ‘the virtue of Accuracy’: ‘the virtue that encourages people to spend more effort than they might have done in trying to find the truth, and not just to accept any belief-shaped thing that comes into their head’ (Williams, 2002, 87–88). This virtue, Williams goes on to argue, is closely related to another of ‘the virtues of truth’; namely, ‘the virtue of Sincerity’. For, as he puts it, ‘[i]f we are to rely on what others tell us, they had better be not just sincere but correct; moreover (in the other direction so to speak) if we take care to be right, we need to be honest with ourselves’ (Williams, 2002, 94). Trust relies crucially on what Williams calls these ‘virtues of truth’. At best, the university affirms the necessity of public reason and critique within a society that values freedom and democracy, thereby upholding what Stewart Ranson calls ‘common literacies of the public sphere’ (Ranson, 2018, 42–45). It does so through the practices of inquiry, questioning, dialogue, research and scholarship, and through the organisational structures of cosmopolitan outreach, public service and public participation: practices and structures that rely upon the conditions of public accountability and transparency, mutuality and respect – and trust. Truth, trust and freedom Truth and trust are, then, inescapably interconnected. The word ‘truth’, as again Williams remarks, originally meant fidelity, loyalty or reliability, with the transition to the modern sense probably having occurred by the fourteenth century

Truth in a time of untruth 81 and the archaic phrase ‘plighting one’s troth’ harking back to the earlier sense (Williams, 2002, 93–94). To trust someone is to be assured that what they say or write is not only sincere in the sense of being an honest expression of their beliefs, but that those beliefs are correct in the sense of being an accurate reflection of the way things are. Insofar as higher education is concerned with ‘encourag[ing] people to spend more effort than they might have done in trying to find the truth’, it is therefore necessarily concerned with establishing the conditions necessary for mutual trust. The crucial point here is the reciprocal relation between truth and trust. We do not establish the truth and then gain the trust of one another. Nor do we gain that trust and then establish the truth. The two, as it were, go hand in hand, with mutual trust achieved through the process of ‘spending more time than [we] might have done in trying to find the truth’; or, to turn that point on its head, with a greater sense of truthfulness achieved through the creation of a discursive environment in which each can rely on what the other says: the very opposite, that is, of a discursive environment dedicated to the deliberate obfuscation of meaning. Ideally, universities are places of trust, in the sense of providing an institutional context within which we trust one another to distinguish between truth and untruth, trusted places, in the sense of providing an institutional focus for certain values that have meaning outside the institution itself, and places of freedom in which truth may be spoken to power. Of course, other places also aspire to truth, trust and freedom. But universities are where we learn the epistemological ground rules of trust and where we are judged publically by our commitment to do so. Without truthfulness there can be no trust, and no places of trust; and without trust there can be no truthful exchange, no trusted places – and no freedom. Truth, trust and freedom are the pillars of the liberal university. As places of trust, universities provide a space within which staff and students alike are, for example, learning and practising the verification procedures appropriate to their own field of study while also learning how to enter into dialogue regarding the appropriateness and effectiveness of those procedures: what are the findings that result from a particular experiment, and what are the legitimate grounds upon which those findings might be challenged? What is the meaning of a particular line of poetry, and again what are the legitimate grounds upon which that interpretation might be challenged? Universities are places where we address such questions and in so doing acknowledge the possibility of alternative findings and interpretations the truth-value of which is again open to challenge and critique. But, of course, none of this is possible unless each of the interlocutors trusts the others to be on a shared quest towards the discovery of more valid and reliable findings and richer and more comprehensive interpretations. As trusted places, universities affirm their significance as public institutions that benefit society as a whole and that rely on public trust. In commenting on this aspect of trust, Paul Gibbs (2018, 415) writes: ‘Because it is transformative rather than for an economically defined purpose, liberal education is dependent on a trusting relationship between the owner of the educational process and

82  Jon Nixon the recipient; one does not know what one is expected to receive, as it has to be jointly created’. As Gibbs goes on to argue, a relationship of this nature ‘may be cynically received because it appears to grant power, coercion and control to the party in whom trust has been vested’. It may be ‘cynically received’, in other words, because the claim of the university to be ‘transformative’ in its ‘defined purpose’ is either not understood or simply not believed, given the dominance of market-driven policies in shaping that ‘defined purpose’. Places of trust that are also trusted places become places of freedom, within which the truth may be spoken and highly contested. The yearning for freedom through speech and dialogue was beautifully expressed by a young female student at the height of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution: Even though we might lack bread and other necessities of life, we wanted freedom. We, the young people, were particularly hampered because we were brought up amidst lies. We continually had to lie. We could not have a healthy idea, because everything was choked in us. We wanted freedom of thought. (Quoted in Arendt, [1958] 2018, 127)12 Only when truth is affirmed through public reason and trust actualised through a shared understanding of the common good can freedom be realised. Only then can freedom become a reality in daily life and public discourse. Freedom relies on mutuality of trust; trust relies on truth-telling within the public domain; and truth and trust – together – maintain the conditions necessary for freedom.

Public educators But institutions are only as good as the practices they sustain. In the case of universities, those practices comprise – primarily – research, scholarship and teaching, each of which requires of its practitioners a particular value-­orientation. An academic practitioner who had no regard for truthfulness, no respect of others, no sense of authenticity in respect of the truth and no magnanimity in sharing ideas and knowledge would be a very poor practitioner. Indeed, to ascribe the term researcher, scholar or teacher to such a person would be to ascribe a gross misnomer. The values of truthfulness, respect, authenticity and magnanimity are intrinsic to the practices we associate with the academic life. To lead such a life is to learn what truthfulness, respect, authenticity and magnanimity mean in practice.13 But it is also a matter of affirming a beleaguered public service ethic against a prevailing market-driven ethos of profitability and private gain – and to affirm the role of the academic as that of public educator. Truthfulness is difficult, as John Donne ([1633] 2006) in his Satire III written in the last decade of the sixteenth century affirmed: ‘On a huge hill,/Cragged and steep, Truth stands, and he that will/Reach her, about must and about must go’ (110). The circumnavigations and reiterations are, Donne maintains,

Truth in a time of untruth 83 not just unfortunate aberrations, but necessary stations on the long uphill haul that constitutes truthfulness. But truthfulness – for academic practitioners – is also difficult because the institutional context within which they operate is not only inimical but hostile to the ‘about must, and about must go’ of teaching and learning. That context requires the pre-specification of performance outcomes, the adherence to externally imposed timeframes, and the acceptance of a competitive culture within which the production of outcomes and the adherence to externally imposed timeframes is of supreme importance. These bureaucratic requirements may be very difficult in particular circumstances to square with the moral demands of academic honesty and truth-telling. Attentiveness towards others – and honesty in our dealings one with another – are the hallmarks of mutual respect.14 But mutual respect – like truthfulness – is difficult in an increasingly managerialised and hierarchical institutional environment where deep inequalities relating to pay, conditions of service and contractual arrangements are endemic. The situation now is as bleak as – if not bleaker than – that described by Mark Considine (2006, 258) two decades ago: Scholarly domains are now infused with managerial values and goals, pedagogical actions are now dominated by organizational imperatives, and the life of the student is increasingly intersected by the priorities of work, finance, and future returns. The managerialist ethos of many universities – and, indeed, of the higher education sector as a whole – militates against the very values of mutual respect upon which the practices of higher education are based. In his 1991 Ethics of Authenticity, the philosopher Charles Taylor explained the notion of ‘authenticity’ in the following terms: The agent seeking significance in life, trying to define him- or herself meaningfully, has to exist in a horizon of important questions … Otherwise put, I can define my identity only against the background of things that m ­ atter … Only if I exist in a world in which history, or the demands of nature, or the needs of my fellow human beings, or the duties of citizenship, or the call of God or something else matters crucially, can I define an identity for myself that is not trivial. (Taylor, 1991, 40–41) To define oneself ‘in a horizon of important questions’ and ‘against the background of things that matter’ is no easy task in any context, since it involves the constant questioning of what constitute the ‘important questions’ and the ‘things that matter’. In the context of post-truth politics – where the ‘important questions’ are taken for granted and the ‘things that matter’ bureaucratically defined – that task becomes not only increasingly difficult but also increasingly risky.15

84  Jon Nixon In an environment characterised by fierce competition and institutional self-promotion, the idea of ‘reaching out’ may seem utopian. But unless institutions and individuals do reach out they become stultified. Academic life when lived to the full requires a constant movement into the unknown. That movement is, as Said pointed out in an essay addressed directly to his fellow academics, what is meant by academic freedom: You will have other things to think about and enjoy than merely yourself and your domain, and those other things are far more impressive, far more worthy of study and respect than self-adulation and uncritical self-­ appreciation. To join the academic world is therefore to enter a ceaseless quest for knowledge and freedom. (Said, 1996, 228) This is not the freedom to spout whatever populist opinion comes into one’s head, but the freedom to explore what one does not understand and the freedom to report responsibly on what one has – and, crucially, has not – understood. Without that willingness to reach out, higher education becomes trapped within its own ivory tower.

A hard choice Universities face a hard choice between two sharply contrasting visions of society and the place of higher education within it. The first is of a society that lacks cohesion and is economically sluggish and politically disengaged. It relies on subjects who know their place in society and are punctilious in the protection of their own private interests. It focuses on the past and views inequality as inevitable. At the bottom of this society are, as Joseph Stiglitz (2012, 289) shows, ‘millions of young people alienated and without hope’. Within this vision of society, higher education is defined as a private gain to individuals, and the university as the organisational means by which that gain is delivered according to ‘an economically defined purpose’. The public domain is thereby diminished to a ‘public of private interests’ (Hind, 2010, 44), while the ‘public good’ comes to be viewed ‘as little more than the aggregate of numerous individual preferences’ (Villa, 2008, 15). The second vision is of a society that embraces difference and is economically resilient and democratically purposeful. It requires citizens who demand their place within the polity and consider their own interests to be inextricably entwined with the public interest. It focuses on alternative futures and challenges the legacy of inequality. It is a society where, as Stiglitz again puts it, ‘the gap between the haves and the have-nots has been narrowed, where there is a sense of shared destiny, [and] a common commitment to opportunity and fairness’ (289). Within this vision, higher education is defined as a public good that benefits society as a whole and the university as an institution dedicated to the preservation and distribution of that public good – the

Truth in a time of untruth 85 public domain is one of public interests, with the university providing a vital public service within it. These contrasting visions – higher education as private gain or public good – raise questions not only about how higher education is funded but about who funds it and why.16 Increasingly, it is being funded through private investment. Is that what we – the public – want? It also raises questions about who should have access to and participate in higher education. As I have argued elsewhere, access and participation are historically skewed in favour of those with both economic and social capital.17 Again, is that what we – the public – want? Underlying these different sets of questions is the underlying question of what higher education is for. Is it to prepare young people for entry to a highly competitive job market or to become responsible and informed global citizens? Or is it – as seems most likely – a complex amalgam of the two which defies the timeworn distinction between ‘vocational’ and ‘academic’? Until we have had a much more open and public debate about what higher education is for it is difficult to see how the higher education sector can develop a coherent response to the funding question; to questions relating to student access and ­participation; to the question of what should be taught and how; or, indeed, to any of the pressing questions that currently beset it. Those involved in higher education – as researchers, teachers and scholars – have a crucial role to play in shaping that debate. But we do so as public educators who – through our teaching and w ­ riting – engage with the public. As Hans-Georg Gadamer emphasised in his 1959 address to commemorate the 550th anniversary of the University of Leipzig, ‘only by means of the participation of the whole public may a university develop its true powers’ (Misgeld and Nicolson, 1992, 33). If institutional priorities need translating into professional values, those values need in turn to be translated into the mainstream of public debate and discourse. The question as to what the university is for is of supreme public interest.

Conclusion In his reflections on what he terms ‘the remaking of journalism’, Rusbridger writes: ‘Public’ is, to some in the twenty-first century, a difficult word. We value public services, public spaces and public goods – but we sometimes struggle to know how to discuss them, create them, run them, fund them, regulate them, support them or measure them. We speak of public benefits and ‘the public interest’ without ever satisfactorily defining them. (Rusbridger, 2018, 370) That is very much the situation in which the university now finds itself. It is in an awful muddle as to what – in the twenty-first century – it is for: what its purposes are, how and by whom those purposes should be defined, what values it seeks to uphold.

86  Jon Nixon But, if – and it is a very big ‘but’ and a very big ‘if’ – we recognise that the university is a public institution: an institution that provides benefit to society as a whole, that is inclusive and participative, that prioritises public interest over private gain … If we start from that, we can begin to counter the obfuscations, evasions and downright lies that characterise a society that is increasingly concerned with private and sectional interests and increasingly dismissive of public interests; a society that is half-in-love with untruth and has no idea how to cope with this half-in-love state; a society that no longer knows – or has lost the will – to speak the truth to power. We can begin to understand what is wrong with higher education and how we might morally reconfigure it and ethically reposition ourselves as public educators within it. In doing so, we shall need to recall Said’s beautifully cadenced – and characteristically courteous – call to arms: ‘Speaking the truth to power is … carefully weighing the alternatives, picking the right one, and then intelligently representing it where it can do the most good and cause the right change’ (Said, 1994, 75).

Acknowledgements An early version of this chapter was presented as a keynote address at the Society for Research into Higher Education (SRHE) Theory Network Seminar (Questioning Trajectories: Politics, Policies and Higher Education, 14 March 2018, London). I am grateful to the facilitators – Dr Ourania Filippakou, Dr David Aldridge and Professor Gert Biesta – for inviting me to participate in that seminar. Thanks are also due to Professor Stewart Ranson who – with characteristic insight and encouragement – commented on a later draft of the chapter. I would also like to thank Jean McNiff for her tolerance in fielding various drafts of this chapter and for her unfailing editorial support and encouragement.

Notes 1 I wrote this piece prior to the global corona virus pandemic and am not therefore able to build in a much needed analysis of governmental and inter-agency responses to this global crisis. 2 For perspectives on the demise of neoliberalism, see Crouch (2011), Filippakou (2017), Ghosh, (2017), Mason (2015) and Streeck (2016; 2017); for perspectives on populism, see Albertazzi and McDonnell (2008), Laclau (2005), Mounk (2018), Müller (2016) and Weyland (2001). 3 ‘[T]he key distinction between right-wing and left-wing populism’, argue Speed and Mannion (2017, 250) ‘is not whether they ostracise, but whom they ostracise. As populism concerns only the antagonistic relationship between the people and the elite, who is considered to be the elite, or the people, depends on the political orientation of the populist’. A recent defence of left-wing populism is provided by the political theorist, Chantal Mouffe: ‘It is necessary to understand that the objective of a left populist strategy is the construction of a “people”’ (Mouffe, 2018a, 31) (See, also, Mouffe, 2018b). Aviezer Tucker (2020, 19) locates the discussion of populism within a broader frame of reference in his mapping of the relation between what he terms liberal democracy, authoritarian absolutism, liberal authoritarianism and absolutist (illiberal) democracy.

Truth in a time of untruth 87 4 The UK European Union membership referendum was held on 23 June 2016. On the basis of a slender majority of 51.9% to leave the EU, Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty was triggered on 29 March 2017 by the UK government with a view to exiting the EU within a two-year period. 5 On Brexit and Trumpism, see Barnett (2017); Gessen (2020); Harding (2017); Levitsky and Ziblatt, (2019); Norris and Inglehart (2019); Schier and Eberly (2018). On the re-entry of the far right, see Fekete (2018) and Neiwert (2017). For the broader personal and political implications of these political shifts, see Applebaum (2020). 6 On austerity and its impact on higher education, see Evans and McBride (2017), McBride and Evans (2017) and Nixon (2017a). 7 As defined by the Oxford English dictionary (which made it the 2016 international word of the year) post-truth ‘relates to or denotes circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief’. 8 This presumably explains the velocity and volume of Trump’s false and misleading claims that, according to the Washington Post, amounted to 2,140 during his first year in office – an average of 5.9 a day (Quoted in Kakutani, 2018, 13). 9 Mussolini was a master of the art of linguistic obfuscation and the blurring of meaningful distinctions in the interests of fascism: ‘we allow ourselves the luxury of being aristocratic and democratic, conservative and progressives, reactionaries and revolutionaries, legals and illegals’ (Quoted in Jones, 2018, 10). 10 See my ‘Learning the language of deliberative democracy’ (Nixon, 2004) for a fuller discussion of this theme. 11 This argument is developed more fully – and with specific reference to G adamer  – in my Hans-Georg Gadamer: The Hermeneutical Imagination ­ (Nixon, 2017b). 12 Arendt is here quoting from the United Nations Report of the Special Committee on the Problem of Hungary (General Assembly, Official Records: Eleventh Session, Supplement No. 18 (A/3592) New York, 1957). 13 I develop this argument more fully in Chapters 4–7 of my 2008 Towards the Virtuous University (Nixon, 2008, 47–110). See, also, Biesta (2010) on what constitutes ‘good education’, Macfarlane (2004) on the ethics of teaching, and Fanghanel (2012) on what it means to become an academic. 14 For a hugely intelligent and highly accessible discussion of respect, see Sennett (2003). 15 See, also, Kreber (2013) for a detailed and scholarly discussion of authenticity in relation to teaching within higher education. 16 The literature on higher education and the public good is extensive, but the following are useful starting points: Bergan et al, 2009; Calhoun, 2006; Filippakou and Williams, 2015; Leibowitz, 2012; Nixon, 2011; Walker, 2012. 17 I rehearse and reference these arguments in ‘Inequality and the erosion of the public good’ (Nixon, 2015).

References Albertazzi, D. and McDonnell, D. (2008) Twenty-first Century Populism. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Appiah, K. A. (2005) The Ethics of Identity. Princeton, NJ, and Woodstock: Princeton University Press. Applebaum, A. (2020) Twilight of Democracy: The Failure of Politics and the Parting of Friends. London: Allen Lane.

88  Jon Nixon Arendt, H. ([1958] 2018) ‘The Hungarian revolution and totalitarian imperialism’, in H. Arendt, Thinking Without a Banister: Essays in Understanding, 1953–1975, edited by Jerome Kohn. New York: Schocken Books. Arendt, H. ([1961] 1977) Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought. New York: Penguin Books (first published by Faber and Faber, 1961, and with additional material by Viking Press, 1968). Barnett, A. (2017) The Lure of Greatness: England’s Brexit and America’s Trump. London: Unbound. Benjamin, W. ([1950] 1969) Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, edited by H. Arendt and translated by H Zohn. New York: Schocken Books. Bernstein, R.J. (2018) Why Read Hannah Arendt Now. Cambridge, UK, and Medford, MA: Polity Press. Biesta, G.J.J. (2010) Good Education in the Age of Measurement: Ethics, Politics, Democracy. London and New York: Routledge. Calhoun, C. (2006) ‘The university and the public good.’ Thesis 11, 84, pp. 7–43. Considine, M. (2006) ‘Theorizing the university as a cultural system: distinctions, identities, emergencies’, Educational Theory, 56, 3, pp. 255–270. Crouch, C. (2011) The Strange Non-Death of Neoliberalism. Cambridge and Malden, MA: Polity. Donne, J. ([1633] 2006) Selected Poems, with an introduction and notes by I. Bell. London: Penguin Books. Evans, B.M. and McBride, S. (eds.) (2017) Austerity: The Lived Experience. Toronto, Buffalo and London: University of Toronto Press. Eyre, R. (2003) ‘The BBC is one of the few things in Britain that works’, The Guardian (27 September) p.22. Fanghanel, J. (2012) Being an Academic. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge. Fekete, E. (2018) Europe’s Fault Lines: Racism and the Rise of the Right. London and New York: Verso. Filippakou, O. (2017) ‘Towards a new epistemic order: higher education after neo-liberalism’, in J. Nixon (ed.) Higher Education in Austerity Europe. London and New York: Bloomsbury, pp. 185–197. Filippakou, O. and Williams, G. (Eds.) (2015) Higher Education as a Public Good: Critical Perspectives on Theory, Policy and Practice. New York: Peter Lang Publishing. Gadamer, H-G. (2001) Gadamer in Conversation: Reflections and Commentary, edited and translated by R.E. Palmer. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Galston, A. W. (2018) Anti-Pluralism: The Populist Threat to Liberal Democracy. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Gessen, M. (2020) Surviving Autocracy. London: Granta. Ghosh, J. (2017) ‘There is an alternative’, Red Pepper, #215 (August/September) pp. 14–17 Gibbs, P. (2018) ‘Trust in the university’, in R. Barnett and M.A. Peters, with the assistance of R. Heraud (eds.) The Idea of the University, Volume 2: Contemporary Perspectives. New York: Peter Lang, pp. 412–431. Harding, L. (2017) Collusion: How Russia Helped Trump Win the White House, London: Guardian/Faber and Faber. Hind, D. (2010) The Return of the Public. London and New York: Verso. Honneth, A. (2014) Freedom’s Right: The Social Foundations of Democratic Life, translated by J. Ganahl. Cambridge: Polity.

Truth in a time of untruth 89 Jones, T. (2018) ‘The fascist movement that brought Mussolini back to the mainstream’, The Guardian/Journal (22 February): London: William Collins, pp. 7–9. Judt, T. (2010) The Memory Chalet. London: William Heinemann. Kakutani, M. (2018) The Death of Truth. London: William Collins. Kreber, C. (2013) Authenticity In and Through Teaching in Higher Education: The Transformative Potential of the Scholarship of Teaching. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge. Laclau, E. (2005) On Populist Reason. London: Verso. Leibowitz, B. (ed.) (2012) Higher Education for the Public Good: Views from the South. Stoke-on-Trent: Trentham Books Ltd. Levitsky, S. and Ziblatt, D. (2019) How Democracies Die: What History Reveals About Our Future. London: Penguin Books. Macfarlane, B. (2004) Teaching with Integrity: The Ethics of Higher Education Practice. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge. Mason, P. (2015) Postcapitalism: A Guide to the Future. London: Penguin. McBride, S. and B.M. Evans (eds.) (2017) The Austerity State. Toronto, Buffalo and London: University of Toronto Press. Misgeld, D. and Nicholson, G. (eds.) (1992) Hans-Georg Gadamer on Education, Poetry, and History: Applied Hermeneutics, translated by L. Schmidt and M. Reuss. Albany: State University of New York. Mouffe, C. (2018a) ‘Populism’s new frontier – Michael Calderbank spoke to Chantal Mouffe about why she thinks the time is right for a left populism’, Red Pepper, #221 (Autumn). pp. 26-31. Mouffe, C. (2018b) For a Left Populism. London and New York: Verso. Mounk, Y. (2018) The People vs. Democracy: Why Our Freedom is in Danger and How to Save It. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Müller, J-W. (2017) What is Populism? London: Penguin Books. Neiwert, D. (2017) Alt-America: The Rise of the Radical Right in the Age of Trump. London and New York: Verso. Nixon, J. (ed.) (2017a) Higher Education in Austerity Europe. London and New York: Bloomsbury. Nixon, J. (2004) ‘Learning the language of deliberative democracy’, in M. Walker and J. Nixon (eds.) Reclaiming Universities from a Runaway World. Maidenhead: Open University Press, pp. 114–127. Nixon, J. (2008) Towards the Virtuous University: The Moral Bases of Academic Practice. New York and London: Routledge. Nixon, J. (2011) Higher Education and the Public Good: Imagining the University. London and New York: Bloomsbury. Nixon, J. (2015) ‘Inequality and the erosion of the public good’, in O. Filippakou and G. Williams (eds.) Higher Education as a Public Good: Critical Perspectives on Theory, Policy and Practice. New York: Peter Lang, pp. 163–180. Nixon, J. (2017b) Hans-Georg Gadamer: The Hermeneutical Imagination. Cham: Springer. Norris, P. and Inglehart, R. (2019) Cultural Backlash: Trump, Brexit, and Authoritarian Populism. New York: Cambridge University Press. Ranson, S. (2018) Education and Democratic Participation: The Making of Learning Communities. London and New York: Routledge. Rusbridger, A. (2018) Breaking News: The Remaking of Journalism and Why It Matters Now. Edinburgh: Canongate.

90  Jon Nixon Said, E. W. (1996) ‘Identity, authority, and freedom: the potentate and the traveller’, in L. Menand (ed.) The Future of Academic Freedom. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, pp. 214–228. Said, E.W. (1994) Representations of the Intellectual: The 1993 Reith Lectures. London: Vintage. Schier, S.E. and Eberly, T.E. (2018) The Trump Presidency: Outsider in the Oval Office. Lanham, Maryland and London: Rowman and Littlefield. Sennett, R. (2003) Respect: The Formation of Character in an Age of Inequality. London: Allen Lane The Penguin Press. Snyder, T. (2017) On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century. London: The Bodley Head. Speed, E. and Mannion, R. (2017) ‘The rise of post-truth populism in pluralist liberal democracies: the challenge for health policy’, International Journal of Health Policy and Management, 6, 5, pp. 249–251 Stiglitz, J. (2012) The Price of Inequality. London: Allen Lane. Streeck, W. (2016) How Will Capitalism End? Essays on a Failing System. London and New York: Verso. Streeck, W. (2017) Buying Time: The Delayed Crisis of Democratic Capitalism (2nd Edition), translated by P. Camiller and D. Fernbach. London and New York: Verso. Su, F. and Wood, M. (eds.) (2017) Cosmopolitan Perspectives on Academic Leadership in Higher Education. London and New York: Bloomsbury. Taylor, C. (1991) The Ethics of Authenticity. Cambridge, MA and London, England: Harvard University Press. Tucker, A. (2020) Democracy Against Liberalism: Its Rise and Fall. Cambridge and Medford MA: Polity Press. Villa, D. (2008) Public Freedom. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press. Walker, M. (2012) ‘Universities, professional capabilities and contributions to the public good in South Africa’, Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education, 42, 6, pp. 819–838 Weyland, K. (2001) ‘Clarifying a contested concept: populism in the study of Latin American politics’, Comparative Politics, 3, 34, pp. 1–22 Williams, B. (2002) Truth and Truthfulness: An Essay in Genealogy. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press. Wolin, S. (2010) Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism. Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press.

7

Cross-cultural doctoral PhDsupervision as transformative academic practice Sigrid Gjøtterud and Athman Kyaruzi Ahmad

Introduction In this chapter, we discuss what counts as ‘academic’ knowledge, related to our experience of a five-year-long cross-cultural supervisory relationship, from 2011 to 2016. Ahmad was a PhD student from Tanzania and Sigrid, a supervisor from Norway. Both are still employed in higher education: Ahmad is an agriculture extension educator and Sigrid, a teacher educator. Thus, we see ourselves as academics. However, our understanding of ‘academic work’ is wide: it is not only about being connected to higher education institutions, but is more broadly about teaching, learning and knowledge-creation. To give an example: we have witnessed episodes where young farmers have come up with new ideas – i.e. created knowledge – about dairy goat-keeping, which has in turn had an impact on whole communities (Gjøtterud, Krogh, Dyngeland & Mwakasumba, 2015). Our emphasis in this chapter is on the significance of the learning and knowledge that can come out of various aspects of cross-cultural supervision. Further, our understanding is somewhat different from that found in various dictionaries, where the concept of ‘academic’ is often defined as about theory and scholarship but lacking in worldliness, common sense, or practicality; it is about conforming to set rules, standards, or traditions.1 However, our aim in this chapter, about our own cross-cultural experiences, is to challenge such views; we hold that academic knowledge can be both practical and worldly, in the sense that the knowledge-creating process, and the knowledge created, may be experienced as emancipatory and transformative, with potential for influencing people’s everyday lives. With Daniels, D’Andrea and Kim (1999, p. 191), we regard cross-cultural supervision as an experience in which the supervisor and supervisee come from different cultural, ethnic or racial backgrounds, or from all three: it is this combined experience that we explore here. However, although our literature searches have unearthed various articles that emphasise the enjoyment and mutual learning that can arise from cross-cultural supervision, the main body of published research appears to focus on the difficulties, for the supervisor as well as for the supervisee. And while we acknowledge the importance of identifying and dealing with the difficulties, we have also found that the differences and challenges DOI: 10.4324/9781351053372-7

92  Sigrid Gjøtterud and Athman Kyaruzi Ahmad involved can be rich sources for learning. Furthermore, while the process of learning with and from each other, and building understanding across cultures in a foreign language, may be time-consuming, and not always aligned with the new efficiency requirements of the New Public Management, now a feature of academic work, we argue that this kind of ‘slow’ knowledge is precisely what is needed for these turbulent times of climate change and the worldwide suffering caused by the unjust distribution of resources. We believe it is crucial for academics involved in research to contribute to understanding how we can learn and come to know better through collaboration across cultural, ethnic or racial backgrounds. By so doing, they can contribute to ‘the reformation and transformation of the status quo into a new global society that is tolerant, democratic, loving and caring …’ (Zuber-Skerritt, 2012, p. 216). Our research stands as an example of how this transformative power of academic knowledge might be embedded in cross-cultural supervision. We draw on a study where we followed an action research approach, documenting the supervisory processes arising from the question: ‘How can we understand and improve our supervisory practice?’ (Marshall, 1999; McNiff, 2017). In the study, we identified those sources for learning that we found to hold transformative power for us as human beings and as academics (Gjøtterud and Ahmad, 2018). Our understanding of transformative learning connects to Mezirow’s (1997) focus on an expansion of consciousness and mental schemes that develop independent thinking about the significance of emotions and experiential learning (Taylor and Cranton, 2012). We identified specific sources for learning as: shared unhomeliness, shared uncertainty and trust building, otherness (differences in gender, race, religion, professional background), shared second language, cultural differences in relating to hierarchy, being in context together and flourishing. The aim of this chapter is to explore what academic qualities these learning sources might foster, so that individuals involved in educational cross-cultural interaction might be enriched and empowered to become agents for change. We aim to inspire others to inquire into their cross-cultural relationships to find similar or other sources and qualities that enable transformative learning. We highlight some organisational aspects that make the supervisory endeavor possible. Mainly though, we explore relational qualities such as openness to differences, and argue why we see such relational qualities as foundational for our academic practices, as teachers, supervisors and as researchers.

Aspects of coming to know and knowing We start by asking if the qualities we have identified as enriching our academic practices as supervisors, teachers and researchers might be characterised as academic knowledge. If so, what kind of knowledge might this be? In response, we found Heron and Reason’s (2008) notions of experiential, presentational, propositional and practical knowing valuable: they argue that these four ways of knowing extend ‘beyond the ways of knowing of positivistic academia’ (p. 367).

Cross-cultural doctoral PhD-supervision 93 In cross-cultural supervisory relationships, these qualities might be understood in terms of the Aristotelian concept phrónêsis, that is, practical reasoning and ethical deliberation, a form of rationality related to praxis (Eikeland, 2017). According to Eikeland, such practical, tacit, emotional, experiential and intuitive forms of knowledge have been marginalised as inadequate by what he calls ‘the modernism’ (ibid. p. 147), whereas, in our view, they are highly relevant to the challenges of our time. Consequently, in our research, we draw on those qualities when trying to make sense of our own experiences that are practical, partly tacit and intuitive and emotional. Experiential knowing captures well the supervising encounters, as: … feeling engaged with what there is, participating, through the perceptual process, in the shared presence of mutual encounter. We see this capacity for feeling as the quintessential nature of the life, the living energy that is within us – the life that is the immanent pole of our embodied spirit. (Heron and Reason, 2008, p. 369) We see the practices of engaged participation as central to cross-cultural relationships, as what Buber (1937) refers to as ‘I-Thou’ relationships rather than ‘I-it’ relationships. I-Thou relationships are those when persons act from ‘a stance in love’, when I encounter the other without prejudice, and hence the other confronts me as Thou (ibid. p. 20/21). However, this stance is contrary to mainstream, traditionalist views of how the ‘academic’ is interpreted, linked as those views are with matters of power and privilege, a stance that is oppositional to the ideal of students and supervisors relating to each other in I-Thou relationships. In our view, only by challenging such traditional power-structures can we meet in reciprocal learning encounters, which require acting from a stance in love. With David Bohm (1988) we argue that ‘if we approach the world through enfolding its wholeness in our consciousness and thus act in love, the world, which enfolds our own being within itself, will respond in a corresponding way’ (p. 67). Therefore, contrary to dominant perspectives, we regard encountering the world and each other without prejudice and in love as founding values for academic work, with the aim of contributing to the common good. It is through the experiential encounter with the presence of others and the world that we come into being and knowing (Heron and Reason, 2008) so that  we can act as human beings and as academics. However, experiential knowing, while vibrant and real, is subtle and often tacit; and we therefore need ways of presenting the experiential knowing in order to share and substantiate it; this in turn begs the need for presentational knowing. In our view, experiential knowing, expressed by stories and reflections in light of theoretical concepts and others’ cross-cultural experiences, takes both presentational and propositional (‘knowing about’) forms. Practical knowing, as knowing ‘how to do things,’ might be the result of experiential, presentational and propositional knowing (ibid. p. 367): it will, however, constantly become experiential knowing as the experiences are always new. This text is also presentational: we present our stories

94  Sigrid Gjøtterud and Athman Kyaruzi Ahmad of cross-cultural supervising experiences and attempt to make sense of them for critique from a reading audience, with the aim of contributing to a discourse of practical knowing. An aim of supervision is to create the conditions for new understandings and new actions. In The Human Condition, Arendt (1958) discusses how we set new beginnings into the world through our actions: she writes: The disclosure of the ‘who’ through speech, and the setting of new beginnings through action, always fall into an already existing web where their immediate consequences can be felt. (p. 184) Setting something new into motion is key to change, which we need in order to survive as humans. Whenever our potential unfolds through conscious encounters with one another’s life worlds, we come more fully into the world and thus build our capacity to act. Both supervisor and supervisee are engaged in such processes: the task is to transform the potential of emergent transformative change through experiential knowing into practical knowing. This is not only the case in cross-cultural supervision; it could be the basis of all dialogical encounters. However, in cross-cultural relationships, the differences may be of greater ­variety and therefore give even richer possibilities for learning and knowledge creation. As researchers and educators, we see a willingness to act from a stance in love, enabled by the transformation of experiential knowing into practical knowing as a core foundation for academic freedom. We understand academic freedom as a capacity which ‘is created through the social esteem that is gained from making constructive contributions to the resolution of important societal problems’ (Levin and Greenwood, 2008, p. 222). Our research suggests that learning from differences in a cross-cultural supervising relationship might have relevance for understanding and creating the kind of knowledge appropriate for addressing pressing societal problems.

Transformative qualities in cross-cultural supervision In this section, we will discuss how the transformative capacities of cross-­ cultural supervision can enhance our academic practice. First, we explain how the funding opportunity for Norwegian PhD programmes created space for collaboration and travel between continents and working contexts. We then look into some of the dilemmas involved in challenging the mainstream research paradigm in Ahmad’s context, before we explore how coming from different backgrounds can be a source for learning and knowledge creation. Issues of power are inevitable in any supervisory relationship, and we look into some of the benefits and challenges of a dialogic approach towards such relationships. We address challenges of not being able to work in our mother tongues, before going on to elaborate the value of shared experiences by being involved in the field together, and how that paved the way for transculturation that led to new

Cross-cultural doctoral PhD-supervision 95 academic work in the community. Finally, we emphasise how the supervisory process proved to be empowering. Funding as opportunity for collaboration Ahmad received funding for his PhD studies through a Quota Scheme in 2010. Normally, academic colleagues seeking funding for PhD students compete for selection. However, when the Quota Scheme was announced at Sigrid’s institute, there was no rush. Supervising quota students is a responsibility that is frequently time-consuming because they involve practical obligations such as finding accommodation for the student and helping them to settle into a new environment. Moreover, completion of a PhD usually takes longer for a quota student. Therefore, some academics hesitate about taking on this kind of responsibility (Singh et al, 2016). As we will explain shortly, the insights we gained were immeasurable, so the extra time involved was definitely worthwhile. According to the Norwegian Center for International Cooperation in Education (SIU), until recently, the Norwegian Government offered funding to students from developing countries, with the aim of providing education that would benefit the student’s home country on their return. This funding was conditional on the student’s residing in the host country, away from family and supportive networks: this often creates problems for those PhD candidates who are involved in cross-cultural supervision (Winchester-Seeto et al, 2014). Our challenge therefore was to find if there might be a way to circumvent this regular practice by weaving our normal working and family lives together with the study programme. After some creative manoeuvering, we managed to connect the PhD project to a research programme, ‘Enhancing Pro-poor Innovations in Natural Resources and Agricultural Value-Chains’ (EPINAV).2 This programme was funded by the Norwegian government, and implemented at Ahmad’s university, Sokoine University of Agriculture (SUA, Tanzania), in collaboration with the Norwegian University of Life Sciences (NMBU). Funding from the project allowed for regular travel for Sigrid and the second supervisor to Tanzania, which reduced the need for Ahmad to stay in Norway. This meant that, apart from attending courses on methodology and content in Norway as required by the Quota Scheme, Ahmad spent most of the time in Tanzania at his home university. Therefore, regular periods of stays for a few weeks or months over the five years of the study enabled us to become familiar with each other’s living and working conditions, families and contexts. The short periods away from home largely combatted the factor of unhomeliness, a theme much found in post-colonial theory, described by Manathunga (2007) as ‘cultural alienation, sense of uncertainty and discomfort’ (p. 98). Such alienation is often experienced when encountering a foreign culture through involvement in unknown contexts, socially and work related. However, these initial feelings of uncertainty and discomfort might be transformed into valuable learning experiences, the development of what Heron and Reason (2008, p. 369) describe as ‘resonance in

96  Sigrid Gjøtterud and Athman Kyaruzi Ahmad a shared life world, as a ground for subsequent reflections together’. The shared presence in unfamiliar contexts, the shared feeling of unhomeliness, might foster a resonance, an understanding of the other, and reflections on the experience might create wider horizons for the imagination. This we see as experiential knowing, a relational form of knowing that enables us to be empathetic. Challenging mainstream research – willingness to take risks Ahmad decided to conduct an action research project in the Uluguru Mountains, in Morogoro, Tanzania (Ahmad, 2016). Embarking on an action research journey is a risk for any PhD student. In any context, PhD study is unpredictable and time-consuming; for a PhD student in an environment where action research was neither taught nor acknowledged as a research approach, the risk was significant. Sigrid felt uncertain whether she would be able to provide the support Ahmad needed, in light of all the unknowns. Were the possible benefits worth the risk? These kinds of dilemmas led to a sense of shared uncertainty and required mutual trust building. Sigrid depended on Ahmad to be her cultural guide, in light of her anxiety of making mistakes in the field. She also had to trust that Ahmad would offer critical advice about what she should do. Similarly, Ahmad had to trust Sigrid to give him sufficient support as he embarked on an academic career that involved introducing action research to his colleagues: his studies involved carrying out a complex study in a rural school and community, with the aim of enhancing teaching and learning by using everyday farming activities as contexts for learning. He encountered resistance in his academic environment, which he had to handle over a long period of time before his colleagues began to have confidence in this methodology, the aim of which was to create practical change as well as have academic merit. Support from both supervisors and their network was crucial; however, we know now that it was worth the risk. Ahmad finished his degree, and action research is now taught and recognised as a legitimate research approach at his university. The upshot is that we now value risk-taking as part of our academic practice, demanding both courage and support. Openness to differences It could potentially have been problematic for a black African Muslim male, being supervised by a white Norwegian Christian female. However, we were both curious to learn about each other’s different backgrounds. Ahmad was born in 1972 in a polygamous Islamic family of 38 children in Tanzania. He is the first-born of his father’s fifth wife, with seven children. Listening to his story about the struggles and hard work needed to pay school-fees, pass exams, get into the university and finally becoming a PhD student was awe-inspiring. Ahmad’s mother instilled in him a strong drive for education despite all the difficulties of economic poverty. On the other hand, Sigrid grew up in an academic family in Norway with her two younger brothers. Schooling was free, and

Cross-cultural doctoral PhD-supervision 97 there were no worries about money. There was little diversity as she was growing up, although Norwegian society has since become increasingly multicultural. However, the culture was founded on Christian/humanistic values of equality, respect, freedom and responsibility. Similarly, traditionally in Tanzania, people of different religions are friends, families of different religions live side by side, and some members of the extended families belong to different religious beliefs. Irrespective of religious beliefs, children would sit side by side, and eat and play together at school. Consequently, respect, openness and tolerance are values we both hold ourselves accountable to, in spite of our different upbringings. Thus, it was unproblematic for Ahmad to be supervised by a woman, athough this can be problematic for some Muslim men. And on a very positive note, in a world where fear of Islam is a growing problem, experiences like ours can provide valuable examples of how differences can be sources for learning rather than of fear. In relation to issues of race, Foldy (2015) raises the question of location in action research and calls for more racial reflexivity. One of Foldy’s arguments is that racial reflexivity might reveal whether the researcher is part of the problem under study. However, for us, Sigrid and Ahmad, it has been an aim to show how the differences, also in race, can lead to new learning. Race or ethnicity is one of the many factors that deepened our understanding of otherness. Sigrid’s experience of being the only white person in a room, at the university as well as during fieldwork, made her aware of the colour of her skin, in the same way that Ahmad felt when he was the only black person in a group. However, our different skin colours did not set us apart, nor has it ever been a taboo we could not talk or joke about. Notwithstanding, Sigrid discovered that her views about race were limited, similar to Frankenberg’s (1993) identification of three major perspectives whites have about race in the USA: essential racism, where races are viewed as unequal (often a case of white supremacy); colour and power evasiveness; and race cognizance. The idea of race cognizance implies that people consciously reject both white supremacy and white supremacist consciousness while engaging actively in efforts to decenter whiteness. Nevertheless, their actions often betray their conscious good intentions because limitations in their knowledge … remain invisible to them. (Mezirow and Taylor, 2009: 264) Sigrid can relate to this. For her, being in the unhomely situation, and sharing and reflecting on different life worlds opened up opportunities for unveiling ignorance: a capacity we see as grounding academic knowing, potentially leading to change for the better. With reference to Gadamer (1979), we regard an attitude of openness to what is different and other as a requirement for expanding our horizons through mutual meaning-making. Gadamer explains the concept ‘horizon’ as ‘the range  of vision that includes everything that can be seen from a particular vantage point’ (p. 313). The range of vision might be expanded when encountering the other: we therefore see openness to otherness as an academic quality. This claim might

98  Sigrid Gjøtterud and Athman Kyaruzi Ahmad be obvious, but it raises the question of how to foster such openness and curiosity. Is it an attitude we can decide on as a way of living, as taking a ‘stance in love’? Perhaps a grounding trust and openness is needed first. Although our research does not give clear answers to these dilemmas, it does suggest that a first step means being prepared to take risks. We are all different. Encountering each other in openness always carries the risk of being turned down, being misunderstood, being bullied. Equally, it is an opportunity for coming more fully into the world, as individuals, and as academics. Paying attention to the value of openness to difference might serve as a reminder to open up, rather than to close down within our prejudices and defences. Here, therefore, we are making a case for how coming from different backgrounds and being different, and learning from the experience, can be an important feature of academic work. Dialogic supervision – humanizing pedagogy We have emphasised how the supervisory relationship was built on the values of equal worth embedded in an I-Thou relationship, within a supervisory tradition that values equality highly (Buber, 1937; Lycke et al, 2000; Tveiten, 2008). This was contrary to the supervisory tradition Ahmad was used to where the supervisor is considered the ‘master’ of knowledge who has the authority to teach, whereas the supervisee is just a student whose job is to take orders. Such a relationship is built on a power imbalance, where the student is required to be submissive. Consequently, the less hierarchical supervisory style Ahmad encountered with Sigrid presented a challenge for him, both from within, and from colleagues who doubted whether proper progress could be achieved in anything less than an authoritarian relationship. Not only did he have to learn to trust that a dialogic, open and accommodative advisory culture would work for him, but he also had to generate confidence among his peers and superiors in order to command their respect. This risk of Ahmad losing respect was something Sigrid had not foreseen. It led to reflections on what cultural differences in relation to hierarchy means and becoming aware of how to act when challenging such circumstances. A lesson Ahmad learned is that informal behaviour in a supervisory relationship, when enacted in mutual respect, is a gateway for relating as human beings, as I and Thou, rather than as an object-subject (I-it) relationship. The term ‘informal behaviour’ implies that actions that reinforce personal support in relationships are not generally found in traditional authoritarian supervision; these include being friends and sharing the student’s interests about non-academic matters. Khene (2014) suggests that in traditional supervisory relationships, factors such as competition for academic time can prevent supervisors from treating students as equals, even as human beings. Instead, students are generally treated as objects, frequently ‘products’. Treating each other as equals is commensurable with Freire’s idea of humanizing pedagogy (Freire, 1970/2000), a pedagogy we regard as highly academic. Such a pedagogy prevents tensions from piling up, and are more likely to help both the student and the supervisor to realise their

Cross-cultural doctoral PhD-supervision 99 personal and professional potentials. Ahmad brought this experiential knowing into his practice, both as a professional practitioner and as a scholar, a point we will elaborate on later. Finding common ground in expressing oneself in a second language The fact that we had to find common ground in a second language was a unifying factor, equally challenging to both. Not until the topic of writing this article came up, did Ahmad confess how the language issue had scared him. Although we both speak English reasonably well, using a shared second language represented a challenge when it came to writing. Neither had we much experience in writing academic texts, which in itself is a challenge. Learning how to do so in a second language is even more demanding: academic communities have strict practices that writers must conform to (Tkachenko, Bratland, & Johansen, 2016). In retrospect, we can see that the experience of struggling as equals, albeit sometimes discouraging, provided valuable lessons about the basic academic qualities of patience and persistence. And had the supervisor been an expert in normative academic issues and the chosen language, she might have provided better support by creating a sense of security and confidence – although being the expert might have given her/him more power, at the risk of the student’s experiencing destructive feelings of inferiority. But whatever the case may be, learning to express oneself in English is a requirement in the academic world if we are to publish and communicate with academic readers. Shared experiences in the field – willingness to be involved Not surprisingly, we found that we were much more likely to become co-creative when we were together in the field where Ahmad was doing his research: not just while physically there, but the ability to picture where his research was situated in order to discuss his plans and reflections. The following is an attempt to capture some of Sigrid’s first impressions: The beauty of the landscape Hungry children Hoes to cultivate the terraced soil No electricity Walking the steep, slippery path Bare school buildings A blackboard white from use No books The headmaster in a dark room with the important book for visitors to register Being greeted by the 600 children and three teachers Shikamo – marahaba

100  Sigrid Gjøtterud and Athman Kyaruzi Ahmad Listening to wise parents Encountering eager children Admiring the leadership of the student Being touched, humble, privileged, grateful Sorrow and happiness A glimpse of understanding Being present and influenced by the immediate experience evoked emotions: it is hard to find words to communicate what experiential knowing involves. However, we learned to share our experiences through words and gestures, otherwise it is hard to imagine exactly how Sigrid could have provided support. Perhaps the most important learning on her side was her appreciation of how little she understood of the impact of poor living conditions. She could also see how important it was for local people to understand that Ahmad had a similar background to themselves, even though he was now studying at a university. However, perhaps the most important understanding of all was the appreciation that we all live in an unjust world where working for greater justice is a privilege provided by our academic freedom. This gives rise to the idea that involvement, or the willingness to be involved, is also an important academic quality, enabling us to reflect on how our different life worlds can provide opportunities for mutual learning and knowledge creation. Transculturation – blending ways of knowing Historically, whites have colonised Tanzanians for centuries and imposed western knowledge systems. This gave rise to the question of whether the Quota Scheme itself might be an oppressive programme that imposed western knowledge systems on the student. One response to the question was to encourage Ahmad to find and use theories and literature from his own culture, finding out what existing indigenous knowledge he could build on, from which we could both learn. The historical and theoretical connections between Nyerere, Freire and Dewey were fascinating and helped us better understand the idea of education for selfreliance. Similarly, the idea of the farm as a pedagogical resource came from a long tradition in Norway (Krogh & Jolly, 2011). In Tanzania, the project of school-farm cooperation developed in the local context of the Uluguru Mountains, blending with the tradition of education for self-reliance as practised in the Nyerere era, though later abandoned in the neo-liberalist paradigm (Ahmad, Krogh, & Gjøtterud, 2014). Manathunga (2011, p. 369) uses the post-colonial term ‘transculturation’ to explain ‘moments of creativity when “culturally diverse students” … carefully select those parts of Western knowledge that they find useful and seek to blend them with their knowledge and ways of thinking’. However, we see transculturation as a two-way process, where culturally diverse students and supervisors blend their ways of knowing and thinking to initiate practical change and develop new theoretical perspectives. In our view, ideas that emerge through transculturation may contribute to those sustainable practices necessary for survival.

Cross-cultural doctoral PhD-supervision 101 Academic work in the communities – distribution of power Ahmad’s action research project was linked to a community development project called Megeta Orphan Education Foundation (MOEF). In MOEF, orphaned youth were allocated to different action learning groups and received training in dairy-goat farming. This meant that they became young farmers who were able to teach their neigbours and children in local shools, and they systematically researched their farming practice (Gjøtterud et al, 2015). A plan developed from their projects to build a competence center located in one of the schools in Mgeta: the idea behind it was that farmers, children and teachers could all do their own research, teaching and learning from one another. This was an innovative and important departure: traditionally academic work is practised by academics, and universities manage issues of knowledge, usually derived from practitioners working in a practice setting. In his project, however, the idea was that university-based researchers could come to the students and farmers to learn from them, and to provide them with the research-based knowledge they needed. In this case, the university, academia, would not be bound to an institution but become a live presence among people. This gives the lie to what Levin and Greenwood (2008) have to say: that [w]hat emerges as the new future university will depend on who engages in the current struggle, what interests they reflect, how they view academic work, and how they use their power to support their interests and those of the civil society. (p. 224) And from this perspective, a willingness to distribute power then becomes another valuable academic trait. Becoming academic change agents The supervising process was filled with a sense of achievement and a sense of success when we came up with solutions to challenges. The academic freedom afforded, supported by financial funding, provided us with a unique opportunity for transformative learning and the expansion of our own horizons. Researching the process further developed the insights gained. Heron and Reason (2008, p. 4) write that: … action research is a participatory process concerned with developing practical knowing in the pursuit of worthwhile human purposes. It seeks to bring together action and reflection, theory and practice, in participation with others, in the pursuit of practical solutions to issues of pressing concern to people, and more generally the flourishing of individual persons and their communities. (our emphasis)

102  Sigrid Gjøtterud and Athman Kyaruzi Ahmad We found that researching our cross-cultural supervising practice has had emancipating and empowering impact in our academic lives, and contributed to our sense of flourishing. Ahmad received his doctorate, and he earned respect at his university as an action researcher and teacher of action research at PhD level. He is now head of departmental research and the publication committee. As academics, we teach and hence have the opportunity to influence large groups of students: we see it as our responsibility to use this power as best we can to serve as agents for social change, similar to Freire’s idea of group-based conscientization (Freire, 1970/2000) and the importance of hope (Freire, 1992/2014). Ahmad’s practice reflects this when working with Sustainable Agriculture Tanzania (SAT), a non-governmental organisation promoting participatory action research in Tanzanian agro-ecology to empower smallholder farmers in organic agriculture. After experiencing how a dialogical approach can allow the mutual exploration of experiences that can lead to the co-creation of knowledge, Ahmad changed his supervisory practice. He acknowledged the value of encouraging the students to voice their opinions, especially in terms of defending the validity of their ideas (Xu & Grant, 2017). One student said, following a supervisory session: ‘Now, when I read my text, I enjoy reading it.’ She was not following a supervisor’s directives, but had learned, through her supervisor’s encouragement, to argue for her thoughts and ideas: perhaps the result of a process of the conflicts, struggles and reconciliations involved in dialogical supervision. Support and critique are equally important for growth (Gjøtterud, 2009). Such academic practice encourages new academics to have confidence in their ability to think and create. It stems from a genuine desire to guide students towards mastery; it requires an equal distribution of power between teacher and student, although by giving away the power of being the only knower, the university teacher ‘risks’ being challenged and over-shadowed. Traditionally, this situation has been seen as academic failure: we see it as a victory when the student becomes the teacher of the teacher. These days, Ahmad is recognised by students who seek his guidance, as well as colleagues who ask for his assistance in guiding their students. He does not impose his insights on students or colleagues; rather he acts as a role model, gradually influencing his working environment in order to change what counts as academic practice. While a dialogical approach to teaching and learning may be old news in Norway, Sigrid has still developed her ideas through working with Ahmad and other colleagues. She has learned from the experience of working with an exploratory process and has benefited from an enhanced understanding of the nature of difference. She brings these ideas to her work with the students, encouraging them to explore and learn from differences amongst themselves, in preparation for working in their own multicultural classrooms. For Sigrid, the shift in teaching approaches has not changed radically, but the scope of her research interest has changed and expanded, from being confined to Norwegian contexts to being involved in several cross-cultural projects. The cross-cultural supervisory process has contributed to the confidence needed to be academic change agents.

Cross-cultural doctoral PhD-supervision 103

Transformation as representation of the academic: concluding reflections Our study of our five-year long cross-cultural supervisory relationship, where we identified sources for transformative learning, has enabled us to identify those qualities and values we think are foundational to how ‘the academic’ should be represented. The first quality we have identified is a willingness to take risk, including the risk of challenging mainstream research paradigms. New ways of thinking are needed in order to solve the problems that traditional ways of thinking have created. Being open to differences is the beginning of finding new ways of thinking. Dialogical supervision, or what Freire refers to as humanizing pedagogy through engaging in I-Thou relationships, has been a unique context for learning. Buber (1937) writes that when we encounter each other from a stance in love, we do not reduce the other to our experience of them but come to see them more fully. When this happens, differences are not threatening but can help expand our horizons. This requires a willingness to be involved in each other’s context in order to share life worlds. And when our horizons are expanded through sharing, we develop and can contribute through conscious action: our experiential knowing transforms into practical knowing. At this point, blending different ways of knowing becomes possible. In our case, the experience of transculturation has the potential to generate something new. This implies that we academics who are working in academic institutions need to use our power in ways that allow power to be distributed among others. Practical knowing means living outside the university. Only through collaboration can we hope to create ways of knowing that will contribute to sustainable development. Winter and O’Donohue (2012) argue that [u]nderstanding what values matter to academic staff in a university is a worthwhile activity as values help shape the behavior and identities of academics and the institution. (p. 565) By paying attention to our values, we are more likely to hold ourselves accountable to them, an idea that nurtures the hope that academics are and might be agents for positive change. Ahmad’s cultural values of openness, tolerance and duty to serve made him embrace action research as a way of making a difference while pursuing his academic degree. He exercised his intellectual, personal and social freedom for the common good, in the spirit of Julius Nyerere (Nyerere, 1968). For Sigrid, supervising students from different cultures meant extra work, but she felt this a small price to pay for the personal and professional transformation she and Ahmad both experienced as people and as academics. Dick (2011) notes that in a turbulent world ‘there is a need for people who engage directly with that world and seek to understand and change it’ (p. 135); hence  he  argues that action research is a pertinent research approach for our time. We add that cross-cultural supervision is another appropriate approach

104  Sigrid Gjøtterud and Athman Kyaruzi Ahmad when trying to change the world. We see the opportunity to learn and create knowledge together within a cross-cultural supervisory relationship as a powerful opportunity to improve the quality both of our academic practice and our lives: an opportunity to work constructively as academics for sustainable development in the hopes of a more just world.

Notes 1 http://www.dictionary.com/browse/academic 2 ht t ps://w w w.n mbu.no/en/facu lt y/ la nd sa m/depa r t ment/norag r ic/ institutional_coop/epinav

References Ahmad, A. K. (2016). Participatory action research for engaging schools and communities to enhance relevant learning: the use of ‘farm’ as a pedagogical resource in Tanzanian rural primary schools. (Ph.D. Thesis number 2016: 54), Norwegian University of Life Sciences, Ås. Ahmad, A. K., Krogh, E., & Gjøtterud, S. (2014). Reconsidering the philosophy of Education for Self-Reliance from an experiential learning perspective in contemporary education in Tanzania. Educational Research for Social Change, 3 (1), 3–19. Arendt, H. (1958). The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Bohm, D. (1988). Postmodern Science and a Postmodern World. In D. R. Griffin (ed.), The Reenchantment of Science. Postmodern Proposals (pp. 57–68). New York: State University of New York Press. Buber, M. (1937). I and Thou. Second Edition. With a Postscript by the Author (R. G. Smith, Trans. 2004 ed.). London, New York: Continuum. Daniels, J., D’Andrea, M. and Kim, B. S. K. (1999). Assessing the barriers and changes of cross-cultural supervision: A case study. Counselor Education and Supervision, 38 (3), 191–204. doi:10.1002/j.1556-6978.1999.tb00570.x Eikeland, O. (2017). Aristotelisk aksjonsforskning [Aristotelian Action Research]. In S. Gjøtterud, H. Hiim, D. Husebø, L. H. Jensen, T. Steen-Olsen and E.  Stjernestrøm (eds.), Aksjonsforskning i Norge. Teoretisk og empirisk mangfold [Action Research in Norway. Theoretical and empirical diversity] (pp. 133–164). Cappelen Damm akademisk. Foldy, E. G. (2015). The Location of Race in Action Research. In H. Bradbury (ed.), The SAGE Handbook of Action Research, Third edition. Sage Research Methods. https://doi.org/https://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781473921290.n50 Frankenberg, R. White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness.1993 London: Routledge. Freire, P. (1970/2000). Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Continuum. Freire, P. (1992/2014). Pedagogy of Hope: Reliving Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Bloomsbury Academic. Gjøtterud, S. (2009). Love and critique in guiding student teachers. Educational Journal of Living Theories EJOLTS, 2 (1), 68–95. Gjøtterud, S., & Ahmad, A. K. (2018). Transformative power of cross-cultural PhD supervision. International Journal of Doctoral Studies, 13, 441–456. https://doi. org/10.28945/4140 Gjøtterud, S., Krogh, E., Dyngeland, C., & Mwakasumba, N. S. (2015). Orphans as agents for change. International Journal for Transformative Research, 3 (1), 3–15.

Cross-cultural doctoral PhD-supervision 105 Heron, J., & Reason, P. (2008). Extending Epistemology within a Co-operative Inquiry. In P. Reason & H. Bradbury (eds.), The SAGE Handbook of Action Research. Participative Inquiry and Practice. Second Edition (pp. 366–380). London: SAGE. Krogh, E., & Jolly, L. (2011). Making sense of place: school-farm cooperation in Norway. Children Youth and Environments, 21 (1), 310–321. doi:10.7721/ chilyoutenvi.21.1.0310 Levin, M., & Greenwood, D. (2008). The Future of Universities: Action Research and the Transformation of Higher Education. In P. Reason & H. Bradbury (eds.), The SAGE Handbook of Action Research: Participative Inquiry and Practice. Second Edition. London: SAGE. Lycke, K. H., Lauvås, P., & Handal, G. (2000). Reflekterende veiledning og veiledning i lærende fellesskap - en grenseoppgang. In K. Skagen (ed.), Kunnskap og handling i pedagogisk veiledning (pp. 123–148). Bergen: Fagbokforlaget. Manathunga, C. (2007). Intercultural Postgraduate Supervision: Ethnographic Journeys of Identity and Power. In D. Palfreyman & D. L. McBride (Eds.), Learning and Teaching Across Cultures in Higher Education (pp. 93–113). London: Palgrave Macmillan UK. Manathunga, C. (2011). Moments of transculturation and assimilation: post-colonial explorations of supervision and culture. Innovations in Education and Teaching International, 48 (4), 367–376. doi:10.1080/14703297.2011.617089 Marshall, J. (1999). Living life as inquiry. Systemic Practice and Action Research, 12(2), 155–171. McNiff, J. (2017). Action Research: All You Need to Know: Sage. Mezirow, J. (1997). Transformative learning: Theory to practice. New Directions for Adult and Continuing Education (74), 5–12. Mezirow, J., & Taylor, E. W. (2009). Transformative learning in practice: insights from community, workplace, and higher education. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Nyerere, J. K. (1968). Ujamaa: essays on socialism. Dar es Salaam: Oxford University Press. Singh, M., Manathunga, C., Bunda, T., & Jing, Q. (2016). Mobilising Indiginous and non-Western theoretic-linguistic knowledge in doctoral education. Knowledge Cultures, 4 (1), 56–70. Taylor, E. W., & Cranton, P. (2012). The Handbook of Transformative Learning: Theory, Research, and Practice. San Francisco, Calif: Jossey Bass. Tkachenko, E., Bratland, K., & Johansen, J. S. (2016). Culturally diverse students in higher education: Challenges and possibilities within academic literacy practices. FLEKS - Scandinavian Journal of Intercultural Theory and Practice, 3 (2). doi:10.7577/fleks.1830 Tveiten, S. (2008). Veiledning: mer enn ord. Bergen: Fagbokforlaget. Winchester-Seeto, T., Homewood, J., Thogersen, J., Jacenyik-Trawoger, C., Manathunga, C., Reid, A., & Holbrook, A. (2014). Doctoral supervision in a cross-cultural context: issues affecting supervisors and candidates. Higher Education Research & Development, 33 (3), 610–626. doi:10.1080/07294360.2013.841648 Winter, R. P., & O’Donohue, W. (2012). Academic identity tensions in the public university: Which values really matter? Journal of Higher Education Policy and Management, 34 (6), 565–573. doi:10.1080/1360080X.2012.716005 Xu, L., & Grant, B. (2017). International doctoral students’ becoming: A dialogic perspective. Innovations in Education and Teaching International, 54 (6), 570–579. doi:10.1080/14703297.2017.1318711 Zuber-Skerritt, O. (2012). Action Research for Sustainable Development in a Turbulent World. Bradford: Emerald Group Publishing Limited.

8

Wrighting an academic life as a practitioner researcher Constructing knowledge on the home front, at the university, throughout the Americas, and in our global community Joseph M. Shosh

By birthright, I shouldn’t be an academic at all. In fact, statistically, I should never even have gone to College in the first place. My European-American immigrant grandparents did not, but they clearly benefitted from the postWorld War II economic boom, where Bethlehem Steel and a self-made laundry business allowed my Hungarian and Italian grandfathers, their wives, and their two children each entrée into the growing middle class. My mother and father were the first to complete high school in their respective families, but without college degrees, they struggled to make ends meet financially in what seemed to me growing up to be the endless recession of the 1970s. I didn’t realize then, as now, that academic performance in our nation’s public schools is still overwhelmingly correlated to parental income, but I benefitted from a rich home literacy environment and a mother who had once held aspirations to become an elementary school teacher. Where many peers on my rural route didn’t see much point in or value to ‘book learning’, I knew that my future depended on my academic success. In the pages that follow, I’ll explore my construction of an academic life, laying out my stance as a wrighter and reflecting on the representations of the academic that I have encountered as a public school and private university student, as a professor building an action-research-based graduate program for practicing teachers, as a co-initiator of the Action Research Network of the Americas, and as an engaged scholar working locally in an attempt to improve educational opportunities globally. I first defined wrighting as a central facet of my academic life in the context of modern-day playwrights and those who constructed something new in the Middle Ages, from shipwrights to wheelwrights, millwrights, and tile-wrights, as opposed to the writers of the day, who were copiers of letters: … what I call wrighting, requires students to examine complex problems from a multiplicity of perspectives and to imagine as if something were other than what it is. When students wright knowledge in a classroom, they embark on a journey to search for truth. Their inquiry leads them to try on different masks as they examine characters, actions, and obstacles and, in turn, they learn more about themselves. They wrestle with real problems DOI: 10.4324/9781351053372-8

Wrighting an academic life as a practitioner researcher 107 and find their voices emerge as they develop solutions to those problems. They become aware of the dialectic between the roles they play and the roles that society expects to see portrayed. Through conscious reflection and struggle, they construct new understandings that lead to new rounds of inquiry and new rounds of wrighting. (Shosh, 2005, p. 73) For me, wrighters are constructors of new knowledge engaged in an Aristotelian process of praxis, or reflective practice, guided by phronesis or practical wisdom based on our values, as we hone our practice through what we know through our techne, or craft knowledge, to create new episteme, or epistemic knowledge (Shosh, 2017). For me, such construction has most often occurred in the dialectic provided by rich third spaces (Bhabha, 1994) between the required and the desired (Shosh, 2000), the internally persuasive and the authoritative (Bakhtin, 1981; Shosh, 2004), the officially sanctioned and the unsanctioned (Shosh, 2005), the empty and the imaginative (Shosh, 2007), the past and the future (Shosh, 2010), the reflective and action-oriented (Shosh, 2016), and the school and larger community (Shosh, 2019). For me, teachers with whom I have worked have engaged in rich inquiry into their own teaching and learning to produce the new knowledge that is most needed by a variety of education stakeholders to bring about meaningful educational change (Shosh, 2007, 2012, 2017, 2019; Shosh and Zales, 2005). Others whom I haven’t met like Jenn Reid and colleagues at the Dayton, Ohio, USA Regional STEM School have adopted the wrighting metaphor for an annual Project: WRIGHT Symposium to provide ‘professional development for educators designed by practicing educators, as opposed to a series of guest speakers who don’t face a classroom of students each day’; and have expanded the metaphor with a most apt acronym whereby WRIGHT also signifies ‘When Real-World Innovation Guides High-Quality Teaching’ (Ohio STEM Learning Network, 2016). By wrighting an academic life and sharing one incarnation of it here, I hope to continue to expand the metaphor, bringing fellow wrighters on board as together we work to right the wrongs of inequality in what is for far too many a socially unjust world.

Reflecting autobiographically on ‘the Academic’ Growing up in the countryside outside of Nazareth, Pennsylvania, USA, I knew that our community and nearby Bethlehem had been founded in the 1740s by missionaries from the Moravian Church, who had fled religious persecution on the European continent and found themselves with a land grant from King George III within William Penn’s colony to form their own utopia in the New World. Little did I realize then that their philosophical forebear, the Moravian bishop John Amos Comenius, regarded as the father of modern education, produced the first picture book for children, Orbus Pictus, and wrote in his Great Didactic of universal education for all ‘whose fate it is to be born human beings: so that at last the whole of the human race may become educated, men of all

108  Joseph M. Shosh ages, all conditions, both sexes and all nations’, some mighty revolutionary thinking for 1649 (Comenius, 1957, p. 97). Even though my first elementary school was just blocks away from the 1740 George Whitefield House, the school itself had no traces of its revolutionary Moravian roots but rather was as familiar as the schoolmaster Gradgrind in Charles Dickens’s Hard Times. We children sat in rows, learned penmanship by copying neatly from the board, raised our hands to speak, and answered back only when acknowledged by the teacher. Slate boards had simply been replaced by mimeographed purple sheets and workbooks, and there were no field trips to the Whitefield House. I recall report cards home to my parents explaining that ‘Improvement was needed’, and as much as I wanted to impress the teacher, my six-year-old self just couldn’t be constrained in my seat. The age of Aquarius may have dawned on historic Nazareth, Pennsylvania, but John Dewey would have recognized the traditional pedagogies instantly; and had I struggled on in that elementary school, as well meaning as my teacher was, I doubt I would ever have learned to wright. Fortunately, a brand-new open concept school predicated on a progressive pedagogical model opened on my rural route just a mile from home back in 1972. While the basal readers and workbooks didn’t completely disappear, they were augmented by reading from actual children’s books, science experiments in designated wet areas, manipulatives to learn math facts, and regular opportunities to explore areas of my own interest. In those wonderfully experiential childhood years at a progressive open-concept school, I became the ring-master of a circus in the school cafeteria, an astronomer building an outer space learning center, an environmentalist exploring crop rotation, and a performer in a pageant to celebrate America’s 200th birthday. As part of an English language arts class project, I even had my first work as a playwright—an adaptation of a Hardy Boys mystery novel—staged for the entire student body. In his assessment of the open movement, educational historian Larry Cuban (2004) notes, ‘In the mid-1970s, with the economy stagnating and the nation deeply divided over the Vietnam War, critics again trained their sights on the public schools. The national crisis gave rise to a perception, amplified by the media, that academic standards had slipped, that the desegregation movement had failed, and that … [what was needed was] a return to the basics’ (pp. 70–71). Return to basics A return to the basics was just what I received as I moved on to junior high school and found myself back in silent rows, and, curious as I had become from my inquiry years, I couldn’t fully understand at the time the significance of the tests we took or the sorting that was being done to place us into academic or vocational tracks. What did I want to be when I grew up? My father drove and dispatched trucks that my uncle built at the local Mack Truck plant. My first cousin would go to the vocational technical school to learn a trade and become a mason. Why did they laugh at me for liking school and thinking that I might want to become

Wrighting an academic life as a practitioner researcher 109 a teacher—maybe even an elementary school principal? Would I be smart enough, though, to go to college, and if I could get in, could my family afford to pay for it? What if I just weren’t college material—not academic enough? What would I do without a skill or a trade? Of course, I hadn’t heard then of Jean Anyon’s (1980, 1981) research, conducted while I was a student at Nazareth Junior High, less than an hour’s drive away in northern New Jersey, which showed clearly how schools delivered an education that she termed executive elite, affluent professional, middle class, or working class—based on the socioeconomic status of the community residents. As a groundbreaking qualitative research academic, Jean Anyon described the social stratification of the American public-school system that was preparing me for a world of work suited to my social class. For better or worse, I had been placed in the academic track of a working-class school, which meant that I would ostensibly be prepared to attend college, whether or not I could afford it. In the classroom, I had learned to play the academic game, which meant I needed to memorize the notes that had been provided by the teacher and learn how to regurgitate the required information in the required format. Becoming a master at repeating what I had been told in school-sanctioned forms like the five-paragraph essay contrasted sharply with the authentic learning that happened for me when taking on new roles in the school plays and musicals, serving in the student government, and becoming editor of the school newspaper. In that editorial role, I had such wonderful opportunities to interview the town’s mayor, engage in investigative reporting about new school construction, and encourage high school students to vote in their first American presidential election, providing me with invaluable wrighting opportunities across different genres, target audiences, and purposes. As a college undergraduate English major preparing to become a secondary English language arts teacher, I quickly became thankful for those authentic literacy learning opportunities: being academic at a small, private liberal arts college in the humanities required discarding any vestiges of memorization and formulaic thinking as I devoured literary texts and criticism and tried to wrap my head around what were, for me, new philosophical constructs. I couldn’t get enough of dramatic literature, so I self-designed a second major in theatre arts and directed theatrical productions on campus and in the local community, stealing off to Broadway any time I could. I still recall one of those selfguided trips to Manhattan, sitting in the Neil Simon Theatre on West 52nd Street watching a revival of Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night starring Jason Robards and Colleen Dewhurst; wondering how a poor kid from rural Pennsylvania could be in this seat and what had transpired in his academic career to make him want to be here rather than watching American football with his family back home. I still recall, too, Dr. Martin, my liberal arts college president, asking me where (not if) I’d be going to graduate school and offering to pen a letter of recommendation to the School of Drama at his alma mater, Yale University. Yes, being well connected in academia could indeed open doors. In my play book at the time, though, college was the end of the academic road—the cherished goal—not the beginning of a new intellectual life. It was

110  Joseph M. Shosh now my duty, I believed, to return to the local public schools and to teach as I had been taught, to transmit my 22-year-old wisdom to the 18- and 19-year old high school seniors from the non-academic track assigned to me in my first year of public-school teaching. I knew that most were not college-bound, but I still had trouble understanding why they didn’t necessarily see the value in analyzing a short story, exploring the transformation from a novel to the screenplay for a film, or eliminating dangling modifiers and split infinitives from their writing. I was on the brink of failing as a teacher and reckoned two things—first, that I was not cut out to teach those students who clearly didn’t want to learn, and, second, academia had the answers to profound questions that I still lacked, so I’d better get off to graduate school and learn to be a better teacher, at least for those students who wanted to learn. A U.S. National Endowment for the Humanities grant for practicing school teachers allowed me to begin my master’s degree study at Middlebury College the summer right after that awful failed first year of teaching, where I was introduced to the scholarship of English education by Courtney Cazden, Nancie Atwell, and an entire troupe of professional actors who helped us explore nuances of meaning in the works of Shakespeare, Samuel Beckett, and Athol Fugard. I began to see that being academic meant always asking new questions without expecting pat answers, reading and writing for our own purposes, and that better choices were always possible and often just around the next corner. From Yale’s resident dramaturg Michael Cadden, on the Middlebury faculty that summer, I learned to listen more closely to the disparate voices from within my own community and to recognize the power of the local in addressing problems on a global scale. New York City and a graduate degree from NYU in theatre arts education beckoned over successive summer sessions, building upon the Middlebury experience to develop the crucial importance of ‘as if’ thinking and the exploration of the academic within the experiential. Exploring the craft of the playwright with Aurand Harris, one of America’s most prolific playwrights for young people; acting on the stage of the Provincetown Playhouse in Greenwich Village, while telecasting the performance to and receiving feedback from graduate students at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto; and exploring what happens when young people take on the mantle of the expert and solve problems through a story drama narrative under the masterful direction of David Booth provided much fodder for exploring the construction of knowledge through drama back at my eastern Pennsylvania High School, where I was learning to construct knowledge with, rather than transmit it to students. A somewhat accidental final class in assessment with Uncommonsense English educator John Mayher sealed the philosophical deal, and I entered the doctoral program in English education at New York University that had been founded by reader response theorist Louise Rosenblatt. Although long retired and approaching her centennial year, Rosenblatt expanded my thinking through her Literature as Exploration and The Reader, The Text, The Poem: The Transactional Theory of the Literary Work, inspired by John Dewey, and her crucial notion that meaning resides not hermeneutically

Wrighting an academic life as a practitioner researcher 111 sealed within a text but rather in a meaningful transaction with a reader who constructs meaning. For me, escorting Rosenblatt from a New York City yellow cab to a waiting faculty reception speaking of transactions made with her texts was equaled only by sitting with her at lunch, where she rose from our table to deliver an impromptu speech at what turned at to be her final National Council of Teachers of English convention, which, to my recollection, began, ‘Those of us seated in this room have a responsibility to stand up and stop the endless and mindless testing. The children depend on us to speak when they cannot or will not otherwise be heard’ (Mayher, 2008, p. 290). Doctoral study at NYU integrated academia seamlessly into my fulltime classroom teaching, providing what were, for me, new theoretical and methodological lenses through which to examine my classroom practice. Margot Ely et al.’s (1991, 1997) narrative approach to qualitative research methodology confirmed my belief in doing research that valued the experiences of the participants first and foremost and formed the bedrock for my own first published classroom research studies. This approach to theory/practice synthesis in academia supported my study of curriculum negotiation, where public school students co-constructed the development of a course, including readings, assignments, fieldtrips, and assessments through drama in education roleplay (Shosh, 2000). It allowed me to develop and explore my own dialogic approach to classroom discourse as I continued my move away from transmission to transactional approaches and engaged students in their own analytic deductive, analytic inductive, reflective procedural, reflective textual, and creative generative modes of meaning making (Shosh, 2004). It undergirded my philosophical commitment to wrighting as a crucial component of developing critical literacy in the secondary school classroom (Shosh, 2005). Finally, it allowed me, as my role shifted from fulltime classroom teacher to university professor and action research facilitator to engage in joint inquiry of the learning that occurs for students in the process of preparing a play for performance (Shosh and Wescoe, 2007).

Building an ‘Academic’ teacher action research program at the university Returning to Moravian College, my undergraduate alma mater, with the invitation to lead a new action-research based master’s degree program for practicing teachers was the perfect opportunity for me to explore and expand my notion of the academic within the context of a new program at what was the 6th oldest institution of higher education in the United States, the first to educate women, and one of the first in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania to certify public school teachers. Building and initially teaching many of the courses for this new program would allow me to engage directly in the development and design of a new scholarship with practicing teachers (Boyer, 1990). Moravian colleagues Robert Mayer and Jack Dilendik applied to and received approval from the Pennsylvania Department of Education to offer the new Master of Education degree program on the condition that courses in the history and philosophy of education be

112  Joseph M. Shosh removed from the program design, since these were regarded as overly academic and not practical enough to meet the needs of practicing teachers. I accepted the appointment and the curricular design challenge, knowing that I wanted to create a dialectic between what I perceived as false dichotomies between theory and practice by embedding the opportunity to examine classroom data from a multiplicity of lenses into multiple action research cycles. Admission would be open to any duly certified and practicing teacher who would agree to engage in multiple action research cycles within his or her classroom and go public with the results of a final study in a graduate thesis. Teachers would enroll in a series of introductory courses titled ‘Teacher as Inquirer’, ‘Teacher as Researcher’, ‘Teacher as Evaluator’, and ‘Contemporary Issues in Education’, where they would, in turn, develop initial lines of inquiry; design and conduct a pilot teacher action research study in the classroom; assess student progress and analyze research data; and explore the academic literature on contemporary topics of interest and applicability to their research. They would intersperse these with four seminars in teaching and learning, directly linked to the area of research interest. They would then complete the degree in a thesis sequence of three courses, where they would design and receive consents for the thesis action research study, conduct the study and analyze data, and write up the final study for oral defense and inclusion in the College’s permanent collection. Here it was crucial to me that all master’s degree candidates enrolled in the program have the opportunity to read Dewey (1938), Freire (1970), Vygotsky (1978), and Delpit and Dowdy (2002) to ensure that data gathered in the classroom could be analyzed through traditional, progressive, dialogical, feminist, social constructivist, linguistic, cultural, and socioeconomic lenses. Initial and follow-up studies of the teachers engaged in the process indicated that nearly 98% reported being able to access, understand, and apply key research findings in education and to document professional practice and make changes to that practice based on systematic inquiry into teaching and learning (Shosh, 2013; Shosh and Zales, 2007). Recognizing that being part of a vibrant academic community on the Moravian College campus was crucial in supporting teachers on their respective scholarly journeys, the Education Department also made the commitment, on its own and through partnership with others, to host an important array of national and international education scholars on campus, including Bill Ayers, Marilyn Cochran-Smith, Linda Christensen, Charlotte Danielsen, Michelle Fine, Jonathan Kozol, Susan Lytle, Jean McNiff, César Osorio Sánchez, and Lesley Wood, among others. They would play a crucial role in validating the work of teachers as researchers. Curricular revisions to the original design occurred as a result of the 2013 study, with a new focus being placed in the initial course on inquiring into the research base for teaching and learning through inquiry; with the examination in ‘Teacher as Researcher’ of new youth participatory action research models in alignment with those inquiry practices; and with the replacement of the general ‘Contemporary Issues’ course with a new course taken in the thesis sequence to focus specifically on the construction of the literature review for the thesis

Wrighting an academic life as a practitioner researcher 113 project. While final thesis documents had always been added to the College’s permanent collection and made available on the Education Department website (www.moravian.edu/education), more recent publications have included meta-thematic analysis of the entire body of teacher research data, providing findings across studies for public scrutiny (Shosh, 2016, 2017). Within the more than 200 studies conducted between 2003 and 2018, teachers documented far more than the technical-rational ability to apply the research of others to their own classroom contexts. Through their inquiries, teachers engaged in a critical pedagogy of learning, gathering, and analyzing data with critical lenses, conducting multiple cycles of various forms of action research, and creating and disseminating new knowledge in their role as public intellectuals. In addition to sharing the results of their research in the final thesis, teachers have presented publicly to their school administrators, to fellow teachers within their schools and districts, and to audiences far beyond their local communities at events like the Moravian College and University of San Diego Action Research Conferences and the Value and Virtue in Practice-Based Research Conference at Britain’s York St. John University. The need for an annual event within the western hemisphere to meet fellow teacher researchers and share their work was one impetus for the creation of a new Action Research Network of the Americas.

Co-founding an action research network of the Americas In the spring of 2012, a group of Moravian graduate students and I found ourselves sharing our research at what was then the largest action research conference in the United States, hosted by Lonnie Rowell at the University of San Diego’s School of Leadership and Education Sciences. While there, I also had the opportunity to represent the United States in a mini United Nations of Action Research, where I began my address on the panel in tongue-incheek fashion: You don’t need me to tell you the status of action research in American education. You already know where we stand. Who needs action research? We have Arnie Duncan’s race to the top. We have all of Bill and Melinda Gates’ money to ensure that teachers do just what the research tells them to do. Gee, if only teachers would work harder, those native Americans on reservations would score higher on standardized tests. Or, if we just taught more phonics to those who speak non-standard English, we’d close the achievement gap. If those union teachers would just stop being so darned lazy and do what the research tells them to do, then all would be right with American education. After all, teachers are supposed to be knowledge ­consumers—not knowledge producers, right?! Of course, I was able to go on to talk about action research as professional practice for a democratic society. Through action research, we learn how to empower ourselves and, in turn, learn from and give voice to the most marginalized

114  Joseph M. Shosh members of our society. That’s revolutionary; that’s threating to those who hold political power; that turns social reproduction upside down. Cochran-Smith and Lytle (2009) had recently reported, ‘Despite all of the forces working against it, teacher research and the larger practitioner inquiry movement continue to flourish in the United States and many parts of the world. Across myriad contexts, practitioner research initiatives are proliferating…and pushing back against constraining policies and mandated practices’ (p. 6). I reminded those assembled that we are those practitioner researchers. We are the ones who must continue to generate new knowledge that makes a difference in people’s lives. We are the ones who must share what we’ve learned through our action and present our findings for public scrutiny. We are the ones who must support one another’s efforts at special events like the USD Conference and both maintain and nourish the relationships formed there. We must also do a much better job of going public with our findings and ensuring that the research produced by practitioners is accepted within the academy, no easy task to be sure. For those of us who have come to action research in our graduate degree programs, I noted, we must remember that commencement marks the true beginning of our teacher research efforts—not their end. So finally, I asked, ‘What’s the state of action research in the U.S.A.?’ Action researchers are those leading the call for the restoration of democracy in an American society controlled by corporate interests. Fortunately, John Dewey has prepared us well here. Democracy is not a given right; we maintain it only through our willingness to take new action. It was at that San Diego conference that Lonnie Rowell convened a breakfast workshop where those who were interested in taking important new action by forming a new consortium of action researchers in the Americas who were largely not participants in the European-based Collaborative Action Research Network (CARN) or the Australian Action Learning Action Research Association (ALAR A). At that time, the only large annual gathering of action researchers throughout the United States and Canada occurred as part of the much larger American Educational Research Association (AER A) conference. While those of us in academia who belonged to AER A would continue to work within the organization to make practitioners feel more welcome and to legitimize the forms of research they conducted, we also recognized the need for an organization of practitioners and academics (who viewed themselves as practitioners) to join together and also to use new technologies to begin to overcome traditional language divides between Anglo and Latin Americas, initiating a new hemispheric network (Shosh, Rowell, Riel & Bruce, 2017). By doing so, we would have the potential to disrupt traditional practitioner/ academic divisions. In drafting the mission statement for the new organization, I wanted to ensure that we would unite college and university students and faculty conducting practitioner inquiry into teaching and learning with fellow action researchers in public schools, private schools, community settings and workplaces throughout the Americas. Our members would be committed to taking action locally, regionally, nationally, and internationally to promote action research that is conducted with a commitment to honesty, integrity, inclusiveness,

Wrighting an academic life as a practitioner researcher 115 multi-vocality, engagement, and achievement within sustainable democratic societies. Of course, the initial mission draft reflected my own position within academia and my own desire to work closely with teachers as fellow practitioners. ARNA would, over time, go on to embrace practitioners in many fields, but this first mission reflected the position of the initiators within academia. By initiating a new hemispheric network, we would begin to bridge long-standing global South and global North divides, taking another step forward in building a new North-South convergence, following the crucial lead of Colombian sociologist Orlando Fals Borda (2006), who noted, ‘We have the political, objective and non-neutral duty of fostering the democratic and spiritual dimensions through more satisfying life systems. To this end, northern and southern scholars can converge as colleagues and soul fellows, for the quest of meaning’ (p. 357). Here, within ARNA, we would bring practitioner-scholars together from throughout the Americas and around the world to pose questions, ponder solutions, and share the results of our inquiries as fellow sentipensante, a word spoken by Colombian fishermen to describe a thinking and feeling person, where heart and mind are united in thought and action in marked contrast to traditional academic constructs that value mind over heart. By initiating a new hemispheric network, we would also join a crucial fight against what Boaventura de Sousa Santos (2014) has termed in Epistemologies of the South quite simply epistemicide or ‘the murder of knowledge’ (p. 92). On a global scale, western scientific knowledge has been used ostensibly to solve problems, often, in turn, creating larger problems and lack of sustainability. Teaching colleagues and I have been confronted with so-called research-based, teacher-proof curriculum where the knowledge created by experts far from the classroom has been touted as best practice for us to follow and apply. Here, our commitment to documenting our research practices carefully and sharing the results of our research publicly has generally granted us a reprieve from deskilling and de-­ professionalization as we have joined colleagues in staking claims to knowledge creation in the classroom and reclaiming our own expertise as practitioners.

Broadening the definition of ‘Academic’ in the local/global community A key facet of ARNA’s knowledge mobilization efforts was the publication in 2017 of the Palgrave International Handbook for Action Research, the surviving ARNA initiators’ attempt to explore the work of the international action research community, comprised of ‘teachers, youth workers, counselors, nurses, community developers, artists, ecologists, farmers, settlement-dwellers, students, professors, and intellectual-activists on every continent and at every edge of the globe’ (p. xi). While an early editorial idea to have each of 50 chapters, penned collaboratively by an author who self-identified as an academic and one who did not, ultimately proved unfeasible, the volume’s 87 contributors share an unwavering commitment to the support of knowledge produced in local contexts and in a wide variety of forms. Here action research is not merely a

116  Joseph M. Shosh methodological approach but an ontological stance to engaging with the world, whether one subscribes to a world view that is critical participatory, informal, emancipatory, democratic, or more likely, whatever hybrid best supports local needs. For some, the research conducted locally will have served its purpose, while others will need and want to disseminate findings more widely, including through the important conversations taking place within and across action research networks. Too often, traditional academics have spoken only to one another, and the world’s expanding action research networks provide crucial venues for collaborative conversation. For me, another crucial component of broadening the definition of the academic has centered on continuing to support former graduate students after they have completed the master’s degree. The genesis for this line of inquiry occurred during John Elliott’s keynote address at the Value and Virtue in Practice-Based Inquiry Conference convened by Jean McNiff and Julian Stern at York St. John University. In that address, Elliott pondered what good action research was actually doing in the world if it were only being used by practitioners to gain advanced credentials and then promptly abandoned along with the awarding of the master’s degree. At CARN’s first Study Day on the East Coast of the United States, participants in a single day visited the classrooms of Moravian graduate education alumni Ali Tannous, Nathan Snyder, and Kevin Horn in eastern Pennsylvania, New York City, and central New Jersey, respectively, to explore the question “What Happens to Action Research After the Master’s Degree?” With projects underway in their classrooms exploring middle school to high school transition, nuclear non-proliferation, and adolescent literacy, CARN liaison Mary McAteer and I (Shosh & McAteer, 2016) concluded, “Teacher action researchers like Tannous, Snyder, and Horn epitomize the power of action research after the master’s degree and of action research networks to engage others in joining their struggle and changing the world” (p. 18). We recognized, too, our responsibility as tutors to continue mentorship, where desired, even after formal degrees had been awarded and to encourage the use of action research network spaces to keep the dialogue going and the research moving forward. Seeing firsthand the continued power of action research to make a difference in the lives of teachers and the young people they served within the classrooms of three of our alumni after they had completed their action research master’s degrees led me to wonder how I might work with teachers throughout our community to promote student-centered, inquiry-based approaches to learning. The multi-district adoption of ‘The Leader in Me’ to support the academics, school culture, and leadership of K-8 children exploring the seven habits of highly effective people provided an invaluable opportunity for a dozen local teachers, our Master of Arts in Teaching Fellow, and me to find our collective voice and publish our own book on researching leadership. Like Vivian Gussin Paley, we would become teacher-authors, expanding the notion of expertise beyond the traditional academic. Our team would also serve as the host of one of more than a dozen sites around the world in advance of the first Global Assembly for Knowledge Democracy in the summer of 2017, making a call for and publishing a paper

Wrighting an academic life as a practitioner researcher 117 on paradigm shifts in education, empowered students, shared leadership, active learning, inquiry approaches, community-based accountability, participatory action research approaches, challenging stereotypes, going public with classroom research findings, and engaging in new educational partnerships (Shosh, 2019). More than a generation ago, Ernest Boyer of the Carnegie Foundation for the  Advancement of Teaching called for a new, engaged scholarship, stating, ‘The conclusion is clear. We need scholars who will not only skillfully explore the frontiers of knowledge, but also integrate ideas, connect thought to action, and inspire students’ (p. 77). When it comes to constructing professional knowledge, and, in my case within the realm of teacher education, the frontiers of knowledge generation are in the classroom with teachers, students, parents, school administrators, and other educational stakeholders. My role as an academic is to support those in the field who invite me to join them as co-inquirers, to research in partnership with them, as, together, we take new actions as a result of what we have learned through our action research cycles, inspiring our students at all levels to go on learning. While John Dewey notes the crucial importance of providing learners with educative experiences through which they evidence the desire to go on learning, he also identifies the challenges involved in breaking free of traditional ways of doing things, explaining, ‘…it is easier to walk in the paths that have been beaten than it is, after taking a new point of view, to work out what is practically involved in the new point of view’ (Dewey, 1938/1998, p. 30). My process of wrighting an academic life has been focused on working out through collaboration with fellow educators how best to engage young people in meaningful, inquiry-based learning. Doing so has generated far more questions than answers, but by posing our own questions, we have indeed discovered together important new ways of problem-solving and supporting our mutual learning. We have largely abandoned notions of contracting outside experts to solve our problems for us but have embraced dialogic, distributed learning as we have worked to create our own knowledge base on teaching and learning by and for teachers and learners (Shosh, 2017). As predominantly European-American, middle class educators, we have taken to heart Lisa Delpit’s reminder that: ‘Teachers seldom know much about the children’s lives and communities outside of the classroom and either don’t know how to or aren’t willing to connect instruction to issues that matter to students, their families, and their community’ (p. 41). As a result, we have worked to honor and validate our students’ lived experiences and look ahead to building even closer ties to families and communities as we continue to engage in new practitioner inquiries. We recognize that an over-reliance on standardized testing data, however potentially well-intentioned its use may be, has continued to marginalize poor and minority children and have committed ourselves to gathering data that documents student engagement as well as achievement and ­utilizes mediated forms of assessment. As Vygotsky reminds us, ‘what children can do with the assistance of others might be in some sense even more indicative of their mental development than what they can do alone’ (Vygotsky,

118  Joseph M. Shosh 1978, p. 85). Hence, we have worked to mediate our assessment practices and to broaden notions of what counts as academic achievement. I have been most fortunate indeed to wright this portion of my academic life with incredibly open-minded fellow teachers, learners, and scholars, which, rather than being mutually exclusive categories, are terms that have described us all at different phases of our work together. We recognize that in a contemporary world where democracy itself is under siege, our individual and collective voices  are needed more than ever to ensure that meaningful educational opportunities are available to all—not just the children of the elite and powerful, who will always be able to afford such opportunities outside of the public realm. Paulo Freire cautions that, ‘apart from inquiry, apart from the praxis, individuals cannot be truly human. Knowledge emerges only through invention and re-invention, through the restless, impatient continuing, hopeful inquiry human beings pursue in the world, with the world, and with each other’ (p. 72). Through our academic wrighting, we have reclaimed our voice as practitioners to ensure that the children we serve are truly educated and have the birthright to wright meaningful lives of their own.

References Anyon, J. (1980). Social class and the hidden curriculum of work. Journal of Education, 162(1), 67–92. Anyon, J. (1981). Social class and school knowledge. Curriculum Inquiry, 11(1), 3–42. Bakhtin, M. M. (1981). The dialogic imagination. (C. Emerson & M. Holquist, Trans.) Austin: University of Texas Press. Bhabha, H. K. (1994). The location of culture. New York: Routledge. Boyer, E. (1990). Scholarship reconsidered: Priorities of the professoriate. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Cochran-Smith, M., & Lytle, S. (2009). Inquiry as stance: Practitioner research for the next generation. New York: Teachers College Press. Comenius, J. A. (1957). In J. Piaget (Ed.), Selections. Paris: United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization. (Original work published 1649). Cuban, L. (2004). Whatever happened to open classrooms? Education Next, Spring. Delpit, L., & Dowdy, J. K. (2002). The skin that we speak: Thoughts on language and culture in the classroom. New York: New Press. Dewey, J. (1938/1998). Experience and education: 60th anniversary edition. Indianapolis, IN: Kappa Delta Pi. Ely, M. (2007). In-forming re-presentations. In D. J. Clandinin (Ed.), Handbook of narrative inquiry: Mapping a methodology (pp. 567–598). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Ely, M., Anzul, M., Friedman, T., Garner, D., & Steinmetz, A. M. (1991). Doing qualitative research: Circles within circles. London: Falmer Press. Ely, M., Vinz, R., Downing, M., & Anzul, M. (1997). On writing qualitative research: Living by words. London: Falmer Press. Fals Borda, O. (2006). The North-South convergence: A 30-year first-person assessment of PAR. Action Research, 4(3), 351–358. Freire, P. (1970/2000). Pedagogy of the oppressed: 30th anniversary edition. New York: Continuum.

Wrighting an academic life as a practitioner researcher 119 Mayher, J. S. (1989). Uncommon sense: Theoretical practice in language education. Portsmouth: Heinemann. Mayher, J. S. (2008). The legacy of English education at NYU. English Education, 40(4), 277–292. Ohio STEM Learning Network. (2016). Educators create connections at the Project: WRIGHT symposium. Available at https://www.osln.org/2016/09/ educators-create-connections-at-the-project-wright-symposium/. Rosenblatt, L. M. (1994). The reader, the text, the poem: The transactional theory of the literary work. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Rosenblatt, L. M. (1995/1933). Literature as exploration (5th ed.) New York: Modern Language Association. Santos, B. D. S. (2014). Epistemologies of the South: Justice against epistemicide. Boulder: Paradigm. Shosh, J. M. (2000). Much ado about negotiation. English Journal, 89(6), 72–79. Shosh, J. M. (2004). Making meaning in a dialogic discourse diary. English Journal, 94(1), 53–58. Shosh, J. M. (2005). Wrighting: Crafting critical literacy through drama. English Journal, 95(1), 69–74. Shosh, J. M. (2010). Constructing third space multiliteracies in the shadow of the blast furnace. Collaborative Action Research Network Bulletin, 16, 41–48. Shosh, J. M. (2012). How teachers define and enact reflective practice: It’s all in the action, Action Researcher in Education, 3(1), 104–119. Shosh, J. M. (2013). Re-articulating the values and virtues of Moravian action research. In J. McNiff (Ed.), Value and virtue in practice-based research (pp. 107–123). Poole: September Books. Shosh, J. M. (2016). Constructing Comenian third spaces for action research in graduate teacher education. In J. McNiff (Ed.), Values and virtues in higher education: Critical perspectives (pp. 141–154). New York: Taylor & Francis. Shosh, J. M. (2017). Toward the construction of a knowledge base on teaching and learning by and for teachers and learners. In L. L. Rowell, C. D. Bruce, J. M. Shosh, & M. M. Riel (Eds.), International handbook of action research. (pp. 647–665). New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Shosh, J. M. (2019). Democratizing knowledge of teaching and learning through student leadership projects. Educational Action Research, 27(3), 393–413. Shosh, J. M., & McAteer, M. (2016). The CARN/ARNA inaugural study day inquiry: What happens to action research after the master’s degree? Educational Action Research, 43(1), 4–20. Shosh, J. M., Rowell, L. L., Bruce, C. D., & Riel, M. M. (2017). The Action Research Network of the Americas (ARNA): Constructing a new network of North-South convergence. In L.L. Rowell, C. D. Bruce, J. M. Shosh, & M. M. Riel (Eds.), International handbook of action research (pp. 487–504). New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Shosh, J. M., & Wescoe, J. (2007). Making meaningful theater in the empty space. English Journal, 96(5), 42–47. Shosh, J. M., & Zales, C. R. (2005). Daring to teach writing authentically K-12 and beyond. English Journal, 95(2), 77–81. Shosh, J. M., & Zales, C. R. (2007). Graduate teacher education as inquiry: A case study of the Moravian M.Ed. model for professional development. Teaching Education, 18(3), 257–275. Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). Mind in society: The development of higher psychological processes. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

9

The cut Women and the practice of female genital mutilation in Kuria, Kenya Boke Joyce Wambura

Introduction In a remote village in Kenya, a girl sits staring, silent, unseeing, all her options exhausted. Weisiko (‘of outside’) has three times already run away from the circumciser’s razor, terrified at the memories of the pain and bleeding her two sisters experienced. Her turn next, no more places to hide. Last time she escaped to her aunt’s place in Tanzania, but was brought back and talked into the ordeal of female genital mutilation (FGM). The Cut. She prays it will not be violent as she fears. Weisiko is one of the millions of girls and women at risk every year of undergoing FGM. Research, such as that of the Government Equalities Office (2015), estimates that over 140 million girls and women have already undergone FGM worldwide. In the UK alone, 130,000 girls and women live with the consequences of FGM (Reid, 2014). In Africa, every five minutes a girl undergoes FGM, while in the Kuria region of Kenya, the site of my own research, it is estimated that 96% of women and girls have done so (Oloo et al., 2010) despite its illegal status in Kenyan law. I write this as a woman from Kenya who has first-hand understanding and experience of the practices of FGM in Kenya, having lived and worked there. Today, I am an activist, living and working in Kenya, who is actively challenging the established practices of FGM and the traditional prejudices that sustain it, with a view to contributing to the current global outcry, including those from the United Nations (2020), which calls for its eradication. This chapter is written from the insights developed during earlier doctoral studies at a UK University where my fieldwork enabled me to study the rites and practices of FGM in order to better understand how these might be challenged and eradicated (Wambura, 2018). My research focuses specifically on the forms of language used to sustain the practices; these become my theoretical frameworks. This focus, I trust, represents an original contribution to knowledge of the field: while FGM has been studied from religious, medical and human rights perspectives (World Health Organisation, 1997; Shell-Duncan and Hernlund, 2001), the issue of how language is used systematically and unthinkingly as a vehicle for its perpetuation does not yet seem to have been considered. Therefore, based on critical DOI: 10.4324/9781351053372-9

The cut 121 discourse analysis, this chapter, informed by my research, explores the language specifically used in Kuria female circumcision songs and examines how linguistic choices are employed in elevating the status of ‘the circumcised’ while positioning uncircumcised women as ‘alien’. The focus in the chapter is on how FGM is normalised and advanced within a particular sociocultural system and how this, in turn, can contribute to its global perpetuation. My hope is that, while the chapter may speak to all right-minded citizens, it will raise important questions, especially for those involved in academic studies, about how ritualised forms of language might contribute to and sustain cultural and social practices, and bring a new emphasis on the need to interrogate and challenge them. Its main goal is to challenge normative assumptions, suggest ways of stopping punitive practices and encourage direct action to stop FGM. My aim, both as an academic and an activist working in local settings, is to encourage those women who perpetuate normalised discourses (in this chapter, through the singing of ceremonial songs during circumcision rites) to interrogate those discourses and practices with a view to changing them, and therefore, it is hoped, eradicating the practices that the songs celebrate. A key theme explored in the chapter is the irony of the situation that, although all women are at risk of FGM, many of those same women become complicit in subjugating others by perpetuating outmoded customs through specific strategies, including, as explored here, linguistic exploitation and emotional blackmailing and brainwashing, including through the use of petty gifts and presents. In this chapter, I explore the potency of the language of those traditional FGM Songs used in circumcision rites and elsewhere as vehicles of persuasion and normalisation. Specifically, I focus on the forms of metaphors, nouns, adjectives and verbs used in constructing and maintaining unequal power relationships between circumcised and uncircumcised women, thus reinforcing the continuation of the practice. The relevance of the chapter for the theme of how ‘the academic’ may be represented lies in a discussion of how older women who are accepted as the knowers of practices use their knowledge to influence and persuade young girls to undergo FGM. I extend the discussion by drawing parallels between the status of specific power-constituted forms of knowledge across the two societies in which my research is located, that is, the status of the knowledge of local women, and that of traditionalist forms of knowledge in ‘the Academy’. I argue that the form of knowledge most respected in Kuria society, and as representative of countless other societies around the world, is equivalent in status to the form of knowledge most respected in scholarly societies. The power of circumcision songs rests in the hidden messages of status-oriented power in the same way as in those of policy and research documents. Thus the knowledge of local ‘knowledgeable’ women can be seen as equivalent to traditional views of ‘the academic’ as a legitimised form of knowledge and knower. However, a traditionalist social-scientific approach is not the form of methodology I choose for my own studies. I opt instead for more person-centred forms, including action research, where the knowledge of local people is valued as much as that of ‘academic experts’. The arguments presented in this chapter

122  Boke Joyce Wambura are informed by the same value base, including how research can be used to solve social problems and create awareness of inequality issues in African rural settings, including my own, and how this can be developed in other contexts; in my view, the humanistic values of person-centred forms of research do not have any geographical or mental boundaries. The politically oriented aims of my research are to communicate to as wide an audience as possible the idea that all citizens should see themselves and be seen as legitimate knowers: in the case of this chapter, this view applies to those perpetrators and victims of FGM who refuse to accept normative understandings and practices and be able to critique, challenge and change their thinking and discourses and, with hope, their circumstances. One way of achieving this is through what is seen as ‘academic research’, that is, the kind of research approved by the Academy. As part of my doctoral research, in 2014–2015, I participated in FGM ceremonies as an observer: my aim then was to use what I saw and learned to inform and support my own emerging activism. Out of that experience, and from my own childhood experiences, I have committed to promoting the rights of women in the community I was researching. Since then, in partnership with three local women, I have been conducting awareness campaigns and challenging women to question their subordinate position and refuse to accept normative assumptions. However, one of the challenges I have faced is access to resources, and this is why this chapter and book will be invaluable to the local communities in Kenya and to research at international levels as a means of challenging regressive practices and finding research-based ways that might contribute to positive change. However, a key factor in this commitment lies in how the institution of ‘the Academy’ might constitute a public sphere that provides an inclusional space for ongoing dialogue among concerned and committed participants. One of the ongoing discourses in the academic sector concerns the values base of gender identity; that is, what is seen as the ‘right’ way to be a woman or man. This matter of ‘being’ a woman or man has recently received some discussion: some current views suggest that, rather than being viewed as a biological given, what counts as ‘woman’ or ‘man’ should be seen as a social construct (Sunderland, 2004; Connell, 2021). In the particular instance of Kuria, the local setting for my research, one is not considered a woman by being born female but by undergoing FGM. Such questions then become the direct province of studies such as mine, that is, the study of the nature of existing knowledges while suggesting different forms and what it might take to legitimise them. Now I consider some of the practical realities of FGM and how local practices and discourses, captured in song, can contribute to its perpetuation. Such descriptions show just how hard it can be to change established attitudes and practices.

Female genital mutilation Historically, the public discourses of FGM have been related to the beliefs and traditions of practising communities. The main reasons for its perpetuation have been associated with cultural identity and the need to belong. However, a more

The cut 123 critical, discursive approach considers how the ideologies about and around the practice have been legitimated through discourses, that is, language in use (Fairclough, 2001). The term ‘FGM’ tends to be used interchangeably with ‘female circumcision’. However, although ‘Female Genital Mutilation’ (FGM) is the term recognised by the World Health Organisation (2008), the Kuria people of Kenya use the term ‘Female Circumcision’ (literally abasagane esaro/ esaro yabasagane). The World Health Organisation has defined FGM as the partial or total removal of the female genitalia or the infliction of other injury on the female genitals for cultural or other non-medical reasons (World Health Organisation, 1997; Momoh, 2005). The WHO further described FGM as a violation both of general human rights and of the specific rights of girls and women (World Health Organisation, 2008), and calls upon communities and cultures that practise FGM to end it. However, despite the efforts by the WHO, many communities that practise FGM still hold firm to their beliefs and practices, each giving a variety of reasons for doing so. A significant aspect of their continued commitment for doing so is that most see the understanding of FGM as embedded within the top-down view of knowledge as it is firmly established in the West: it therefore appears alien to their own indigenous, non-Eurocentric cultures that value the shared practical knowledge of locals. To give a brief overview of the outcomes of FGM, here is an outline of what its practices can involve. They usually range from washing of the clitoris for the purpose of cleansing it, light pricking of the clitoris, cutting the small tip of the hood of the clitoris to cutting the main parts of the female genitalia and sewing the opening, leaving a small opening for passing urine and menstruation. WHO (2008) has classified these surgeries into four main types: 1 Type I: partial or total removal of the clitoris and/the prepuce (clitoridectomy). 2 Type II: partial or total removal of the clitoris and labia minora, with or without excision of the labia majora (excision). 3 Type III: narrowing of the vaginal orifice and creation of the covering seal by cutting and appositioning the labia minora and/or labia majora with or without excision of the clitoris (infibulation). 4 Type IV: all other harmful procedures to the female genitalia for non-­medical purposes, such as, pricking, piercing, incising, scraping and cauterisation. Among the Kuria, Type II (partial or total removal of the clitoris and labia minora) is the form most commonly practised. The side effects vary depending on the level of the operation. These effects can be short or long term. At the time of the operation, the greatest risks are haemorrhage and shock (Shell-Duncan and Hernlund, 2001); these claim an unknown number of victims with deaths often going unreported. Those who survive usually experience acute or chronic disorders including clitoral cysts, labia adhesions, recurrent urinary tract infections, renal scarring and kidney dysfunction, sterility and, as per the original intention, the long-lasting loss of

124  Boke Joyce Wambura sexual feeling. Women are left with scars, numbness and loss of sensation in their sexual organs as well as with an abiding sense of shame and embarrassment (Gollaher, 2000). The distribution and prevalence of FGM vary across continents. Approximately 132–140 million women have experienced FGM worldwide (Shell-Duncan and Hernlund, 2001; Momoh 2005; Wilson, 2013; Reid, 2014). In the UK, as noted earlier, 130,000 girls and women live with the consequences of FGM, while 60,000 are at risk of its most severe forms (Beckford and Manning, 2016). FGM is also practised in Europe, America and Australia, mostly among immigrant communities, refugees and asylum seekers (Government Equalities Office, 2015). In Africa, FGM is established in 28 countries with the prevalence ranging between 12% and 100%. In 17 of those countries, prevalence stands at over 50% (Momoh, 2005). The origins of the culture of circumcision among the Kuria people is still a mystery, just as is the origin of the practice internationally. Nobody quite knows when it started; they ‘… were born and found it ongoing, it was practised by our great grandparents and passed on to us by our fathers; we will pass it to our children and them to their children’ (Rioba, 2014). At the same time, Mokaya (2012) has argued that Bantu language speakers might have carried the practice from their origins in Misiri (Egypt): this might explain why the Bantu circumcise their girls while Nilotes from neighbouring tribes do not. My research is located within Kuria region, a key aspect of whose ceremonies is the prominence of women. Women are the main participants, although on critical examination, the ones who benefit least. Women prepare the girls for the cut by inviting relatives and friends, preparing the meals, escorting the girls to the cutting grounds and back and by nursing them and preparing them to ‘come out’. It is the women who sing FGM songs which encourage girls to undergo the cut. These traditions call for a critical questioning and challenge. Such questioning reveals that the ritual is a key element of Kuria people’s culture. Ruel (1997) notes that it marks a person’s progress through life. The pain is meant to prepare a woman for her difficult adulthood responsibilities such as bearing children and giving birth, establishing a family and becoming a parent. Consequently, in Kuria, a girl who is not circumcised is not allowed to become pregnant. ‘Esaro gives a person adult status and the right to bear children which come with marriage ceremonies,’ says Ruel (1997: 26). Further, because the emphasis among the Kuria people is on establishing a family, marriage becomes a rite that follows close after initiation irrespective of the age of the girl; and because marriage and the continuation of family is important, and everyone is expected to have a family, FGM therefore becomes inevitable and virtually compulsory since a girl who has not undergone circumcision will not be allowed to marry. ‘FGM among the Kuria people marks the marriageability of women, as well as the right to bear a name and a home and being socialized properly into acceptable “womanhood”’ (Ruel, 1997: 27). Another powerful reason for the continuation of FGM in Kuria is the belief that cutting the clitoris reduces immorality among girls and preserves their

The cut 125 sexual purity (until marriage) by reducing the urge for sex. Oloo et al. (2010: 15) argue that FGM is carried out so that women will ‘… stay for longer periods without sex while their husbands are out to graze the animals or raid from the neighbouring communities…’. Women’s sexual desires are curtailed to ensure they are faithful wives, and that girls will maintain good morals. FGM is also practised for economic gain. Parents are keen to have their daughters undergo FGM to make them marriageable and increase their dowry prospects. A girl who has been cut is able to attract a higher bride price for her father, hence her economic value increases. Further, FGM identifies a person as a true Kuria, which importantly separates them from their Luo neighbours who do not practise FGM (Wambura, 2015). Circumcision provides a licence to participate in the affairs of the community: for instance, one cannot run for an elective position unless they are circumcised. FGM is therefore considered necessary for a girl to be seen as a responsible member of society. FGM is also conducted for social acceptance. Girls opt to bear the pain rather than suffer daily ridicule from their friends and peers. Oloo et al. (2010) report that ridicule and insults from their peers can prove to be impossible to bear, pressuring most girls to go for the cut. Any uncircumcised girl faces stigmatisation, labelling and discrimination. She is refused permission to perform some everyday duties: for instance, she is barred from picking vegetables from her neighbour’s garden because, if she did, the vegetables will wilt and dry up. During birth, if the baby’s head (especially with reference to a baby boy) touches the clitoris while the uncircumcised woman is giving birth, the baby will die. Some of these myths and superstitious beliefs put pressure on the girls till they succumb to the cut. These kinds of pressure need to be demystified, critiqued and challenged and different forms of knowledge accepted. Of special interest for my research is the complicit nature of circumcision songs.

Song and ideology Among the Kuria, circumcision songs are used for entertainment during FGM seasons and are also seen as a form of heritage, the preservation of beliefs, values and customs. They are passed on from one generation to the next and carry messages about the community, their heroes, beliefs and ways of life. They contain messages that encourage initiates to be brave when undergoing circumcision (Oloo et al., 2010). The songs portray circumcised and uncircumcised women in contrastive ways. Circumcised women are cast as strong, powerful, brave and physically beautiful while the uncircumcised are presented as weak, cowardly, ugly and worthless. This clear categorisation and unmistakable identity construction of the two groups makes it easy to allocate unequal social identities. The vivid presentation of the songs creates unforgettable pictures in the minds of the audience, including young children, and can play a major role in their socialisation. Girls grow up looking forward to the day they will undergo FGM in order to live up to the image described in the songs. The legitimation achieved through repetition of the songs in every circumcision season and ceremony can

126  Boke Joyce Wambura lead to an unconscious internalisation of the existing FGM ideology. The Kuria people do not believe that FGM has any negative effects. They feel that it has only positive effects because during the ceremony people are happy and in a celebratory mood and also because circumcision will ensure that their women become ‘complete, marriageable and not promiscuous’ (Rioba, 2014). When asked about cases where girls die from bleeding (see Wambura, 2016), they state that it can only happen because of curses cast following something that the girl or her family did, or did not do correctly. This is where critique is most needed. The meaning of such myths needs to be uncovered and challenged through a critical analysis of the language used in the songs; and from the perspective presented here, it is the role of the academic to do this most effectively through the means of critical discourse analytical approach (CDA). Such an approach can provide guidance about how to make visible the hidden messages embedded in the songs and to reveal what may not always be seen from an everyday non-academic perspective. It can stand as a form of analysis that seeks to explain how unequal power relationships can be established, reproduced and maintained in social and political contexts (Fairclough, 2015). It also clarifies elements of the marginalisation, exclusion and domination of some people by others through ideological processes (Fairclough, 2010) and the effect this can have on social relationships. Baxter (2010) argues that CDA uncovers visible as well as hidden inequalities in social relationships by examining ways in which language works in specific discourses to perpetuate these inequalities. Fairclough (1992) provides a critical discourse analytical framework which involves the analysis of texts (including songs), analysis of the production, distribution, consumption and analysis of social processes. In textual analysis, the focus is on linguistic items – such as vocabulary (lexical items, metaphors) and how social actors have been represented. These linguistic items can act as cues and traces in the identification and interpretation of discourses (Fairclough, 1992, 2001; Sunderland, 2004) that promote the unequal power structures and the hierarchical positioning of members of the social group in question; so they need to be viewed and interpreted in the context in which they are used. The cues may be seen as the surface manifestations of the underlying beliefs, ideologies and structures of the language of the culture. Further, an analysis of social processes will entail a critical look at the existing social structures, beliefs and customs of a particular social group and how these may be manifested in language. A critical discourse analysis of the Kuria FGM songs, for instance, reveals certain patterns; it shows a significant difference between how circumcised and uncircumcised women are socially constructed. It also shows the foregrounding of certain ideologies: for instance, that circumcised women are strong and in control, and that uncircumcised women are weak and worthless. Table 9.1 lists a selection of metaphors (source domains), and the category of women they apply to (target domain), while Table 9.2 summarises the nouns, verbs and adjectives identified in the Kuria FGM songs. It is evident from Tables 9.1 and 9.2 that unequal patterns exist on a wide scale.

The cut 127 Table 9.1  Metaphors in the female circumcision songs, and the women category they refer to

Metaphors

Circumcised woman

Uncircumcised woman

She is: Rock Soda/solar Bowl/basket Earrings Tree/chicken

She is: Dog

These metaphors are some of the ways in which uncircumcised women are positioned as different and lesser from those who have been circumcised. From Table 9.1, the metaphors identified in the songs and referring to circumcised and uncircumcised women present a binary contrastive categorisation of women. Circumcised women are positioned highly while uncircumcised women are degraded. The rock metaphor, for example, is the most popular metaphor used when describing circumcised women. The Kuria people identify different types of rocks and stones depending on their size and use. The one used to scrub feet is named a stone (irisambuini), whereas the one used to grind millet is a rock Table 9.2  Examples of linguistic items used in the FGM songs Circumcised woman Attributive nouns She is: Server Water fetcher Healer Adjectives She is: Generous Her beauty lies in her: Teeth Necklaces Beads Beautiful hair Earrings Verbs She: Spreads Serves Gives birth Entices

Uncircumcised woman Attributive nouns She is: Uncircumcised

Verbs She: Embarrasses

128  Boke Joyce Wambura (orogena). The one used to air and dry grains is a rock (orotare). The rock metaphor in the songs is derived from the grinding stone which, according to Kuria mythology, does not wear out in spite of repeated usage, nor does it age. A small rock is called akagena. A normal size rock is irigena while a big one is ogogena. The word egetare, derived from the airing rock, is used in a negative way and has negative connotations, denoting ‘non-productive’. Whenever used for a woman it means she is barren. Egetare literally means a large wide rock seated in a wide area which therefore makes the area unfit for crop production. So, two types of rock are referred to in the songs: akagena (small rock) and irigena (normal rock). Akagena (small rock) is used for a girl who is being prepared for circumcision; and is therefore common in the songs performed during preparation and the day before circumcision. Once she is circumcised, she becomes a rock (irigena). The word ‘rock’ is normally used with reference to a man: a firstborn son is described as the ‘rock of the family’ and any man who has been successful is also described as a ‘rock’. Therefore, once circumcised, the woman becomes a rock. She becomes dependable (one of the characteristics ideologically associated with men) by virtue of the fact that she has borne the pain. She becomes a proper member of society by being initiated into womanhood. She can now perform the duties denied to those who have not undergone FGM. She can bear children and most importantly can be married at any time. With FGM comes an elevation of a woman’s low status to a higher status. This therefore positions circumcised women at a higher level of power than those who are not. They sing that ‘Our sons dance slowly; She has become a rock’; Our child has become … She has become a woman like others; She has become a rock.’ Other popular metaphors are soda and solar. These metaphors are used together with reference to circumcised women, and carry connotations relating to food and attraction. The songs argue that before circumcision the woman cannot be ‘eaten’ (literally to mean she is not allowed to give in to sexual relations) but once circumcised, she has a right to ‘be taken’ like a soda. She is now sweet for men to drink from her ‘source’. This means that with FGM, a girl is free to engage sexually with any man who wishes to seek her hand in marriage in the same way that a soda is free for anyone who can afford it. This contradicts the assumption that FGM enhances virginity and sexual purity, as stated in most FGM literature (see, for example, Oloo et al., 2010). On the other hand, the solar metaphor is used to mean she can illuminate and attract men towards herself. Solar panels, a recent phenomenon in Kuria, are very expensive but of great value, compared to the usual cloth lamp (ekoroboi) or tin lamp (etara) whose light is not as bright as that of a solar-charged battery. The use of the solar metaphor for circumcised women therefore shows their value compared to the uncircumcised, whose use is limited. Circumcised women are ideologically perceived to be a bright light that  can be seen from a distance and which attracts many suitors, just as a bright light attracts many insects. The metaphor also suggests that as solar lights last longer, the women will perpetuate the continuity of the family line

The cut 129 of the men who will marry them, thus underpinning the value of circumcised women. These metaphors are used only with reference to circumcised women; those who are not circumcised lack these qualities. It is only after circumcision that one becomes sweet and attractive. This is used to legitimise the circumcision ideology and to normalise it. The songs include phrases such as: ‘Our child has become has become a woman like others; She has become a soda; she has become a solar …’ As well as being soda and solar, circumcised women have also been constructed as earrings, accessories with which women adorn themselves to enhance their beauty. The earrings metaphor is used with reference to circumcised women only. The women are said to be beautiful and compared to earrings. The context within which the metaphor is used suggests that they are beautiful and attractive to the extent of making men act in ‘manly’ ways to get these ‘earrings’. This implies that those who have not undergone FGM are not beautiful or attractive, so they cannot attract men or be married. Performers sing songs that draw analogies such as ‘Our women are like earrings’, ‘Those that we see and run fast’, ‘We go to get cattle from our enemies’ and ‘We get the enemies’ cattle by force and bring them home’. Through these metaphors, women have been objectified and have been compared to objects of consumption and beauty. These positions go unquestioned and uncritiqued; they are celebrated and viewed positively. The common assumption is that a woman is only useful when she has material value, assessed by the yardstick of beauty and available only after FGM. This representation of what counts as a ‘proper’ woman has great social impact on growing girls. Young listeners internalise these values and behaviours and take them as legitimated knowledge. Girls grow up assuming that it is their responsibility to remain beautiful in order to attract men. This makes FGM inevitable since is it ideologically constructed as the only way through which Kuria women can become beautiful. Bomb and ship metaphors are also used with reference to circumcised women. Bombs are destructive and damaging while a ship can withstand stormy waters. In Kuria, these two metaphors are normally used in relation to men. They show men’s strength and ability to withstand any difficulties, particularly when facing enemies in war and during clashes with other tribes. In this case, however, they refer to a woman, a circumcised woman, one who has given birth and has had children. Such a woman has acquired status and is perceived to be as strong as a man. She is compared to a bomb that hit Machage’s (a former Kuria Member of Parliament who had the tallest building in the district) building and destroyed it. This shows that a woman who has withstood FGM has the ability to exercise her power and is able also to act destructively. This in turn means that women who have not undergone FGM cannot perform such male-like acts since they are powerless. The songs include metaphors such as: ‘Mother what can I compare you to? What can I compare you to eeee ee?’, and go on to say, ‘You are like a ship a bomb; The one that sounded in the skies, ee ee in the skies; The one that hit Machage’s tall building ee ee Machage’s tall building’.

130  Boke Joyce Wambura Such constructions underpin the value attached to motherhood, albeit that this is allowed only after FGM, thus making female circumcision necessary. The tree and chicken metaphors are used in the songs to emphasise the expectations of a Kuria woman to give birth unrestrictedly. She is told to give birth like a tree which has taken deep root near a source of water and which bears fruit from season to season. This emphasises the importance of motherhood among the Kuria. A Kuria home with many children is considered rich, the reason for why the woman is encouraged to keep giving birth in order to propagate her husband’s family line and make him rich. The woman is also cautioned to guard her children as a chicken does her chicks. This reiterates the role of a woman as a carer and nurturer. Once a baby is born, it is the sole responsibility of the mother to ensure they grow up to be a respectable human being. Only women who have undergone FGM are allowed to give birth and consequently care for children. If anyone who has not been circumcised becomes pregnant, it is treated as a curse and she is ostracised. This custom reaffirms the role of FGM in what is ideologically perceived to be a form of empowerment for Kuria women. The songs say: ‘Spread uncle’s wife, spread, give birth and spread, Spread, give birth and spread like a tree that has roots deep down; Give birth like a chicken gives birth and guards. The metaphors used to describe circumcised women are all positive, while negative metaphors are associated with uncircumcised women. The dog metaphor, for instance, is used only with reference to uncircumcised women. The word ‘dog’ is an insult when used to refer to a human being. When a person is called a dog, it is demeaning and shows he/she is worthless and non-human. He/she is an unidentified person who can be kicked and can wander anywhere, just as dogs do. In Kuria, dogs are not treated as pets. They are wild animals, ferocious and dangerous. In most cases, they fend for themselves by hunting, and when they die, they are not accorded any burial but just thrown into the bush to rot and be forgotten. Being compared to a dog, the uncircumcised girl has been animalised and devalued. No one respects her or values her. This is why the girl being prepared for circumcision asks for an orogoye (sisal cane) to ‘beat the night away’ so that she can quickly be circumcised and rid of the state that has made her comparable to a dog. She comments that ‘The one with dry legs (the cock) please crow; So I can be taken off this bad uncircumcised state; The state that has barred me from being greeted nyamuita (respectable woman); The state that has made me be called a dog.’ Metaphors do ideological work (Koller, 2004) and by using such a demeaning reference as dog to refer to the uncircumcised girls, the goal of alienating and stigmatising the uncircumcised is achieved, hence putting pressure on them to undergo FGM in order to be accepted: this celebration of FGM also contributes to legitimating their suppression and subordination. In the songs, FGM is presented in two main ways: as the most important, normal and natural thing to go through, and as an easy task to undertake. The songs contribute to the normalisation and trivialisation of the FGM pain, which serves to make it expectable and acceptable among those who have not gone

The cut 131 through it. The words used to describe the vitality of the cut show the role of FGM in identity formation. Those who go through it are described as belonging to the community while the ones who don’t or who do not undergo it properly are said to belong to the Luo community (the Luo do not circumcise girls). This stripping off of one’s identity as a Kuria woman serves to instil fear of loss of one’s name and belonging among one’s people, thus compelling young girls to give in. They warn: ‘If you embarrass us in broad daylight, Go and be circumcised in Luo land: With those with circumcised teeth, feet and finger nails. If you embarrass us go that way – Go to the uncircumcised the Luo’. The words prick, pick and touch, which carry connotations of less pain, are used to refer to the act of FGM instead of cut which conjures images of more pain. This choice of verbs trivialising the act is made purposely, to make FGM sound an easy option and to lessen the effects of the act. This makes the candidate feel that it is not too bad after all if it is just a prick, while in actual fact, the female genitalia are cut and not just touched as stated in the song. In this case, language is used to coat reality with lies in order to persuade listeners to accept intended messages and consequently perpetuate intended ideologies. The following song extract contains verbs used for FGM. The singers say: ‘She pricks like a beauty prick; If she is picking, let her pick.’ They also add that ‘when you bear it, it is nothing; it is as easy as grinding millet or stirring porridge’. They repeat that it does not take long; it is just two seconds, ‘the circumciser bends just twice and gets up’. Using verbs that portray everyday actions such as grinding and stirring, which the girls are used to and which they find easy and enjoyable, is a discursive strategy employed by older women to clear doubts of pain and assure the girls that it is not anything unusual, but just like any other everyday activities. Similar messages are expressed where the cutting act is described as an action of beautifying a girl, hence reinforcing the need for a woman to be beautiful and the myth that circumcised women become beautiful through FGM. ‘Eee yee she pricks like a beauty prick,’ they sing: ‘Daughter of my sister sit still, sit still – Ee twice she will touch and get up ee.’ In summary, from the lexical choices and metaphors, it is clear that FGM is hailed as worthwhile and mandatory, and the pain in it trivialised. The songs chosen contain carefully selected verbs such as ‘prick’, ‘pick’, ‘touch’ and ‘grind’ instead of the verb ‘cut’, which is the correct verb for the FGM action. In this way, older women deliberately elevate FGM so that girls come to believe that it is easy and quickly undertaken and not painful at all. Lexical items used for uncircumcised women are negative in tone and carry negative connotations with the aim of denigrating uncircumcised women and emphasising the need for FGM. Such words as one who cries, embarrasses, is a dog, coward, are used to refer to uncircumcised women. Circumcised women are positioned as powerful in contrast to the uncircumcised by being constructed as ‘rock’, ‘soda’, ‘solar’, ‘bomb’ and ‘ship’ because they have undergone the cut and are therefore considered proper women. These positions are restated and confirmed repeatedly in the songs used every season, every two years. They have become part and parcel of the Kuria

132  Boke Joyce Wambura people and what counts for them as common knowledge. The songs succeed in perpetuating, legitimating and reinforcing existing knowledge about FGM.

However … However, this kind of compliant stance can be challenged by considering how the concept of ‘the academic’ might be understood as encouraging critical awareness that does not unquestioningly accept given ideologies, and that encourages the development of a critical mind that refuses to take anything at face value. Such a view of the academic encourages a culture that challenges existing social structures both in the academic and social spheres. This is a culture that demolishes hierarchies built on superstition and overgeneralisation. Thus, by extension to contexts such as those discussed in contexts such as the Kuria, the ‘academic’ accepts the responsibility for questioning the validity and value of FGM. However, linkage of ‘the academic’ with such humanitarian-oriented knowledge is not widely established in the public domain: academic theorists have not done enough to sensitize the public about the value of questioning taken-­forgranted-discourses. Thus, by default, established views of ‘the academic’ have contributed to the perpetuation of FGM.

Conclusion From my personal perspective, now as a writer-activist, I also want to show how the traditions of FGM can create hierarchies and inequality among members of Kuria society, hence contributing to the perpetuation of social inequality and FGM practices. This will, I hope, lead to the promotion of greater equality between women, and the subversion of existing power imbalances and an end to FGM, thereby enhancing women’s position in local and international society and ensuring full recognition of equality and rights. Thus, ‘the academic’ might ultimately be seen as a form of knowledge with the potential for challenging existing underlying structures and advocating for the values of freedom and human rights. I would like to suggest that equality campaigns encourage people to develop new attitudes towards women and men’s roles and social expectations. Gender equality laws should be emphasised and followed rather than traditional gender beliefs. Once equality is achieved in the domestic sphere and at the local village level, equity attitudes stand a better chance of spreading to national, regional and global levels and to encouraging social change. I also suggest that anti-FGM bodies explicitly discuss the dangers of FGM. It is only when they are made explicit that such discourses can be challenged and resisted as an initial step towards change. There is need for more research activities that make use of other approaches. Any research towards this course in the Kenyan and African context will be useful. This chapter also suggests a linguistic perspective in the development of interventions aimed at achieving a culture of social equality in the wider Kenyan

The cut 133 context. This can be achieved through the dissemination of actions that promote gender equality such as publicity initiatives, policies and programmes aimed at improving equality positions in Kenya. There is need for the development of a more nationalised policy on gender, and changes in gender representations in school books, media and other avenues. Finally, I would like to emphasise the need for a change in everyday discourses. Activists could create anti-FGM songs which will be disseminated to the local people through mass media outlets such as radio and TV. The messages in the songs, if heard regularly, will be internalised and the listeners may start to question the truth in the FGM songs once they are exposed to a discourse that challenges the now deeply ingrained beliefs circulated through FGM songs. While the challenge ahead may seem hard, it can be achieved, for the benefit of millions of women worldwide.

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134  Boke Joyce Wambura Ruel, M. (1997) Belief, Ritual and the Securing of Life: Reflexive Essays on a Bantu Religion. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Shell-Duncan, B. and Hernlund, H. (2001) Female Genital ‘Circumcision’ in Africa. London: Lynne Reinner Publishers. Sunderland, J. (2004) Gendered Discourses. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Wambura, J. (2015) ‘The Shields and the earrings: Challenging female genital mutilation (FGM) practices in Kenya through critical linguistic analysis.’ Paper presented at the British Association for Applied Linguistics (BAAL) conference. Aston University. Birmingham. UK. Wambura, J. (2016) ‘Gendered discourses in female circumcision songs in Kuria, Kenya.’ Paper presented at the Conference of the Student Organisation of Linguistics in Europe (conSOLE XXIV), York St John University. York. Wambura, J. (2018) ‘Earrings and Shields: Metaphor and Gendered Discourses in Female Genital Mutilation Songs in Kuria, Kenya’. Gender and Language, 12 (1), pp 87–113. Wilson, A. (2013) How methods used to eliminate foot binding in China can be employed to eradicate female genital mutilation. Journal of Gender Studies, 22 (1), pp 17–37. World Health Organisation. (1997) Eliminating female genital mutilation. An interagency statement by OCHR, UNAIDS, UNDP, UNECA, UNESCO, UNFPA, UNHCR, UNICEF, UNIFEM and WHO. Available at: http://apps.who.int/ iris/bitstream/handle/10665/43839/9789241596442_eng.pdf;jsessionid= CA46363F461D7660CF25F4FAC3D2E55E?sequence=1 or at https://www. who.int/reproductivehealth/publications/fgm/9789241596442/en/ [accessed on 2 October 2021]. World Health Organisation. (2008) Female Genital Mutilation. Draft from WHO Technical Working Group Meeting on Female Genital Mutilation. Geneva: WHO. United Nations. (2020) International Day of Zero Tolerance for Female Genital Mutilation, 6 February. Available at: https://www.un.org/en/observances/femalegenital-mutilation-day [accessed 2 October 2021].

10 Developing teacher professionalism in an era of neo-liberalism Hilde Hiim

Introduction In Scandinavia, teachers have traditionally been regarded as academics, that is, professionals who are involved in advanced and critically oriented forms of learning and scholarship. They also have the social and professional mandate to help future generations develop the democratic values of individual and social freedom and responsibility. In this chapter, I will raise questions about whether this mandate and the realisation of the values involved might offer an oppositional stance to the dominant neo-liberal ideology currently permeating education. I will also present and further develop the conceptual framework that colleagues and I have developed for the analysis of teaching and learning in Norwegian and Danish teacher education (Hiim, 2017; Hiim and Hippe, 2006). The aim of the framework is to strengthen teachers’ ability to analyse, criticise and develop educationally oriented teaching and learning processes, as well as an ability to criticise educational ideologies. I will argue that a one-sided neo-liberal educational ideology, as is currently the case in most western societies, with its roots in a rationalist conception of knowledge can make it difficult for teachers to achieve their social and democratic responsibilities as professionals in their everyday work. I will further argue that the analysis and critique of different theories of knowledge, related to p ­ ractical teaching, should be a basic part of teacher professionalism. Teachers need to develop such insights into ideas about what knowledge is, and appreciate how these ideas affect their understanding of education and teaching in order to meet today’s ideological challenges. The reasons for this approach are offered here.

A critically oriented model of teacher professionalism Neo-liberal approaches to education have become increasingly dominant in Norway and in other European countries over recent decades. Education is now widely seen as a standardised and objectively measured process, governed and controlled by political, bureaucratic and economic-oriented actors (Bottery, 2006; Davies and Bansel, 2007). Consequently, the role of the teacher has been greatly reduced from that of a free and responsible professional to that of a DOI: 10.4324/9781351053372-10

136  Hilde Hiim functionary with responsibility for implementing and accounting for processes dictated and controlled from above. Most teachers would probably experience this development as deliberately planned and imposed to the extent that it becomes unavoidable. It would therefore seem more important than ever that teachers should have the conceptual tools to criticise this now-prevalent one-sided ideology of education, and to strengthen their independent and collective professionalism by posing a counter-challenge in the form of a critically oriented model of professionalism. In this chapter, I investigate how such a model can be supported in teacher education through a focus on theories of knowledge and experience combined with the analysis and development of practical teaching. I also present a particular theory of teaching as a potential conceptual framework that might strengthen teachers’ capacity for critical judgment and help them develop alternatives to the current one-sided neo-liberal ideology and forms of practice (Hiim 2010, 2016; Hiim and Hippe, 2006). The framework is inspired by critical and pragmatic approaches to theories of knowledge, and is structured around six interdependent concepts that may be seen as constituting the main aspects of practical teaching. These concepts are visualised in the model presented in Figure 10.1 that aims to give teachers a means to: • • •

Analyse and criticise practically and educationally oriented teaching and learning processes; Analyse and understand the relationship between concepts of knowledge and concepts of education, teaching and learning; Develop and do research on their practice in cooperation with pupils and colleagues.

This model is used widely in Norwegian and Danish teacher education. The aim of this chapter is to investigate and discuss the model in light of the challenges of the now-dominant neo-liberal form of education. I also wish to discuss the related concept of didactics; this is a core educational concept in Scandinavia and in German-speaking countries, though not necessarily with the same prosaic meaning as in English-speaking countries. I will first show how the model has grown out of discussions in Scandinavian and German-speaking countries about the main aims and elements of teaching. I present some definitions of didactics to show what the concept means in these countries and why it is regarded as a key concept in teacher education. I will then present ideas about how the six categories of the model can work together as a means of analysing, reflecting on and developing teacher work. Then follows an investigation and discussion about possible connections between different conceptualisations of knowledge and different understandings of the aims and elements of teaching, related to the model. I will end with a discussion about how a systematic, critical analysis of teaching, related to systematic development and action research projects, can strengthen the independent individual and collective professionalism of experienced and student teachers. A main

Developing teacher professionalism in an era of neo-liberalism 137

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Figure 10.1  A model of didactic relations. Source:  Hiim and Hippe (1989), after Bjørndal og Lieberg (1978).

argument throughout is that critical teacher professionalism should be seen as an important counter-balance to the dominant one-sided neo-liberal educational ideology. First, I consider the concept of didactics and the kinds of relationships involved.

The concept of didactics and didactic relationships In most English-speaking countries, ‘didactics’ is usually taken to mean something close to ‘instruction’ or ‘lecturing’, implying that the teacher is the one who knows while the learner does not. The situation is different in Scandinavia and in German-speaking countries where didactics is taken to mean ‘theories about teaching and learning’ or even simply ‘teaching’ (Engelsen, 2006; Gundem, 1998; Jangk and Meyer, 1997). The concept has been and still is regarded as very important because it focuses directly on teachers’ work; but this means that different understandings and definitions of the concept exist, depending on how different people think about what education and teaching is and should be.

138  Hilde Hiim Earlier versions of didactics in Scandinavian contexts worked on the assumption that a main emphasis should be on subject matter and content. The main task of the teacher was to transmit the cultural heritage, consisting of subject matter aimed at contributing to each pupil’s overall development; this included cultural, scientific and social education (generally termed ‘Bildung’, a term now in common usage also in English-speaking countries). An important aspect of education was seen as making values such as freedom of thought and social responsibility available for new generations (Gundem, 1998; Klafki, 1971). The teacher was seen as an academic whose main task was to educate new generations, using resources that were seen as the best of the then educational tradition. From the 1970s onwards, this rather content-centred view of education and teaching was widely criticised for focusing too narrowly on subject matter and on the teacher, and too little on pupils’ learning. It was felt that a one-sided emphasis on specific content might contribute to a lack of sensitivity or critique about pupils’ different backgrounds and cultural traditions. It was further argued that education, teaching and learning should be understood in terms of six main categories, as follows: 1 First is the pupils’ learning resources, i.e. the psychological, physical, social, cultural and subject-related qualities that each pupil brings to the learning-­ teaching situation. 2 Second are framework conditions: these refer to structural, organisational, physical, economic or other factors in the situation that can facilitate or prevent teaching and learning. Examples of framework conditions that teachers must attend to are formal curriculum frameworks and other regulations, timetables and access to teaching and learning materials. 3 Third, aims and goals refer to the purpose of teaching and what pupils are supposed to learn. 4 Fourth, subject matter and content concern the choice and organisation of subject matter and social content. 5 Fifth, the learning process refers to how the choice of teaching methods is related to ways of working and learning for the pupils. 6 Last, evaluation includes feedback to pupils during the learning process, the formal assessment of pupils’ work and an evaluation of the teaching process. Bjørndal and Lieberg (1978) and Heiman and Schulz (1965) have developed a theory of didactic relations, aimed at promoting an understanding of didactics as containing all these main elements in the teaching and learning process. A main concern in the theory of didactic relations is to focus on pupils’ learning as well as on subject matter and content, and to see teaching and learning as complementary rather than separate processes. Inspired by a tradition of critical theory, it has also been argued that a sole focus on learning might be seen as too technical: democratic values also needed to be included in the organisation of the learning process (Schäfer and Schaller, 1973). The teacher’s task as an

Developing teacher professionalism in an era of neo-liberalism 139 academic should be seen not just as talking about freedom and democracy, but as practising it in and through their teaching. Different versions of these didactic concepts and relations have been visualised in different but similar models. My colleague Else Hippe and I developed the following model: The model shows that all the categories are in a reciprocal, dynamic relationship with one another. The purpose of the model is to help teachers reflect on and develop their teaching through continuous critical analysis. Key questions emerge, including: what is the relationship between pupils’ personal, social and cultural learning resources and the aims of the actual teaching? Are the goals and subject matter relevant in relation to pupils’ learning resources? What is the relationship between pupils’ learning resources and how the learning process is organised? What opportunities are available for pupils to collaborate, communicate and learn from one another? Are frame factors such as time and learning materials sufficient to ensure a good learning process for all the pupils? How can the actual teaching and learning process be evaluated? What should be evaluated? By whom? Are the pupils involved in the evaluation process? How can assessment take place in such a way that makes it possible for all the pupils to develop and show their skills and knowledge? What do the pupils think of these questions? And so on. The purpose of this form of didactic analysis is that teachers identify and reflect on what counts as good and not-so-good relationships in aspects in their own teaching. The aim of didactic analysis and reflection is to improve teaching and learning through systematic reflection and development processes conducted by teachers, in close collaboration with their pupils. The model has been influential in Norwegian and also Danish teacher education since the 1990s, and is part of the existing curriculum in many teacher education institutions in Denmark and Norway. Students report that the model helps them reflect on and learn from their own practice, and that it strengthens their professionalism (Hiim, 2009, 2010, 2013; Hiim and Hippe, 2001). However, even if the model of didactic relations is aimed at illuminating the reciprocal relationship between teaching and learning, there is still the danger that the interpretation of the categories are still based on a one-sided rationalist, instrumental interpretation of knowledge, teaching and learning. As noted above, our version of the model is inspired by pragmatism and critical theory, and a critique of rationalism. So in the following sections, I will present and discuss connections between didactic concepts and theories of knowledge and experience.

A rationalist perspective on knowledge and didactics A rationalist, technical understanding of knowledge builds on the idea that knowledge is about verbalising concepts that stand as given entities in the world, related to one another through specific laws (Molander, 1997). Thus, the aim of knowledge comes largely to be seen as about controlling the world (Habermas,

140  Hilde Hiim 1999). From this rationalist, technical perspective, educational teaching and learning processes may be governed, measured and controlled, based on established theoretical principles, curriculum frameworks and objectives. The main concern of good education, then, is to fulfil given criteria through procedures that have been shown to work. The teacher’s main task is to meet such stated objectives and criteria by using procedures that can and should be standardised. This rationalist view of education and learning also tends to imply a divide between teachers’ practice and research. The researcher’s task is to develop appropriate principles and procedures that may be demonstrated to work, while the teacher’s task is to implement those procedures. Neo-liberalist educational ideology is strongly influenced by a rationalist, technical understanding of knowledge and didactics with its emphasis on standardisation, measurement and control (Bottery, 2006). All six categories in the model of didactic relations (Figure 10.1) can be interpreted through the lens of a rationalist, instrumental understanding of knowledge and learning. A rationalist understanding of pupils’ learning resources will be concerned with objectively diagnosing and measuring pupils’ knowledge and skills in relation to given criteria, so different forms of testing will be essential. The issue of frame conditions will require a special focus on economic factors and cost efficiency in the educational process. Aims will be seen as the most important didactic category alongside evaluation and assessment, and the use of graded objectives or criteria for measuring pupils’ learning are strongly emphasised. Any subject matter will be regarded as a means for achieving the objectives and as a kind of concretisation of those objectives. A main concern of the learning process will be to find which teaching and learning methods work most effectively in relation to the objectives. The focus of the evaluation will be on whether the objectives have been achieved, but the evaluation can also concern the efficiency of the subject matter and methods in relation to the objectives. Such a rationalist understanding of didactic concepts has strong similarities to the learning-by-objectives pedagogy developed by Tyler in the 1950s (Tyler, 1950), and is highly visible in today’s neo-liberal educational ideology, given the current focus on issues of economy and competition. It can be seen, for example, in the existence of formal directions for Norwegian national curriculum frameworks that locate educational objectives within specific taxonomic systems (White Paper 16, 2016–2017). School leaders and teachers at all levels are expected to adjust to and use these systems automatically. However, in my view, contrary to such systems, student teachers and established teachers need to understand which concept of knowledge a rationalist ideology of education is based on, and how this particular concept of knowledge is connected with more concrete understandings of teaching and didactic categories. It is essential that teachers and student teachers understand the limits of a rationalist conception of knowledge and are able to critique it. So, in the following sections, I will investigate the connections between pragmatic and critical concepts of knowledge and didactics, and consider more closely what a critique of and alternatives to a rationalist theory of knowledge might look like.

Developing teacher professionalism in an era of neo-liberalism 141

Pragmatist concepts of knowledge and didactics As noted, Else Hippe’s and my version of the theory of didactic relationships is inspired by pragmatic epistemology, especially as found in interpretations of Wittgenstein and Heidegger (see also Dreyfus, 1991; Hiim, 2010; 2016; Hiim and Hippe, 2004; Janik, 1996; Molander, 1997). In the following sections, I therefore investigate how their respective metaphors for human experience can illuminate knowledge and didactics, with a main emphasis on Wittgenstein’s game metaphor. Wittgenstein’s game metaphor Wittgenstein’s (2003) late philosophy can be seen as a critique of a rationalist conception of knowledge. For Wittgenstein, life forms and practices that develop and change are the basis of human experience and learning. His game metaphor understands experience and learning as living, playful activities. Concepts and words such as ‘care’ or ‘democracy’ are woven into life forms, contexts and ‘games’ that our lives become part of. Experience and language take place in practical, social and cultural contexts, regulated by many assumed, non-­verbalised conditions (Janik, 1996; Molander, 1997). A game (or a concept or word) necessarily has a purpose, and to play it involves participation and understanding of its purpose. So from this perspective, participation in particular situations and examples are of core importance in the development of knowledge. From Wittgenstein’s perspective, experience and knowledge – for instance of the words ‘care’ or ‘democracy’ – are constituted by actions, sensations, emotions, intentions and language as a whole. A multi-dimensional, holistic concept of knowledge indicates that learning usually takes place through various forms of tasks where pupils are existentially engaged in actions that require independent judgment and collaboration with others. Wittgenstein emphasises this point: no one can learn to play a game alone. Someone who can play it, and who we can talk about our experiences with, must show us how to play it. From Wittgenstein’s perspective, then, the importance of generalised and standardised knowledge is overvalued. In his view, meaning is found in life experiences; consequently, formal and theoretical knowledge must be rooted in pupils’ life worlds. A concept of knowledge as contextual and existential implies that teachers and pupils need the freedom to relate the educational process to pupils’ lives and experiences so that all can create their own meaning. However, the one-sided rationalist educational system outlined above, with its emphasis on standardisation, obstructs this creation of meaning, and restricts teachers’ freedom to act as responsible professionals. Heidegger’s workshop metaphor Now to turn to Heidegger’s workshop metaphor. This compares everyday experience to working in a workshop where everything has a function and a purpose: for example, the function of doors to a house is to protect people from weather

142  Hilde Hiim and danger (Heidegger, 1978; Hiim, 2010). Heidegger maintains that our use of things and concepts are always connected with intentions, functions and contexts that are always already there in our culture (Dreyfus, 1991; Janik 1996). We gain experience primarily through participating in something whose purpose we can easily see: a main form is through projects. Further, experience always implies intentionality, something we choose to do that is meaningful for us. Experience becomes explicit when we meet a challenge or problem that we wish to do something about – for instance when the door to the house we build does not fit properly, or when the flowers we want to grow do not thrive. Problems related to tasks we are engaged in are basic to learning: they lead to deliberation, reflection, a search for solutions and knowledge development. We learn through using and doing, in situations characterised by engagement, involvement and responsibility, where the concepts are meaningfully related to the context and the overall situation. Scholars know that although there are important differences between Wittgenstein’s game metaphor and Heidegger’s workshop metaphor, both throw light on experience, learning and knowledge development as intentional, participative and contextual (Dreyfus, 1991; Janik, 1996; Molander, 1997). Both emphasise that knowledge has many dimensions that constitute a whole: these are action, emotion, values, aesthetics and understanding. From a pragmatic perspective, a rationalist conception of knowledge does not engage fully with the multidimensionality of experience and knowledge. Teachers and pupils need space to include their living experience in the teaching and learning process, and to choose their own projects. A pragmatist concept of knowledge A pragmatist concept of knowledge throws important light on the six categories in the model of didactic relations. A pragmatist understanding of the pupils’ learning resources directs attention towards their existential, subjective, social and cultural life world, and the experiences each pupil brings with them to the educational situation. These experiences are seen as important resources. With regard to frame conditions, it is vital to create structural and physical opportunities for organising practical learning situations and experiences that pupils can be involved in existentially. From a pragmatist point of view, the aims and goals should be not only about controlling the teaching process. Indeed, the degree of standardisation and control should be reduced, given that a good deal of important knowledge cannot be standardised or measured, and because teachers and pupils need to make their own responsible decisions in the educational process. Also, there is a danger that a one-sided emphasis on standardisation and on the verbal transmission of general, abstract knowledge may lead to a basic lack of existential and conceptual meaning in pupils’ learning. A pragmatist perspective draws attention to cultural, social and existential aspects of the subject matter and content, and towards opportunities for creating connections with and between the life worlds of different pupils. The learning process is a key category in pragmatically inspired didactics. An important

Developing teacher professionalism in an era of neo-liberalism 143 issue is to develop teaching methods and ways of working that enhance learning through participation in various forms of practical projects that pupils find meaningful. Evaluation focuses on the pupils’ learning process and the experience of existential meaning in the educational content, not only on goals and objectives. The results of pupils’ learning are of course important, but more central is the issue of which didactic changes could strengthen the quality of the teaching and learning process. These kinds of pragmatic theories of knowledge have been criticised for focusing too much on existing practice traditions and too little on social change. This critique is discussed in the following sections, together with investigations of critical theory and didactics.

Critical concepts of knowledge and didactics Habermas’ theory of communicative action has also inspired the theory of didactic relations (Habermas, 1980, 1999). Based on Habermas’ earlier conceptualisations of critical theory, it can be argued that important limitations exist in both a rationalist and a pragmatic understanding of knowledge and didactics. On the one hand, the focus on measurement and control in a rationalist approach can lead to the objectification of pupils in ways that separate their life world and individual self from the educational process; on the other, a pragmatic approach suffers from a lack of critique of normative aspects and traditions of power in different life worlds and practices, including teaching practices (Habermas, 1980). A closer look at these issues in light of Habermas’ theory of communicative action shows the following. Habermas’ concern in the theory of communicative action is to create a basis for the critique and development of social practices. He emphasises that practice can have different purposes, and he draws on what he refers to as different interests of experience, related to different types of action and types of knowledge. The different types of action have different validity criteria, each based on different preconditions, as follows. •

•

•

The first, goal-directed, instrumental action, is results-oriented: for instance, the teacher tries to achieve predefined results in class through a choice of a certain subject matter and certain methods. The validity criterion here is whether the teacher’s actions are effective, based on the existence of a shared, objective world. A second type of action is conversation, where the validity criterion is whether what is said and done, such as in the teaching process, is understandable for all concerned. This criterion is also based on the precondition of a shared, objective world. Third, ‘dramaturgic action’ is Habermas’ term for expressive actions. The validity criterion is whether what is said and done by, for example, teachers and pupils, is sincere, and is based on a subjective relationship between human beings and the world.

144  Hilde Hiim •

Finally, the criterion for value- and norm-regulated action is whether what is said and done, as in, for example, the teaching process, is fair and just according to norms that take the existence of a shared social world as a necessary precondition. Type of action

Validity criterion

instrumental action conversation dramaturgic action norm-regulated action

Is it effective? Is it understandable? Is it sincere? Is it fair and just?

According to Habermas, critical evaluation based on these validity criteria is essential for making questionable practices visible and creating a reasonable basis  for change. From a critical perspective, it is important that teachers and pupils develop what Habermas calls ‘critical communicative competence’. Such competence means the ability to judge actions and knowledge based on the validity criteria mentioned above, namely: is what is said and done effective? Is it understandable? Is it sincere? And, most of all, is it just? According to Habermas’ principle of democratic action, only norms that are acceptable to all who are affected by them can be considered valid. He is concerned about a tendency in society to reduce all kinds of practice to a question of efficiency of social and economic systems. Further, it can be argued that this tendency has intensified in the current era of neo-liberalism. The upshot is that there is danger, not least in education systems, that questions of justice, understandability and subjective meaning are shoved into the background, and social values are reduced to economic values. Further, this one-sided kind of instrumental understanding of knowledge and education tends to influence the nature of teachers’ and pupils’ communication and understanding of themselves and one another. ‘Good’ pupils and teachers are assumed to be those who achieve measurable results; the others are ‘bad’. Therefore, seen from a critical theoretical perspective, it is important to draw attention to the different purposes of knowledge and education and to questions of social and ethical values related to democracy, power and justice. As mentioned earlier, helping pupils to develop the democratic values of freedom and responsibility is a key part of teachers’ professional and social mandate in Scandinavian countries. Critical theory can provide important perspectives on the six categories in educational and teaching processes, related to this mandate. A critical perspective on the pupils’ learning resources indicates that their subjective, social and cultural life worlds are an important basis for education and teaching. Also, there is bound to be a certain amount of scepticism towards a one-sided objective measurement of pupils’ knowledge and skills: the reason for this is that the standards of measurement used may be biased towards specific social and ­cultural groups and will therefore be unjust by stigmatising individuals to the extent that they lose a good deal of self-confidence and motivation (Hiim, 2010). From a critical perspective, then, frame conditions are important for providing space for democratic co-influence in educational, teaching and learning

Developing teacher professionalism in an era of neo-liberalism 145 processes. A further important principle is that pupils experience and understand how social frames and structures are created by humans and can therefore be changed through social processes, including democratic ones. Critically inspired didactics also draws attention to the difference between society’s educational goals, expressed for instance in formal curriculum frameworks, and an individual pupil’s goals and motivation. The upshot is that goals formulated in the curriculum should be wide enough to allow space for local adjustments where individual pupils can identify goals that are meaningful and motivating for them. Regarding subject matter and content, a main issue in critical didactics is that the content should be related to pupils’ experience of their life world and that they find it relevant. The educational content should help pupils find their place in society as well as stimulate their ability to criticise and change their social situations where necessary. From a critical perspective, subject matter should be seen not simply as something given, but be chosen and evaluated through continuous democratic processes that actively involve the pupils. When organising any learning process, priority must be given to teaching and learning methods that encourage dialogue, participation and the exercise of democratic influence. Critically inspired didactics also highlights the possibly conflicting purposes of evaluation and assessment. On the one hand, it is assumed that evaluation and feedback in the learning process should support each pupil’s learning; on the other, that assessment and grades should be aimed at selecting pupils for further education and work. Consequently, from a critical perspective, questions are raised concerning the justness of this commitment to the standardisation of evaluation, measurement, grades and competition in education at primary and secondary level, both sectors that stipulate that attendance of all children and young people is mandatory. However, critical theory has been criticised for its over-optimistic belief in the possibilities of reaching consensus about questions of validity (Schanning, 1992). Ideas of what is effective or just and of what kind of knowledge is most worthwhile may be very different. Winter (1989) has argued that it is important to accept and promote the understanding that different cultural and social traditions and voices will always be different. Now let me consider some main elements of a theory of didactic relationships.

Some main elements of a theory of didactic relationships A main purpose in a theory of didactic relations is to provide insights into the relationship between different concepts of knowledge and different understandings of the core principles of teaching. I have already tried to analyse and discuss some of these connections, making the point that elements of different concepts of knowledge are to some extent opposed to one another. However, from a more holistic, wider concept of knowledge, education and didactics, they can also be seen as expressing different, more complementary aspects of knowledge. So, from a rationalist, technical approach to knowledge and didactics, the main issues may be seen as efficiency and measurable learning results. The aim

146  Hilde Hiim here is to achieve high learning outcomes. On the other hand, from a pragmatic perspective, experience-based, participative learning and existential involvement are core principles. A main condition here is that knowledge and education should be meaningful to the pupils. And from a critical theory perspective, normative aspects of knowledge and education and democratic values are key concerns. The most important aim here is that pupils should develop critical communicative competence and the capacity for participating in processes of democratic development and change. A theory of didactic relations is inspired by all these perspectives as well as by the educational dilemmas discussed in the analyses above. The theory builds on a wide concept of knowledge that includes technical, pragmatic and critical perspectives. There is no simple answer to how to solve educational dilemmas or how to balance the relationships between the didactic categories. A main concern in a theory of didactic relations is to throw light on didactic challenges and inspire educators to reflect upon and improve their educational practices. However, this approach is consistently undermined by today’s embracing of neo-liberal ideology; a one-sided approach, inspired by rationalist ideas, and with a too narrow and dogmatic understanding of knowledge and education.

A model of didactic action research Now consider what might happen when the model of didactic relationships is represented as a model of didactic action research, as shown in Figure 10.2. The purpose of this approach is to emphasise the importance of research and development in teachers’ work. This model of didactic relationships is meant as a tool for analysis, reflection, development and research in professional teacher practice. As an action research model, it is strongly inspired by the British tradition of teacher research (Carr and Kemmis, 1986; Elliott, 1991, 1998; McNiff, 2014, 2017), and has been used in many action research projects conducted by teachers, especially in connection with in-service teacher education programmes, from bachelor to PhD-level. A main idea is that the teachers identify important didactic challenges in their practice in collaboration with their pupils and colleagues, and try out improvements. Here are two examples. Example 1 One project, drawn from the work of Vibeke Melby, concerns education in social subjects in an upper secondary school. The teacher’s experience is that pupils find the subject content abstract, boring and not very useful. The teacher wants to change her teaching to make it more relevant and meaningful to the pupils’ learning. Throughout one school year, she works closely and collaboratively with her students to develop content, teaching and working methods that relate the subjects directly to the students’ lives. These methods systematically stimulate participative learning in such a way that allows the students to draw on their own life experiences. Results from the projects are documented in a master’s thesis

Developing teacher professionalism in an era of neo-liberalism 147

Pupils’ learning resources Pedagogical framework conditions

Evaluation

Learning process

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Figure 10.2  A model of didactic action research. Source:  Hiim and Hippe (2009).

148  Hilde Hiim and published as a book about social issues, much used by other teachers. The results show that there is a need for changes in the national curriculum in social subjects (Melby, 2003). The same teacher, who later becomes a school leader, is now working on a PhD project where she has conducted action research into her practice as a school leader. In this project, she introduced the didactic relations model and action research to her staff. The aim was to use didactic analysis and action research as an approach to facilitate individual and collective learning processes among staff as well as pupils at her school. Over a period of several years, the teachers at the school systematically conducted action research projects into their own practices, aimed at improving their own teaching and their pupils’ learning. Also, all the staff members met regularly to exchange experiences from their own projects, in order to learn from one another and together develop the school as a learning organisation. According to the teachers, the didactic concepts they encountered stimulated their reflection and provided them with a common language that facilitated collective development (Melby, 2019). Example 2 A second example is of an extensive action research project on practice-based education in vocational programmes at upper secondary school level, led by myself. Thirty teachers on an in-service master’s programme participated in the project. The background was the teachers’ experiences of a lack of vocational relevance in  the curriculum. All the teachers conducted and documented their action research projects at their own schools where they tried to develop more practice-based, participative and vocationally relevant content, working methods and forms of evaluation and assessment. Important obstacles to this kind of development were identified. The results showed clearly that the pupils’ motivation and sense of meaning were improved. The teachers said that didactic analysis and research into their own practice was highly meaningful to them (Hiim, 2013). Didactic action research builds on the concepts of teaching and knowledge presented in the previous sections of this chapter. Two important main principles concern how the research is documented. These are, first, the documentation should show and discuss how important challenges in the actual field of education can be met, and any important obstacles; second, it is important to document the experiences and opinions of the participants, not least the pupils’, and their opportunities for influencing the action research process.

Conclusion In the Norwegian school system, a strong tendency exists towards reforms and projects initiated and partly governed from above, based on research about procedures that are supposed to ‘work’. For instance, there has been a whole Hattie industry where school authorities and school leaders pay a lot of money to learn specific recipes for educational success (Hattie, 2013). The teacher’s role becomes

Developing teacher professionalism in an era of neo-liberalism 149 partly reduced to implementing pre-determined programmes and p ­ rocedures. To combat such tendencies, I have here presented and discussed a conceptual framework for didactic analysis, reflection, development and research. I have argued that this framework can contribute to strengthening professional, ­experience-based teacher knowledge, and help teachers develop a counter-­balance to top-down school development through their own teacher research. The purpose of didactic teacher research is not simply to develop the i­nstrumental principles of ‘what works’, but to inspire other teachers to have confidence in their professional performance (Stenhouse, 1975). The aim is also to contribute to structural, organisational and curricular changes based on teachers’ practical professional experiences. This kind of strengthening of teacher professionalism is vital in the current era of neo-liberalism where the autonomy and professional responsibility of teachers are under serious threat.

References Bjørndal, B. & Lieberg, S. (1978) Nye veier i didaktikken. (New perspectives on didactics) Oslo: Aschehoug Press. Bottery, M. (2006) Education and globalization: Redefining the role of the educational professional. Education Review, 58 (1) (95–113). Carr, W., & Kemmis, S. (1986) Becoming critical: Educational knowledge and action research. London: Falmer Press. Davies, B. & Bansel, P. (2007) Neoliberalism and education. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 20 (3) (247–259). Dreyfus, H. (1991) Being-in-the-world. Cambridge, Massachusetts, London: The MIT Press. Elliott, J. (1991) Action research for educational change. Buckingham: Open University Press. Elliott, J. (1998) The curriculum experiment. Meeting the challenge of social change. Buckingham: Open University Press. Engelsen, B.U. (2006) Kan læring planlegges? Arbeid med læreplaner – hva, hvordan, hvorfor? (Can learning be planned? Work on curriculum – what, why and how?). Oslo: Gyldendal Academic Press. Gundem, B. (1998) Skolens oppgave og innhold. En studiebok i didaktikk. (The mandate and content of schools. A study book in didactics). Oslo: The University Press. Habermas, J. (1980) Teorier om samfund og sprog. (Theories on society and language). Copenhagen: Gyldendal. Habermas, J. (1999) Kommunikativ handling, lov og rett. (The theory of communicative action). Oslo: Tano Aschehoug. Hattie, J. (2013) Visible learning: A study of over 800 meta-analyses relating to achievement. London: Routledge. Heidegger, M. (1978) Being and time. Oxford: Blackwell. Heimann, P.G. & Schulz, W. (1965) Unterricht – analyse und planung. Hannover: Schroedel. Hiim, H. (2010) ‘Pedagogisk aksjonsforskning. Tilnærminger, eksempler og kunnskapsfilosofisk grunnlag.’ In Educational action research. Approaches, examples and philosophy. Oslo: Gyldendal Academic Press.

150  Hilde Hiim Hiim, H. (2013) Praksisbasert yrkesutdanning. (Practice-based vocational education). Gyldendal Academic Press. Hiim, H. (2016) ‘Educational Action Research and the Development of Professional Teacher Knowledge’. In E. Gunnarsson, H.P. Hansen, B. Steen Nielsen (eds.). Action research for democracy: pp. 147–161. London: Routledge. Hiim, H. (2017) ‘Relevant lærerutdanning og aksjonsforskning’ (Relevant Teacher Education and Action Research). In S. Gjøtterud, H. Hiim, D. Husebø, L.H. Jensen, T. Steen-Olsen, E. Stjernstrøm (eds.). Aksjonsforskning i Norge. Teoretisk og empirisk mangfold. (Action research in Norway. Theoretical and empirical diversity). Oslo: Cappelen Damm Academic. Hiim, H. & Hippe, E. (2004) Å utdanne profesjonelle yrkesutøvere. (Education professional practitioners) Oslo: Gyldendal academic press. Hiim, H. & Hippe, E. (2006) Læring gjennom opplevelse, forståelse og handling. (Learning through experience, understanding and action) (2nd ed.). Oslo: The University Press. Hiim, H. & Hippe, E. (2009) Undervisningsplanlegging for yrkesfaglærere. (Didactics for vocational teachers) (3. ed., 1. ed. 1989). Oslo: The University Press. Jangk, W. & Meyer, H. (1997) Nyttan av kunskaper i didaktisk teori. (The usefulness of knowledge in didactic theory). In M. Uljens (ed.) Didaktikk- teori, reflektion och praktikk (Didactics- reflection and practice): pp. 17–34. Stockholm: Student Literature. Janik, A. (1996) Kunskapsbegreppet i praktisk filosofi. (The concept of knowledge in practical philosophy) Stockholm: Symposion. Klafki, W. (1971) Studien zur Bildungstheorie und Didaktik. Weinheim: Beltz. McNiff, J. (2014) Writing and doing action research. London: Sage. McNiff, J. (2017) Action Research. All you need to know. London: Sage. Melby, V. (2003) ‘Fagdidaktikk I samfunnsfag’ (Didactics in social subjects). Master’s thesis, Department of Vocational Teacher Education, OsloMet University. Melby, V. (2016) ‘Hvordan kan skoleledere og lærere jobbe sammen for å utvikle utdanningspraksis og skolen som lærende organisasjon gjennom aksjonsforskning?’ (‘How can school leaders and teachers collaborate on developing educational practice and the school as a learning organization through action research?’) PhD Thesis, OsloMet University, Faculty of Teacher Education and International Studies. Molander, B. (1997) Arbetets Kunskapsteori. (The knowledge theory of work). Stockholm: Gotab. Schäfer, K.H. & Schaller, K. (1973) Kritische Erziehungswissenschaft und kommunikative Didaktik. Heidelberg: Quelle und Meyer. Schanning, E. (1992) ‘Blindflekker I Habermas’ kommunikasjonsteori.’ (‘Blind spots in Habermas’ theory of communicative action’). Materialisten (The Materialist) 1 (2–92). Stenhouse, L. (1975) An introduction to curriculum research and development. London: Guilford. Tyler, R.W. (1950) Basic principles of curriculum and instruction. Chicago: University of Chicago. White Paper 16. (2016–2017) Culture for Quality in Higher Education. Winter, R. (1989) Learning from experience. Principles and practice in action research. London: Falmer. Wittgenstein, L. (2003) Filosofiske undersøkelser. (Philosophical investigations). Oslo: De norske bokklubbene (The Norwegian Book Clubs).

11 Total nursing Reclaiming nursing for the patient Peter McDonnell

As a practising nurse of many years’ experience, I have become increasingly concerned at the current movement in the United Kingdom towards a constrained model of nursing practice. This model focuses, almost exclusively, on a narrow, so-called ‘academic’ form of nurse education that is ‘delivered’ only at universities, but is virtually universally accepted as the basis for general nursing practices. It is also widely assumed, especially by the leaders of the profession, including the UK Nursing and Midwifery Council and the Royal College of Nursing, that this situation is as it should be: nursing knowledge should be centred in academic theory, with less concern for practical, everyday working knowledge. Consequently, through their endorsement, the national leaders of nursing could be shown actively to be failing their own profession. Further, the concept ‘the academic’ can be understood in different ways, so different groups can choose an interpretation that suits their own agenda. In the case of the national leaders of nursing, it is easy to see how the currently dominant narrow, abstract, exclusive model, far removed from the world of hands-on nursing practice, might hold attractions in terms of perceived academic status; and this has become the orthodoxy. The historical reasons for this argument are described shortly. However, contrary to this view, and referring to an abundant source of supporting evidence, I argue that such an approach continuously fails to encompass the needs of nursing and the patients it serves. In my view, while academic knowledge certainly has a place in nurse education and practices, it should not be seen as virtually the only form of knowledge that nurses need. Practical forms of knowledge are also core to ensuring good quality everyday nursing practices, involving a range of abilities, including the skills of direct hands-on care and advanced technical capability. This approach puts the patient at the centre of discussions about nursing. I further argue that a more balanced combination of academic knowledge and practice-based everyday knowledge would go far in doing justifiable honour to nurses; this can be done by portraying nurses as knowledgeable and capable practitioners who can theorise their practices, are competent to decide on the knowledge base of their profession and can suggest options for possible new directions. Further, as nursing is a practice-based profession, such an approach would provide an opportunity for practice to lead DOI: 10.4324/9781351053372-11

152  Peter McDonnell theory, rather than theory to lead practice, which is the current situation. Some may argue that this already happens, but I would in turn argue that if it does, it happens in a largely unrecognised and unformed way. The current situation is that, while front line, practice-based nurses are likely to be the first to encounter new treatments, equipment and concepts which they can adapt and apply on a day-to-day basis, they then have to wait for university-based academics to catch up with the new realities, when their existing practice will be explained back to them as abstract theory, though now far removed from their lived experience. It is of course easy to see how this narrow, exclusive model of nursing might hold attractions for the national leaders of nursing in terms of enhanced professional status; but in the broader scheme of things, it represents a profound injustice to everyday nurses and their practical professional knowledge. In this chapter, contrary to the accepted orthodoxy, I propose a new model of nursing and nurse education that I term ‘total nursing’. This model is premised on a close relationship between academic and practice-based knowledge, and provides space for the development of a form of initial and ongoing professional nurse education that, contrary to the current model, holds hope for the future of the profession. It would mean that practice would be recognised as the core area for knowledge development. It would also mean that, once their initial training had ensured an appropriate level of knowledge and skills, nurses would have a professional learning pathway, with designated points, by which they could enter and exit programmes according to their needs. Thus a strong professional knowledge base would be developed, grounded in a solid core of practice, that would benefit both nurses and the patients in their care. Such a model would also strengthen the view that nursing is an action-oriented practice first and foremost: it is the actions of nurses, what they actually do for patients, that makes the profession both useful and essential and that underpins the nature of nursing. It would also meet the core mandate that the patient must be positioned at the centre of any discussion of nursing, recognising also that the leadership and education of the nursing profession are of value only inasmuch as they support the nursing activity of direct patient care. It must also be remembered that a main responsibility of any professional organisation is to protect both their client group (in this case, patients) and the profession’s members (nurses). So it is important to ask whether the present system of nursing leadership and education is meeting the needs of patients and nurses.

Is the current system working? That the present system is not working for either group can be demonstrated in a range of ways, including the following: •

The system does not produce sufficient numbers of nurses to replace those currently leaving or retiring from the profession. Nurses have left the profession in droves for various reasons, including constant demands for long

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•

•

hours, excessive amounts of hard work, a real pay cut, and frequent lack of support from managers and professional bodies (see Connolly, 2018; Buchan et al., 2019). Most nurses graduate with a large student debt that disables them economically for years (Matthews-King, 2018b). This punishes individual nurses and makes nursing an increasingly difficult choice of profession. While it is acknowledged that the vast majority of nurses and healthcare assistants carry out their roles assiduously and often at personal cost, nevertheless investigations, reports and stories repeatedly show that standards of basic patient care are often not met. A prime example may be seen in the Robert Francis (2013) Report (see below); see also Robinson (2013) for a useful commentary.

Such bodies of evidence show that the profession of nursing is failing to deliver the best standard of care to patients, regularly demonstrated by a pattern of complaints, denials, cover-ups and investigations that produce evidence of poor practice. Two key examples show the reality of the situation. First was the case of Ann Clwyd, as reported in the 2013 review of the National Health Service (NHS) Hospitals Complaints System ‘Putting Patients Back in the Picture’ (Clywd and Hart, 2013), who, on visiting her dying husband: broke down in tears as she recalled his last hours, shivering under flimsy sheets, with an ill-fitting oxygen mask cutting into his face, wedged up against the bars of the hospital bed. She said her husband, a former head of News and Current Affairs for BBC Wales, died ‘like a battery hen’. (p. 6) A second example may be found in the 2013 Francis Report into the state of healthcare, including nursing. The story is that in 2009, Robert Francis was asked to conduct an investigation into standards of healthcare at North Staffordshire Hospital. His wide-ranging report included direct criticisms of standards of nursing care. In fact, some of the review team stated that they were shocked by the lack of humanity of some nurses. And while widespread managerial failings created pressure at clinical level, the response of many staff, including nurses, was denial and defensiveness. These denials extended to national level when Francis (2013) pointed out that, following his report containing suggestions about possible structural changes, the national nurse leaders had responded negatively and defensively, although there had been positive responses from medical and managerial organisations (Lintern, 2013). It seems as though, having achieved their nirvana of degree-only nurses and the side-lining of caring, the nursing hierarchy will not listen to any questioning of its established wisdom. Francis also pointed out that, despite the number of organisations which supposedly exist to protect patients’ interests, what triggered his report was the longstanding determination of concerned relatives in the face of resistance from

154  Peter McDonnell some of these organisations. Following publication of the report, many media stories appeared, replicating many of the criticisms in other parts of the country. A common factor in these stories was the lack of good quality hands-on direct care of patients (see also the ITV news (2013) story ‘Viewers describe poor nursing care in hospitals all over the UK’). Indeed, the lack of real engagement by many of the organisations that supposedly exist to protect patients is a reminder that nurses should maintain a role in patient advocacy. But if this were the case, then care for the person, rather than a more functional view of the patient, would need to be at the heart of the relationship. Altogether, then, it would seem that, rather than seeking to blame individual nurses for what are often structural failures, we should ask why poor care happens, look at underlying systemic faults, and identify and remove those who let down patients and other nurses: while also always recognising that each nurse is responsible and answerable for their own behaviour. Such investigation shows clearly that faults can be divided generally into two groups, termed here the external and the internal factors.

External factors The external factors comprise those issues that fall outside the remit and ­control of the nursing profession. Central to these is the extent to which governments have been invested in and controlled by corporate business entities; this has generated policies which benefit big business rather than the public (see, for example, Cave and Rowell, 2014). Foremost is the continual budget cutting by which the NHS is continually weakened, despite the hand-on-heart denials of government ministers, as in, for example, Guardian Newspaper (2013). Further, money allocated to the NHS then leeches out into the pockets of the large corporate providers who usually make high profits but pay little of the tax which could have been reinvested to provide healthcare and other community services (Jones, 2014). Alarmingly, recent years have seen a huge rise in the involvement of these companies in the NHS, effectively representing the hidden privatisation of a national institution by entwining them into existing NHS facilities. It also involves the asset stripping of the community goods built up over centuries of public endeavour. Further, the recent spate of failures of many of these corporate entities, some also providing transport, education and prison resources, has highlighted the danger of outsourcing public services to profit-led monoliths. A prime example of this situation was the failure in 2018–2019 of Carillion, a massive multinational services company that ran into multi-millions pounds worth of debt, but was rescued by the provision of equally staggeringly large amounts of government money. Ironically, the rescue money had been drawn from the public taxation which companies such as Carillion had been intended to reduce. In cases like this, therefore, the public pay twice for a failing service: first by government’s investing in money-grabbing companies and second by rescuing them when they fail through that very greed.

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Internal factors Of specific interest for this chapter, however, are the internal factors that affect the direct delivery of nursing care, this for two reasons. First, they are matters over which the profession of nursing has direct control, a situation that has resulted from decisions made by elitist groups within the national nurse leadership; such groups have been present since the registration debates of the late 1800s (see below). Second, the profession has to put its own house in order before it can credibly contribute to discussions about the rapidly deteriorating state of the NHS. Getting to the heart of the question of whether nursing is meeting the needs of patients therefore means first looking at the internal factors affecting the profession; and this in turn means first raising questions about the nature, aims and purposes of nursing itself. Any answer will help to decide how nurses are selected, by whom and how they will learn to nurse. Two issues arise: first, to recognise the need for the practice of care; second, to include care as part of nurses’ initial and ongoing professional education. Currently, both aspects appear to be deliberately being diminished in professional discourses: ironically, while almost all dictionary definitions of nursing use the word ‘care’, the reality is that care is precisely what has been abrogated by nurse leaders (see Ion, Jones and Craven, n.d.; a later version appeared in 2016). Those leaders have achieved this by deciding, without consultation with other professional bodies, that qualification as a nurse can now be achieved only by university degree, through the often sterile context of formal study. They have also decided that there is a separate entity called ‘care’ which is delivered by a group now known as healthcare assistants (HCAs). Apparently, these HCAs, although answerable to nurses and carrying out an essential role in looking after patients, do not require any mandatory training for their work: this in spite of the recommendation by Francis that mandatory training should be offered to all Healthcare Assistants. Sadly, nursing leaders and government chose not to respond to his report, a fact that Francis roundly condemned (Lintern, 2013). To sum up: if nursing is to be understood as skilled, knowledgeable care for patients, it seems all the more incredible that training and development are denied at the point of hands-on care. The situation might be understood as a knowledge vacuum at the interface between nurses and patients. It is ironic: those students who are university-based, with an emphasis on abstract textbook knowledge, miss out on much of the tactile, experiential involvement that comes from being embedded in the clinical area; while, at the same time, the HCA group, who provide 60% of direct patient care and have hands-on experience, are denied access to supporting theory development (Lintern, 2013). To put these suggestions into context and appreciate their potential implications, consider what are generally understood as the activities that comprise nursing practice, the aim of which is to ensure that the actual living needs of the patient are being met. These include hydration, nutrition, mobilisation, protection, hygiene and spiritual support. However, national nurse leaders have decided that the entity called ‘nursing’ can be carried out only by those who

156  Peter McDonnell possess a costly university degree (to note: a course leading to a BA degree in nursing in 2021 costs around £70,000). Separate to nursing, according to the current orthodoxy, is the activity of ‘caring’: this may be carried out by healthcare assistants and requires no mandatory training or recognised qualification, although this hands-on care is the essential element that supports the necessities of life, as outlined above. Further, research by, for example, Cavendish (2013) and Willis (2015) have shown that these activities make up at least two thirds of what is generally understood to comprise nursing care; yet healthcare assistants are not even recognised as part of nursing or given any nationally recognised preparation. The legacy of the very title of ‘healthcare assistant’ gives an historical insight into how nurse leaders regard them and therefore the importance ascribed to their role. Whereas until about the 1990s, they were called ‘nursing assistants’ (NAs), the word ‘nursing’ has now been removed from their title. This has been a non-trivial action which raises the question: if the title was unimportant then why was the decision taken to change it? It appears to be yet another step in the separation of nursing and caring, part of a determination to elevate nursing into a more technical and academic practice whose most likely long-term effect is to lead the profession of nursing to wither on the vine. Yet in moving nursing away from the direct hands-on care that makes up a large proportion of overall nursing/caring activity, nurse leaders consistently fail to appreciate that it is precisely this hands-on care that supports all other inputs, and that needs to be delivered on a daily basis; complex medical and surgical procedures can be undermined if a patient is allowed to become dehydrated or develop a pressure ulcer. It is at this point of patient contact where knowledgeable, skilled nursing care can contribute huge preventative and restorative benefit. To give an example: consider the effects of dehydration on the individual patient and, by extension, on the healthcare system. Ensuring that the patient has sufficient fluids to meet their needs is not just a simple matter of giving constant drinks: good hydration is subject to a wider range of complex physiological, pathological and environmental factors; and doing it well requires an understanding of human physiology. Yet the fact that the present system does not deliver good hydration practice is indicated by research showing that dehydration costs the NHS at least £1 billion annually (Campbell, 2011) – a cost largely incurred in putting right errors which could have been avoided with proper training and understanding in direct patient care: all this is on top of the human misery, additional hospital time incurred for individual patients and even death for some. And hydration is just one leg of the essential platform of human needs: the same cost-benefit analysis could be applied to other essential aspects such as mobilisation and nutrition. The upshot is that nurse leaders consistently pursue the policy that the very point of most patient contact is the one where the least knowledge is needed. And to suggest, as they do, that this highly complex area of human understanding requires no supporting knowledge base to support practical skills would be laughable if it were not so critical. The concept of care has also been eroded by a tendency to refer to it as ‘basic care’. A moment’s thought shows that it is

Total nursing 157 not so much ‘basic’ as essential to those everyday aspects of life needed for survival, and must be met before other less tangible needs are considered: an idea also addressed by Maslow (1943/2013), who maintained that the higher human needs for companionship, art and music may be addressed only when the more basic needs are in place. On this view, perhaps meeting the daily living needs of patients might better be described as providing ‘essential care’, rather than ‘basic care’: a term that underlines the importance of care, of meeting patients’ needs, as a central tenet of nursing. Care would thereby become a core consideration in nurses’ professional education: practice-based, care-based nursing would mean developing skilled understanding in the clinical area, supported but not dominated by theoretical learning. In summary, then, I argue that the national leaders of nursing have unilaterally redefined nursing in ways that are right for themselves but damaging to patients, the group for whom nursing actually exists. They have done this mainly by creating a false division between nursing and caring, despite the centrality of caring for the practice of nursing. It is time for a revival of the concept of nursing as a care-based practice, an in-depth consideration of what kind of knowledge best supports nursing and how it is best acquired. Further, if it is agreed that the knowledge base of nursing should be built around that which enables nurses to meet these needs, and therefore if a practice-­ based form of professional education is to be promoted, questions arise about which forms of knowledge best support good nursing care, and how and where these forms of knowledge can best be learnt and developed. It also raises the question of how nurses should be selected and by whom. It may transpire that the present leadership might be judged as too remote and inflexible to contribute to any major shift in how nursing is envisaged and organised. In my view, as with any action-oriented profession, nurses can be assessed effectively only in the practice area. It is not enough for nurses to learn and be tested only on book-based knowledge: they need also to be judged in terms of their real-world effectiveness and capacity to meet the challenges of actual practice. In such a system, nurse education would take place largely in the clinical area, and would promote the idea that theory would take the form of skills and practical knowledge developed through experiential learning. This view is not particularly revolutionary: it already has a firm historical basis, as follows.

Historical basis It is widely acknowledged that most of the current changes in nursing practice and philosophy by national nurse managers have been in the ideological pursuit of a vision of higher status for nursing rather than in improving the care of patients. For example, in 1972, the statement that nurses should no longer be ‘the handmaidens of doctors’ but should aim for increased status (Briggs, 1972: 28) was eagerly taken up and repeated by many in national nurse leadership. However, other suggestions from Briggs’s report were conveniently forgotten,

158  Peter McDonnell including that nursing should have a common entry training portal of around 18 months for all nurses and should be practice-oriented. Instead, the form of nursing aimed for was informed mainly by academic theory; it quickly became narrowed into a model of university degree qualification and selection based entirely on achieving the requisite number of A levels. Consequently, when nursing education moved to the university, there was no system in place for teaching people to nurse; and the syllabus of training for nurses was changed from what nurses needed to know in order to look after patients, to what the universities were prepared to teach (Ousey, 2011). But this then raises the question of the role of the academy and which interpretation of ‘the academic’ is chosen. While many university-based academics might appreciate that a narrow techno-rational model of theory does not encompass the wide diversity of forms of knowledge that inform lived experience, the current marketised view of education requires them to see students as an income stream, creating a situation that does not help them understand the complex and tactile work of nursing. A false hierarchy of knowledge is promoted that assumes the superiority of classroom-based education over the wider ways in which theory, based on actual practice, may be developed. So at this point, it may be helpful to consider why nurse leaders have followed the route described above: this means looking at the history of the development of nursing as a profession.

Florence Nightingale Perhaps the most well-known figure in the historical record is Florence Nightingale, who, in the mid-1800s, when the professions, including medicine, were staking their claims and marking out their professional territory (AbelSmith, 1960), effectively initiated the idea of nursing as a profession. Before her, the essentials of nursing care would have been practised by individuals, families and religious orders, but there were no commonly agreed standards for  nursing, or form of training. It was Nightingale who pulled the strings together to describe what a nurse was and how they should learn their practice. Her philosophy was grounded in the conviction that learning in the absence of the compassion of the workplace did not make for good practice. Further, many of the personal qualities required for the tough work of nursing, she said, cannot be assessed by classroom examinations (Woodham-Smith, 1950). Nursing could and should be a profession where people who demonstrate an aptitude can be given the opportunity to grow and develop appropriate skills and knowledge while contributing to patients’ nursing care. Significantly, in Nightingale’s (1859) ‘Notes on Nursing’ and her training schedules, the needs of the patient are central. Everything else is in support of meeting those needs. Nightingale also raised issues about the character of the nurse. Her argument was that no amount of learning could lead to the delivery of good nursing care in the absence of a compassionate, self-disciplined personality. She also brooked no failing in selection standards, instructing her helpers

Total nursing 159 to ‘avoid fat, drunken dames of over 14 stone as the bedsteads are not strong enough’ (Woodham-Smith, 1950: 108). Nightingale’s ideas were widely adopted, possibly because at the time, there were so many different kinds of hospitals and no universally accepted view of what qualified someone to practise as a nurse. Her pragmatic approach towards evolving a model for nursing therefore filled the gap and became widely accepted. It meant assessing the needs of the patient and devising ways to meet them; and student nurses would develop the knowledge and skills to demonstrate on the  job that they could meet those needs. It was because of her direct influence that the word ‘nurse’ eventually became a protected title which guaranteed that the individual practitioner had met the required levels of skill and knowledge, a point that also gave protection and reassurance to patients. However, once Nightingale had made nursing an acceptable job for ‘respectable’ women, and established the need for publicly acknowledged professional standards, different influences began to arise within the profession, depending on the interests of the parties involved: these began to take the form of two opposing camps, each with their own ideology. One was the original pragmatic view of Nightingale herself, which was to build nursing around the skills and knowledge needed to care for and protect patients. The later, status-seeking approach, a view that nursing should be seen as a specialised, elitist profession was epitomised by the combative Mrs Ethel Bedford-Fenwick who dominated the debate about the registration of nurses in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Abel-Smith, 1960). Following the lead of Mrs Bedford-Fenwick and other like-minded agitators, the leadership began to develop what may be described today as a guild view of the professions (Abel-Smith, 1960). This model focuses on marking out the territory of the profession and protecting its borders; it also entails having a protected title and making entrance to the profession more difficult. Law and medicine are good examples of this model: it is likely that medicine especially influenced some nurse leaders at the time. And generally speaking, it would appear that the idea of treating nursing as a profession with stringent rules and standards to protect patients was laudable and need not have clashed with a more patient-centred approach; a clear benefit would have been to ensure a profession confident of its own ground. However, the elitist camp decided to restrict nursing entry only to ‘educated ladies’ (which could be taken as code for ‘class distinction’, as in Bourdieu, 1984, 1991). The result was that the rules for entry to nursing appeared rather as a class-based system where education was frequently used to denote family background (Abel-Smith, 1960) rather than a profession that was open to anyone who demonstrated a willingness to develop a responsible, other-oriented practice. The upshot was that a dynamic balance developed between meeting the needs of the population by ensuring there were adequate numbers of skilled nurses, and the aspirational desires of those who wanted a more rarefied profession. This situation went on for many years, although at certain points, such as at times of crisis or extreme staff shortage, politicians represented by the Privy Council

160  Peter McDonnell over-ruled or persuaded the governing bodies to accept compromises. An example of this flexibility was the introduction, early in World War II, of enrolled nurses (ENs), who undertook a two-year rather than three-year training course, focusing on practical, hands-on nursing care. The educational requirements for such courses were lower, thus opening nursing to a wider range of people (see also below). The vast majority made a valuable contribution to patient care and were valued by staff and patients alike for their practical bedside nursing (AbelSmith, 1960), and many went on to become registered nurses. Eventually, however, the balance shifted and the elitist camp gained ascendancy. Over a period of a few years, ENs were phased out from the 1980s, and nurse education moved away from hospitals to colleges of nursing and eventually to universities. From 2013, nurse registration was by university degree only. It would appear that the status-seeking element among nurse leaders had achieved their goal. The first invocation of university-based nurse education was called Project 2000. The aim was that student nurses would spend most of their first year in university with short placements almost as guests in clinical areas. However, Project 2000 was generally considered to be a failure: many students were recruited who had no interest in the tough everyday work of nursing and some young people wasted a year of their lives trying to reconcile the high visions of nursing practice they had received in the university with their experience in clinical areas (McDonnell, 2023). Yet despite the failure of Project 2000, national nurse leaders still persevered with the university-based model of nurse education. Any criticisms from the practice area were considered to be the result of poor implementation by others rather than because of the nature of the concept. Up until the 1990s, nurses in training spent meaningful time working in clinical areas, interspersed with regular spells in classrooms to develop related theoretical knowledge. The student nurse was embedded in the clinical area and regarded as part of the workforce, despite many official statements to the contrary (see, for example, McDonnell, 2023). Much of the knowledge gained was through experiential and sensory learning. Whilst a firm curriculum and schedule of mainly practice-based learning was in place, it was part of a rich learning environment comprising the feel, sound, smell and sights of everyday practice. Much of the required learning was internalised from experience, and thus difficult to measure; but it is hard to see how the knowledge supporting practical nursing capacity could be developed without this experience. As with other practice-oriented practices such as surgery, bricklaying and hairdressing, the practice of nursing can be properly learnt only through practice supported by established theory. To reverse this balance can lead to a practitioner who is sound on theoretical knowledge but weak in the actual hands-on application of their knowledge. As a result of all this early internal political upheaval, an opportunity was missed whereby the best from the two opposing views – the elitist and the more pragmatic approaches – could have been reconciled. While some of the more open-minded among nurse leaders continued to see the profession as a broad

Total nursing 161 church, accepting different qualifications and different designations under the title of ‘nurse’ (such as the title of ‘State Enrolled Nurse’ [SEN], later shortened to EN), the elitist camp insisted, and still insist, that there should be only one portal of entry to nursing qualification. Registration for nurses was agreed in 1919 and eventually a three-year course became the accepted standard for nurse registration. The system today is that trainees may qualify only as a Registered Nurse, following a three-year higher education institution-based course; although calls are being made for the re-introduction of staff with qualifications equivalent to that of EN (see, for example, Peate, n.d.). However, questions arise regarding the potential effect on the end user, the patient, always and inevitably linked with the role and identity of the nurse. Some of the outcomes of the implementation of a more constrained, elitist vision were disastrous. The lack of focus on the practical, knowledge-based skills necessary for ensuring the wellbeing of patients meant that abstract knowledge was valued more highly than the day-to-day abundance of real life learning to be found in clinical areas. The severance of many of the links between clinical areas and nurse education meant that staff were physically distant from each other. The situation that staff now worked in different environments and had different day-to-day experiences meant they had little in common, so different priorities and agendas emerged, leading to a disunity of vision and collapse of collegial work practices. But perhaps the most striking feature is that when nurse education moved into the universities, the curriculum changed from that which helped to meet patient needs to what the university could more easily teach at a distance from patient areas. Instead of developing knowledge from the actual practice of nursing, what was now foregrounded was second-hand theory from sociology, psychology and other academic disciplines. So where are we now?

The present situation Key questions arise from the confusion, regarding the selection and training of nurses: these include the following. Who is selected to become a nurse? The present situation whereby nursing and care are seen as separate entities means that there is no continuity between the two roles of nurse and care-giver. Nor does time spent as an HCA bring one any nearer to being a nurse: the only route in to nursing is now by degree only. This means that HCAs, people who have demonstrated the personal qualities needed in the stressful world of caring for others, are not seen as likely candidates. They are prevented from linking their hands-on, real world experience with any theoretical input. Consequently, the point of most contact with patients becomes a barren area where practice and theory cannot link or draw on the other’s expertise. This then constitutes a dangerous knowledge vacuum. The selection focuses only on those people who

162  Peter McDonnell have met the educational requirements to attend university rather than demonstrated the wider attributes required to handle the tough job of nursing. How are they selected? In the present system, selection for nursing is based solely on what is called ‘academic grounds’. However, this term itself is highly suspect because of increasing amounts of data that show universities to be offering places to applicants regardless of their actual academic achievement, often taking the guise of unconditional offers, the intent of which would appear as erring towards financial returns rather than towards professional credibility. Such practices throw a long shadow over questions to do with the suitability of universities for preparing nurses. How are they trained and educated for their role? So, while nursing may be deemed by some in the profession to have achieved some kind of increased status through degree-only qualification, the actual knowledge level around the patient appears to have fallen. This is because, as outlined earlier, the hands-on care of the HCAs is unsupported by any professional education provision whereby they can develop deeper understanding of professional and practical matters; and while this means that HCAs can certainly learn from experience, they have no theoretical basis to their learning. Meanwhile, reduced opportunities for developing essential hands-on skills and tactile knowledge are available for those nurses who have received university education. This is because the university-centric nature of their selection and professional education means they are not embedded within the clinical team. Consequently, fewer opportunities are available for them to develop the experiential, sensory understandings that are essential to providing holistic nursing care. This situation has been worsened by the gap between universities and clinical areas. Currently, a geographical and philosophical gulf exists between hospitals and universities, with no common perspectives or intent. There is also a national problem in getting busy frontline nurses to act effectively as mentors to students, a practice often seen as a time-consuming distraction from everyday work (Nursing Times Review, 2012). The very nature of clinical placements means that students are more likely to be seen, and see themselves, as visitors to or guests in clinical areas. This contrasts with the situation where students were steeped in everyday practice and were given specific roles and responsibilities. And while this may have led to occasional accusations of exploitation, it did ensure that nurses completed their training with knowledge-based skills and tactile understanding. Further, the so-called exploitation was as nothing compared to the present situation where most student nurses have to take out large loans to pay universities for a degree which then grants them the dubious honour of working in a difficult and low-paid role. Many nurses find it a bitter pill to swallow that while many will never afford a home of their own, some senior members of a university are paid at least the equivalent of a house per year,

Total nursing 163 funded by student debt: recent media stories have commented on this fact but to date (early 2022) there has been virtually no response from the national leadership of nursing. Finally, a chilling point: the way in which nursing has been redefined now threatens the profession in a number of ways, including the idea that if nursing does not provide a useful, relevant service to its end users, it will become a confusion of competing ideologies and cease to exist as a profession. In summary, then, it is a tragedy that national decision-makers have not adopted a more imaginative and broad-based view of education, a key lesson of which is that the day-to-day work of nurses in clinical areas is a virtual goldmine of opportunity for learning. Perhaps, given that most contemporary nursing research has been carried out within the narrow world view of traditional academic research and for the narrow benefits of universities and their staff as described by Linda Davies, President of the RCN (outlined in Merrifield, 2016), the time could be right for a more open-minded and exploratory type of practice-­ based research which could be part of nursing practice and beneficial to patients. So, as noted earlier, a possible solution may be the idea of total nursing.

Total nursing Nursing must see as a priority the need to address the problems listed at the beginning of the chapter: • • •

Failure to replace numbers of nurses leaving the profession Nurses graduating with huge debt Regular reports of failures in nursing care

Unless nursing addresses these issues, it is highly likely that politicians, healthcare managers and corporate companies will step in, enforce changes that will effectively disable nursing as an integrated profession and make patient needs a lower priority. To avoid this, nursing would need to consider dismantling the present model and rebuilding it around the actual needs of patients in the clinical area. It is likely that the leadership for such an initiative would need to come from the frontline nurses and HCAs whose everyday experience gives them a clear view of the real life situation. Further, a new approach to preparing nurses can be formed around a simple model which addresses whatever is required to protect and support patients towards the best outcomes – a system I call ‘total nursing’, because it recognises that hands-on, direct patient care is at the heart of nursing. Unless the need for hydration, nutrition, protection, mobilisation and psychological support are met, then nursing fails in its central mission and all other healthcare input is undermined. It should be a relatively simple matter to introduce a system of progressive nursing qualification, built upon a joint foundation course, that enables nurses to develop the frontline, hands-on skills that ensure patient safety and support

164  Peter McDonnell healing while simultaneously developing knowledge of the more theoretical aspects of the profession. Demonstrating the ability to actually nurse patients would therefore be the basis of selection. It would become the responsibility of nurse educators to find ways to support the learning of committed nurses rather than offering a table d’hôte menu. Later, as individual understanding develops, nurses could move on to more advanced study courses, thereby increasing their knowledge in more specialised and complex areas of nursing. Such an approach would mean that the practice of nursing remains relevant to and is built upon the needs of patients. Further, this approach would ensure that, as nurses developed through the different stages of learning, they would have the hands-on practical knowledge with which to support less-experienced colleagues. This by itself would be a huge improvement over the present system that insists on the situation in which nursing and care remain as separate entities. Then, over time, nurses can enhance their technical knowledge and theory development, thus developing themselves as specialists and academics in their own right, secure in the knowledge that they have met the essential life needs of the patient. An advantage of this approach would be to attract those people whose central interest was in fulfilling the role of nursing. Such a progressive system of education would allow nurses to reach a level at which they were happy to work, knowing that at all levels they were contributing meaningfully to patient wellbeing. Perhaps this is not the end but the beginning.

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Total nursing 165 Connolly, R. (2018) ‘The numbers that explain the nursing crisis in the UK’. Available at https://inews.co.uk/news/health/the-numbers-that-explain-the-nursingcrisis-in-the-uk-152518; accessed 9 April 2021. Donnelly, L. (2015) ‘Nurses and midwives could face £65,000 debts under government plans to raise tuition fees’, The Telegraph, 26 November 2015. Available at https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/nhs/12018994/Nurses-and-midwives-couldface-65000-debts-under-loans-plans.html; accessed 9 April 2021. Francis, R. (2013) Report of the Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust Public Inquiry: Executive Summary (Francis Report). London: The Stationery Office. Available at https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/ uploads/attachment_data/file/279124/0947.pdf; accessed 9 April 2021. Guardian Newspaper. (2013) ‘Minister denies cuts affect NHS patients’, The Guardian, 25 October. Available at https://www.business-live.co.uk/economicdevelopment/minister-denies-cuts-affect-nhs-3976441; accessed 10 April 2021. Ion, R., Jones, A. and Craven, R. (2016) ‘Raising concerns and reporting poor care in practice,’ Pre-edited Copy of Article Later Published in Nursing Standard, 31(15): 55–62, following peer-review. Available at https://rke.abertay.ac.uk/ ws/portalfiles/portal/8592210/Ion_ReportingPoorCare_Accepted_2016.pdf; accessed 10 April 2021. ITV News (2013) ‘Viewers describe poor nursing care in hospitals all over the UK’, ITV News, 5.20 pm. Available at https://www.itv.com/news/2013-04-22/yourstories-of-poor-nursing-care-in-hospitals-all-over-the-uk; accessed 10 April 2021. Jones, O. (2014) The Establishment and How They Get Away With It. London: Penguin. Lintern, S. (2013) ‘Exclusive: Francis criticises nurse leadership’, Nursing Times, 14 May 2013. Available at https://www.nursingtimes.net/roles/nurse-managers/ exclusive-francis-criticises-nurse-leadership-14-05-2013/; accessed 9 April 2021. Maslow, A. (1943/2013) A Theory of Human Motivation. New York: Martino Fine Books. Matthews-King, A. (2018a) ‘Mental health care crisis looming because trainee nurses are being driven away by bursary cuts, MPs warn’. Available at http://www. independent.co.uk/news/health/mental-health-care-crisis-trainee-nurses-bursarycuts-staffing-recruitment-support-quality-a8177981.html; accessed 2 May 2021. Matthews-King, A. (2018b) ‘Nursing course applications fall for second year after student bursary scrapped’. Available at https://www.independent.co.uk/news/ health/nursing-applications-ucas-course-drop-nhs-grants-funding-debt-tuitionfees-costs-a8191546.html; accessed 9 May 2021. McDonnell, P. (2023) What Happened to Nursing? Dorset: September Books (in preparation). Merrifield, N. (2013) ‘Nursing has “let itself down” on useful research’: available at https://www.nursingtimes.net/news/research-and-innovation/nursing-has-letitself-down-on-useful-research-22-04-2016/; accessed 12 July 2022. Nightingale, F. (1859) Notes on Nursing. London: Harrison. Nursing Times Review (2012) ‘What are the barriers to good mentoring?’. Available at https://www.nursingtimes.net/roles/nurse-managers/what-are-the-barriersto-good-mentoring-21-09-2012/; accessed 24 April 2021. Ousey, K. (2011) ‘The changing face of student nurse education and training programmes,’ Wounds UK, 7(1): 70–76. Available at http://eprints.hud.ac.uk/id/ eprint/10084/1/ouseycontent_9838.pdf; accessed 24 April 2021.

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12 Developing new research networks in Latvia Linda Pavītola and L āsma Latsone

Introduction Education is considered one of the most important factors for ensuring the growth, competitiveness and sustainability of the Latvian economy, as advocated in medium and long-term policy planning documents developed by the Ministry of Education and Science: see The Guidelines for the Development of Education for 2014–2020 (2013); Guidelines for the Development of Science, Technology and Innovation for 2014–2020 (2013) and the Ministry of Regional Development and Local Government of the Republic of Latvia (Sustainable Development Strategy for Latvia to 2030) (2013). Consequently, specific policy issues are prioritised, including progression towards the provision of a high-quality education for all. This is to ensure the shift towards the development and achievement of competences at all educational levels and to create a balance between education, science, society, politics and the national economy on both a local and global scale. Currently, the Latvian education system is in process of shifting towards this kind of competence-based approach; this requires a revision and improvement of the content of schools curricula and a change in teaching approaches, from a didactic to a more student-centred form. The aim now is to cut down on the fragmentation of school subjects and ensure that pupils are able to use the knowledge they acquire in real-life situations. To achieve these goals, pupils need to learn to develop capacity in thinking critically, engaging in co-operative learning and finding answers for themselves. Thus, the meaning of lessons is actively constructed by students, working collaboratively with one another and the teacher, not simply acquired and internalised from external sources. This then becomes the aim and focus of the learning process. According to the European Social Fund project ‘Competence-based approach to the content of learning’, as implemented by the National Center for Educational Content (Skola(School)2030, 2016), the main aim of a competence-based approach is to ensure improvement in the quality of education according to the strategic goals of Latvian education policy, as set out in the Education Policy Outlook: Latvia (2017). A related aim is to reform the general content of education, now focused on delivering a competence-based education system. DOI: 10.4324/9781351053372-12

168  Linda Pav ītola and L āsma Latsone It is anticipated that the achievement of these two aims will promote the competitiveness of Latvian education in the local and global context (Skola(School)2030, 2016). For this process to be efficient, according to Olina et al. (2018) and Purēns (2017), the findings of educational research should contribute to supporting and extending the theoretical and practical knowledge base of both academics and teachers in order to improve teaching and learning practices and educational processes as a whole. We two authors, positioned as academics and involved in research activities and teacher education in Latvia, are caught up in these movements. Part of our job, as is the expectation of academics everywhere, is to work with knowledge and produce and disseminate texts that show how our learning informs our practices. However, it is widely acknowledged that being an academic does not mean only the pursuit of knowledge and its dissemination. Authors such as Hyland (2007) and Murray (2012) confirm that although the business of conducting a research project and publishing its results is part of being an academic, it is not enough just to explore theoretically different philosophies and approaches: theoretical knowledge itself needs to be rooted in personal experience. This can take place in social and cultural contexts where academics undertake their scientific activities, learn the practices and techniques involved, understand and elaborate theoretical models and interpret the research results by appreciating the meaning of these experiences for real-life practices (Brookfield, 1995; Merriam, 2009). These issues are especially relevant to academics who are involved in teaching and research in higher education: they are expected to be proactive agents of change, and engage with the many possible challenges that are inevitable features of this process. However, different people have different interpretations of what being ‘an academic’ involves. Here is what it generally means in a Latvian context.

The status and role of academics in the context of Latvia According to some dictionaries an ‘academic’ is defined as a teacher or scholar in a university or other institute of higher education; someone who is a learned person but is somewhat inexperienced in practical matters; whose knowledge is based on ideas and theories in the existing literatures but is not necessarily related to the practicalities of real life (Cambridge Dictionary, n.d.; MerriamWebster Online Dictionary, n.d.). We two authors strongly believe that in higher education, academics are and should be individuals engaged in teaching and/or research; and that the practical implementation of research outcomes should be achieved through engagement in collaborative networks with practitioners in the field. In our view, this focus on collaborative networking is fundamental to the work of academics and influences the meaning they give to their professional lives. In Latvia, the current situation is that higher education is going through a rapid process of change at a policy level, with direct implications for the status of academics. While academic positions are stipulated in the Law on Institutions of

Developing new research networks in Latvia 169 Higher Education (henceforth LIHE, 1995), research positions are decided by the Law on Scientific Activity (henceforth LSA, 2013). However, these kinds of distinctions can lead to a disconnect between institutionally based teaching and research tasks. While the LIHE requires that academic positions should comprise research as well as teaching activities, this often does not happen in practice, or, if it does, takes place only to a limited extent. Further, this clear separation of the two tracks (academic and research) seems unusual from an international perspective since in many other countries academic jobs tend to comprise responsibilities for both teaching and research. Latvian national policy documents do not share this view. An example of the differences may be seen in the recent report on the management of higher education in Latvia (Academic Careers in Latvia, 2018, developed in cooperation with the World Bank), which examines the links between academic career and employment conditions according to specifically designed criteria. This means that several problematic areas emerge. First, it presents the separation of academic and scientific work as a problem in higher education; the implication is that, instead of holding one integrated academic position, staff members often fulfil several roles, and this in itself tends to get in the way of encouraging a view of academic and scientific work as a unified practice. Also, the need to combine different positions and tasks can easily lead to a view of the work as fragmented. This, combined with a high workload, can create unfavourable conditions for academic work and development, a serious situation if the aim is to strengthen the connection between teaching and research. Another obstacle is that a tenure-track model is normal in the current Latvian education system: it means that academics get elected to their positions for a period of only six years, which does not necessarily contribute to a sense of stability. Consequently, in Latvia, an academic career often transforms into a set of different and often unrelated jobs, making the career itself seem fragmented, as well as a less attractive career option. Such framing conditions can also have a strong negative influence on building research networks, thus also seriously jeopardising potential opportunities for collaborative work. Looking at the current situation from a theoretical, more analytical perspective, one way of approaching the complexity of the career development of academics is to identify and distinguish between three different kinds of academic career, as described by Gläser and Laudel (2015). These would stand as three parallel and mutually interlinked careers: • • •

A cognitive career, referring to aspects of research; A community career, referring to an academic’s position within the scientific community, including their reputation, status, and role; An organisational career, referring to the academic’s organisational positions (Gläser and Laudel 2015: 13).

An analysis of this model in the context of Latvia shows that, in general, an academic’s career is highly fragmented, and the conditions for a specifically

170  Linda Pav ītola and L āsma Latsone designated cognitive career are not always supported by organisations with different priorities, so this can make progress in one’s academic work and career(s) comparatively challenging. Further, even a cursory survey shows that many new scientists tend to be somewhat pessimistic about pursuing a potential academic and research career in Latvia, while others appear to lack the motivation to continue along their existing pathways. In turn, the value of the community career is often underestimated (Gläser and Laudel, 2015: 13): this represents a potential huge loss to the education system, because such a career is premised on the idea of sharing knowledge through open dialogue and communicating the research results to communities, thereby strengthening links between different professional priorities, with possible implications for curricula content and delivery. Consequently, while most academics are willing to cooperate with colleagues from other higher education establishments, they are not so keen to get involved in academic leadership or collaborative research as part of a wider scientific community: doing so would represent a distraction away from the main interest of working with communities to develop the kind of knowledge that will be useful to the community itself. In our view, it is only through promoting openness and criticality that the research process itself can become educational and thereby meaningful for all; it is only through collaboration and networking locally, nationally and internationally, and by listening in, sharing experiences, providing feedback and personal self-reflection (Pavitola, Latsone and Bethere, 2016: 107) that the policy-­recommended orientation towards social and economic outcomes can be assured. Co-operation should serve as the grounds for the improvement of the education system: this may be done through an emphasis on collaboration with other agencies, including higher education institutions, municipalities, general educational institutions, teachers’ professional associations, nongovernmental organisations and experts in the educational sector, as well as international professional associations. Unfortunately, in the context of Latvia, the outcomes of traditional academic educational research do not show the realisation of such a vision: this kind of research does not always reach its target audience and often cannot be easily implemented through the everyday processes of teaching and learning. Some major reasons for this situation and its potential drawbacks could be the lack of continuity among different research programmes and underdeveloped research networks: these inevitably hinder the integration of established knowledge within educational processes and reduce the potential social impact of educational research (Pavitola, Latsone and Bethere, 2016: 99). So, considering the findings of these theoretical considerations, we believe that a possible solution lies in the creation of action research projects, where academics work together with professionals, with specific though negotiated aims. These would focus largely on linking academic educational research with classroom teaching practices: the aim now would be to further develop teachers’ professionalism in teaching, improve teaching practices and develop an extended knowledge base for teaching and learning. Thus, through collaboration and

Developing new research networks in Latvia 171 networking, the research process can become a powerful and meaningful means for generating, testing, sharing and implementing new ideas and knowledge in educational contexts.

Action research as a means of creating research networks within community As academics involved in teacher education, we see action research as a powerful way to integrate theory and practice, given that it requires the identification of a problematic issue, participation in imagining a possible solution, and taking appropriate and considered action. It could in fact become one of the most powerful methodologies for academic researchers and teacher practitioners who wish to support and implement the proposed National policy changes. It can be done by encouraging and contributing to the capacity for reflection, and the questioning and rethinking of existing practices; this would enable all participants involved in the research to make wise educational judgements about what should be done to bring research results to life through the reality of practices. Schools in Latvia need teachers who, most importantly, and in co-­operation with other colleagues, are able to plan and implement learning processes that will provide pupils with opportunities for the development of the kind of knowledge, skills and attitudes necessary for life in the twenty-first century. Action research can help to extend educators’ reflective competence and practical know-how in the field of education, as well as improve their capacity to critically evaluate their professional activities (Brookfield, 1995). Also, it is important to appreciate that there are different kinds of action and reflection. According to Schön (1987), reflection can be viewed as reflection-in-­ action and reflection-on-­action, where reflection-in-action takes place during the action phase of an event, while reflection-on-action takes place after the event. Further, based on Schön’s (1987) studies, Farrell (2013) has also developed the related concept of reflection-for-action. This involves thinking about future actions with the intention of improving or changing practice. It also invites teachers to anticipate what might occur during their practice, as well as strengthens their capacity to reflect on past experiences. According to Farrell (2013), the main problem teachers face when engaged in reflection-for-action is which aspect of knowledge they should reflect on, in order to make appropriate improvements or qualitative changes in their own practice. Reflectionfor-action can help teachers to review what has been accomplished and identify possible constructive guidelines to be used in the teaching process (Olteanu, 2016). This is where academics come in: they can support teacher-practitioners in reaching their desired professional goals. And here they provide a most important service, given that the current situation, both in teacher professional education, as well as in academic settings, is that there is a considerable gap between research and its practical application. This is indeed where we see the greatest need for using action research principles and creating collaborative research networks among academics and practitioners in the field. Further, such

172  Linda Pav ītola and L āsma Latsone a move would address one of the main aims in the ongoing reform of the education system towards a contemporary competence-based system of education, and thus bridge the gap between scholarly activity, practice and research by involving teachers-practitioners in doing research and in the regular communication of research outcomes. However, this raises questions about possible new requirements for teachers involved in continuing professional development programmes: these requirements include the acquisition of skills and concepts relevant to implementing the new content of education and emphasising the reorientation from knowledge transfer to the joint creation of innovations. These changing circumstances require wise educational experience and competence for personal and professional self-expression, while, at the same time, pointing to the need for openness in collaboration. Given all these considerations, it is important to consider the options for creating powerful research networks within the community, so that the full social and economic impact of our research can be ensured, thereby affirming the need to develop new ways of implementing a competence-based approach. Through our own research studies, we hope to realise the potential of action research for emphasising the value of networks appropriate for the community-oriented career development of academics.

The context and design of the study The research context for our study is the teacher continuing professional development programme ‘Pedagogy’, delivered at Liepaja University (henceforth LiepU). This programme has so far involved 225 participants who have studied and successfully completed the 2015–2018 programme. The core features of the programme are reflection on and an analysis of how the topics of pedagogy, psychology and educational sciences may be integrated through the linking of practical aspects and theoretical knowledge, as well as through the analysis and presentation of examples of good practice. This has all been done within the context of acquiring experience of practical teamwork through reflection on the practices involved. During the study process, the teachers are required to conduct a piece of action research on a topic relevant to and significant for their professional practice. They are asked to explore the chosen issue from a pedagogical and, possibly, psychological perspective, emphasising its potential collaborative aspects and ensuring appropriate feedback to the academics who run the continuing professional development programme. Further, considerable weight is given to the evaluation of the quality of results and research outcomes, and a consideration of the potential transfer of research findings into general practices. The main aim of our research is to investigate the possibilities of creating collaborative networks between academics and practitioners through realising the potentials of action research, as well as generating ideas about extending research-informed practice and practical know-how into the field of education in the wider context of change.

Developing new research networks in Latvia 173 Our research questions are as follows: • •

How can we as academics use action research as a way to improve pedagogical practices in light of contemporary educational challenges? What networks can be created among academics and practitioners in order to cope with ongoing changes in education?

In the research process, we, as academics, have taken an active part as advisors for our students, who are themselves all practising teachers: our brief has been  to ensure that they understand the principles of action research, guide them throughout the research and finally assess their research results. At the same time, we have also reflected on our own practice, coming to provisional conclusions about how to address any areas that need improvement. Our methodology has included using a qualitative research design based on a social constructivist perspective; and we have used case study as a strategy to explore the potentials of action research within the specific context of improving pedagogical practices to meet the requirements of a competence based approach. Data have been analysed using qualitative content analysis of the conduct and findings of a number of selected action research studies undertaken by our students. They have included teachers of various specialities and from various formal and non-formal educational institutions (including pre-school, special, general and professional education institutions) from different regions in Latvia. Because of the diversity of respondents, the research topics have included a wide range of topical issues, relevant for both national and regional contexts, about contemporary pedagogical processes related to how respondents are positioned professionally in their own settings. Examples that illustrate this diversity include: • • • • • • •

the search for solutions in issues of young people’s education and upbringing in a changing society; the qualitative analysis and development of teachers’ professional education in the context of a multicultural society; the development of healthy lifestyle habits; transition problems from preschool to primary school; didactics in school subjects; the application of aspects of art and music pedagogy when working with children; and many other topics that emerged throughout the enquiry.

We gathered data from 225 papers about ongoing research: using a criterion sampling strategy, we selected 65 papers that met at least three out of the four criteria set out below concerning the basic principles of action research (McNiff, 2013): that is, progress in the direction of reflection in, on and for action: 1 Reviewing one’s own current practice; 2 Identifying an area requiring improvement;

174  Linda Pav ītola and L āsma Latsone 3 Imagining a possible solution/s and trying it/them out; 4 Evaluating and/or adapting the new practice in light of the evaluation of new practices. The reason why we did not select some research papers, even though they emphasised topical issues in education, was mainly that they did not meet the criteria: specifically they lacked focus in terms of the study and evaluation of the author’s own pedagogical activity. Some participants had still opted for a traditionalist approach to their studies, structuring them as the study and application of existing theory without considering their own attitudes or possible insights into their own pedagogical practices, and without exploring, suggesting and testing possible pedagogical solutions. Consequently, these respondents struggled with formulating and articulating the research topic, research aims and research question; discussions with other professionals in the field were missing as well as any attempts to ‘dig deeper’, to collaborate or engage in networking. This might have been because of certain attitudes such as ‘I already know how to do it’ or ‘it is not worth doing’. Some participants showed a lack of interest in the action research process by trying to adapt already available data to their current studies, or by describing the research process with the least possible effort. Consequently, even though we had supported our students in choosing their research topics, and discussed possible problem-solving strategies as well as ideas for implementing their research results in practice, in many cases, the desired result was still not achieved. This fact shows that some teachers still lacked a basic understanding about the processes involved and the potential benefits of action research, as well as raising questions about our position as academics – could we have explained the principles of action research and its significance in educational practice more effectively, or could we have done things differently?

Analysis of the findings The research sample was analysed according to criteria derived from our theoretical findings. These corresponded with the action research principles outlined by McNiff (2013) and with aspects of our Model for Promoting Openness and Criticality in Educational Research (Pavitola, Latsone and Bethere, 2016: 107), as well as by emphasising the value of the process of reflection-for-action (Farrell, 2013; Olteanu, 2016). We identified the following criteria: The research studies had to demonstrate: • •

Critical reflection on one’s own pedagogical practice and ability to identify any aspects requiring improvement; Identification and formulation of research question/s and use of appropriate strategies for exploring potential solutions;

Developing new research networks in Latvia 175 • •

Development of research networks for promoting research-informed practices in education; Evaluation of possibilities and new strategic directions for the implementation of the findings in broader pedagogical practices.

The most frequent finding among the studies was that teachers had reflected on their practice: this occurred in 29 cases, whereas reflection in practice, where respondents analysed and reflected on their professional experience while conducting the research occurred in only 20 cases. Regarding reflection for practice, only in 16 cases did this kind of reflection result in meaningful feedback; and even less, perhaps, in a real critical evaluation of possible challenges and potential strategies for improving educational practice. As reflection for practice is one of the main preconditions for doing action research, the results of this study indicate that practising teachers need support and guidance when self-assessing their own pedagogical activity, or in discovering how research results might be implemented in ongoing practice. It appears that considerable support from academics, as well as from experience is needed to learn the skills required for reflection for practice. When it came to analysing the selected action research studies, our first step was to check whether the first criterion had been observed, i.e. that teachers could reflect on their pedagogical action in various pedagogical situations and were able to identify areas where improvement was needed. The majority of the research studies were focused on current issues in educational spaces and discourses, such as ‘Self-initiative of youth in raising awareness of current issues in the arts’, ‘Developing research skills using peer instruction methods’, ‘Opportunities for purposeful computer time for learners in Grades 1–3’, ‘Development of pupils’ argumentation skills’, ‘Supporting the ability of learners to introduce themselves to the labour market’, ‘Scientifically-oriented education lessons as a means for social integration and breaking of stereotypes’ and so on. However, some teachers chose to explore more general and widely-defined phenomena, including initiatives for collaboration with parents, communication skills and Orff methodology for rhythm development. It became clear that some students struggled with identifying a particular aspect that needed attention in current practices without generalising the issue to wider contexts. This kind of general approach to defining the research subject might also have been because of a lack of appropriate knowledge, or reluctance to go deeper into the research problem. It could also possibly have been rooted in teachers’ lack of confidence in their research skills, even though research skills, as a performance indicator of professional competence, are required in the National Teacher’s Standards (Izglītības un Zinātnes ministrija/Ministry of Education and Science). So it might be concluded that the development of research skills is something to be supported by academics and developed through engagement in common networks and research projects. Regarding the second criterion, that is, the identification and formulation of research question/s and use of matching strategies for exploring potential

176  Linda Pav ītola and L āsma Latsone solutions, we observed that research questions were often formulated cautiously, avoiding any issues that might appear challenging or problematic. This finding emphasises the need to address how to raise appropriate research questions: they should be critical and searching and get to the heart of the problem, not just stay at the level of gathering factual information. These kinds of critically challenging research questions tended to come mostly from novice teachers who posed questions such as ‘How to find a common language with young people aged 11–15’, ‘How do I involve and encourage a child who has been made to attend classes?’, ‘How to create museum lessons dealing with historic events of local significance to stimulate students’ interest’, or ‘How can pupils’ observation and research skills be developed during natural science lessons in primary school?’ Teachers involved in the study tended to stop at the level of describing their pedagogical experiences, which, although a fine way to share examples of good practice, do not require development of the skills of structuring, describing and explaining experience according to specified criteria. Consequently, some authors found it difficult to choose appropriate research methods, or to describe how their study was progressing, or how data were being gathered and results obtained. Even if the research process itself was reported as significant and interesting, a reader could easily get the impression, at least sometimes, that an author had just tried to pad out a text with information often not even remotely connected with the particular study. These findings point to the importance of the support academics can offer to teacher-practitioners by working with them and helping them to develop original ideas and transform them into practice, as well as strengthening the commitment of both sides to tackle problematic issues. In relation to the third criterion – the development of research networks to promote research-informed practices in education – the situation tends to be highly problematic. It was noticeable that there was too little action and participation, including lack of open dialogue, networking, working in interdisciplinary teams or collaboration; this in spite of the fact that the Professional Standards state that teachers must get involved in the development of their professionalism and in educational matters in general. They can do this through collaboration with colleagues and through planning and implementation of pedagogical solutions, as well as through engaging in policy-making, whether within an educational institution, local community or at national level. We found, in most action research samples, that the main cooperative agents were the teacher and the student; only rarely were parents or other colleagues involved. Wider cooperative networks were not considered. Further, it appeared that in most cases, co-operation with other educators was not considered significant even within the context of a single educational institution. Consequently, it became evident that the lack of cooperation between colleagues and the lack of networking would hinder the implementation of an interdisciplinary approach that underpins the competence-based approach, which requires the development of teamwork, as well as increased interest and

Developing new research networks in Latvia 177 skills in co-ordinating the content of different learning subjects. This finding had implications: specifically, that academics like us must be more open and ready to involve colleagues and practitioners in our research; moreover, we must teach our student teachers to develop professional networking skills for improvement of educational practices. However, it was still the case that teachers value collaboration with colleagues working in different situations: one participant commented: ‘Collaboration with colleagues is really important, so we must be able to work together, both professionally and on a daily basis, and be able to agree and co-operate.’ Thus, the analysis of these findings points to the importance of the need for collaborative networks in order to implement the research results and recommendations, as well as to improve the quality of the learning process. Collaboration within the community is vital, given that teachers must be familiar with their contexts in order to link learning content to everyday life. Academics could be seen as the main agents to lead and support this process. The fourth criterion –  the evaluation of possibilities and looking for new strategic directions to implement the findings in pedagogical practices – is highly significant, as it shows the value of reflection-for action (Farrell, 2013; Olteanu, 2016). There is demand for teachers who are capable of initiating a paradigm shift in general education by moving the focus away from the straightforward transfer of information to the acquisition and development of competences, as based on the School2030 (2016) recommendations. However, we found that most of the research papers do not contain mention of possible solutions; they simply pose questions regarding pedagogical practices. Only in some cases (16, as mentioned above) was an effort made to challenge assumptions and create innovative ways of solving problematic issues, as well as evaluating and adapting them to a particular learning process. In this context, positive examples such as the following should be noted: ‘Involvement of students in cycling and improving the environment of the local community’, ‘Adaptation methods for children in Montessori classes’, ‘Exercises, games and pedagogical techniques to develop cooperative skills in mixed-age students’ drama groups’, ‘Teaching vegetable growing skills for students with mild mental development disorders’. Regardless of these examples of good practice, the findings of our study point to the need to develop the skills of reflection-for-practice, where attitudes towards one’s work, self-assessment and self-reflection serve as preconditions for the development of professional competence. This process promotes change by creating collaborative networks, guiding others in new strategic directions, and contributing to the implementation of research-informed practice. Thus, the support of academics with both academic and practical competencies is of the utmost significance for its success. The findings of our research imply the development of diverse possibilities for using action research as a means for refining pedagogical practices within a contemporary culture of fast-changing educational challenges. This is demonstrated by teachers from our programme who have offered positive feedback

178  Linda Pav ītola and L āsma Latsone about the value of action research and ideas for further pedagogical action. Just a few examples: After conducting the research, I understood that regardless of where the learning takes place, whether in the classroom or as distance learning, personal contact with the teacher and her feedback is very important to the learner. In my future pedagogical practice, I will more actively use solutions provided by modern technologies and introduce a video response system. The research results also indicated that active communication between the students and the sense of belonging to a particular group are very important and can act as additional motivators in the study process. A few examples are: •

• •

‘My action research has helped me to better understand my own activities in relation to providing feedback for students with the help of audio/ video files’; ‘The best and the most effective way to motivate a student is to encourage their future activity and point out primarily what they have achieved’; ‘At the moment, the main evidence of my professionalism is in the recognition that comes from the pupils, and their enjoyment of our interactions, both during lessons and at breaktime.’

The research sample also reveals other common problematic issues. Much of the content of the action research studies is focused more on a teacher’s activities in terms of what should be taught and done, rather than on students’ reflection on, participation in and understanding of what is being taught. Also, the ­question of why something needs to be considered: is it just because of the need to follow a certain programme or because students need to achieve specific learning outcomes, skills and competencies? The research focus often remains on a teacher-­centred approach rather than a student-centred approach, a recurrent topic in contemporary education processes. Here are a few examples of some of the subjective factors involved: •

•

‘The aim of my action research is how to prepare for my pedagogical work with 13–14-year-old students, involving the teaching of composition and working with the material’; ‘As a teacher, I must raise learners’ interest and demonstrate that economic knowledge is essential for their education.’

Also significant is the ability to notice one’s own limitations and, even more, strengths, as it presents opportunities for improving and refining one’s own professional competence. It is also important to be able to evaluate not only students’ performance but also one’s own pedagogical activity, to allow for the development of new insights and a revisiting of long-known ideas but now from a new perspective. Teachers usually relate strongly to their own personal

Developing new research networks in Latvia 179 experience, so it can often be difficult for them to change their attitudes and start doing things differently. As two colleagues commented: ‘It is a matter of self-analysis – who I am as a person and as a teacher’; ‘I am starting to change my mind.’ These insights are valuable and can contribute to teachers’ ongoing professional development.

Conclusions The findings of both our theoretical and empirical studies point to the conclusion that action research can serve as a valuable means for exploring specific educational issues to do with improving educational processes and with implementing a competence-based approach. However, our research shows that in a Latvian context, action research is not used sufficiently, and there is urgent need to disseminate ideas more widely regarding the possible advantages and opportunities for teacher-researchers as well as for academics. Having said this, it has to be remembered that not only teacher-researchers but also academic researchers struggle with formulating research questions in such a way as to be significant for improving pedagogical practices. It is essential to explore issues relevant for today’s educational cultures, such as the need to develop critical thinking, cooperation, communication and self-directed learning skills, as well as the ability to identify opportunities for the practical application of new knowledge in different pedagogical situations. There is also need for professional and competent teachers who are able to implement flexible teaching and learning processes in order to reach stipulated learning outcomes; teachers who are capable of creating their own individual approaches, developing interdisciplinary approaches in learning contents and are able to interpret the curriculum standards as well as to develop new curricula. There is urgent need to share experience and knowledge: this can be achieved through engaging in action research. So, to summarise the findings from the analysis of representative action research papers from our research, we would like to point to the importance of research-for-action that requires both collaboration among academics in their professional communities and the creation of research networks between educational institutions, professional associations and policymakers. They also require the empowerment of teacher-researchers as active participants in these cooperative networks, in order to cope with changes in the field of general education. This would be of mutual benefit to both sides: the professional careers of teachers would be supported, whilst also strengthening community career opportunities for academics. As part of networking, we academics can offer meaningful and informed support to help practitioners decide which issues need attention, help in identifying needs compatible with a competence-based approach and suggest ways forward. By doing so, we strongly believe that teacher-researchers will become

180  Linda Pav ītola and L āsma Latsone more confident in using their pedagogical knowledge, skills and practices in order to reach the goals set out for the shift to a competence-based approach. Consequently, research networks will promote the practice of finding solutions to existing challenges, and sharing and communicating research outcomes with identified audiences within the community. Anticipated outcomes will contribute to: • • • •

improving the process of teaching and learning by demonstrating the interconnectedness between study, practice and research; constructing and extending theoretical and practical knowledge and encouraging new mindsets; appreciation of research results and creating ideas for further studies; establishing sustainable networking cultures by working together as professionals and academics towards commonly identified goals.

The empirical findings of our research also raise considerations about strategies for strengthening existing collaboration between school networks and educational authorities and ensuring the effective development of research networks, based on cooperative partnership principles. They also raise questions about the accessibility of information and openness, as well as providing regular feedback and critical self-reflection. Regarding future prospects, the plan is to communicate the benefits of action research and involvement in research networks to different audiences; these include checking that the collaborative experience of academics and teachers in the local community will be protected, as well as the participation of academic staff in advisory institutions. This could lead to a heightened understanding of current issues in the educational spaces of Europe and the world, including the need to develop partnerships for sustainable community development and the establishment of a partnership network inside and outside the community. Networking with social partners will also promote the identification of important research areas and themes and help with disseminating research results in line with national research priorities, as well as the strategic development needs of the city and the region. We strongly believe that our research findings advocate the value of researchfor-action as an investment in expanding the boundaries of knowledge and research skills of teachers. It would also support further research with the power to contribute to informed and practice-based education and innovation progress, thus creating a unified vision and understanding of the ongoing changes within the education system and searching creatively for answers to new and challenging questions.

References Academic Careers in Latvia: Status Quo Report. (2018) World Bank Reimbursable Advisory Service on Higher Education in Latvia, ESF project No. 8.3.6.1/16/I/001 “Participation in international educational studies”. European Union: ESF.

Developing new research networks in Latvia 181 Brookfield, S. D. (1995) Becoming a Critically Reflective Teacher. San Francisko: Jossey-Bass Publishers. Cambridge Dictionary. (n.d.) Retrieved from https://dictionary.cambridge.org/ dictionary/english/academic Education Policy Outlook: Latvia OECD. (2017). OECD, European Commission. Farrell, T. S. (2013) ‘Reflecting on ESL teacher expertise: a case study.’ System, 41(4), 1070–1082. Gläser, J., & Laudel, G. (2015) The Three Careers of an Academic. Berlin: Zentrum Technik und Gesellschaft. Guidelines for the Development of Education for 2014-2020 (2013). Ministry of Education and Science of the Republic of Latvia. Guidelines for the Development of Science, Technology and Innovation for 20142020. (2013) Ministry of Education and Science of the Republic of Latvia. Hyland, K. (2007) Writing in the Academy: Reputation, Education and Knowledge. London: University of London: Institute of London Press. Law on Institutions of Higher Education, (1995) 179(462). Saeima: “Latvijas Vēstnesis”. Law On Scientific Activity. (2013) Valsts Valodas centrs (State Language Centre). McNiff, J. (2013) Action Research for Professional Development. Concise advice for new and experienced action researchers. Dorset: September Books. Merriam, S. B. (2009) Qualitative Research: A Guide to Design and Implementation. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers. Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.merriamwebster.com/dictionary/academic?src=search-dict-box Murray, R. E. (2012) ‘Developing a community of research practice’. British Educational Research Journal, 38(5), 783–800. Olina, Z., Namsone, D., France, I., Cakane, L., Pestovs, P., Bertule, D., … Butkevica, A. (2018) Māc īšan ās lietprat ībai. (D. Namsone, Ed.) Rīga: LU Akadēmiskais apgāds. Olteanu, C. (2016) ‘Reflection and the object of learning’. International Journal for Lesson and Learning Studies, 5(1), 60–75. Pavitola, L., Latsone, L., & Bethere, D. (2016) ‘Perspectives on criticality and openness in educational research in the context of Latvia’. In Values and Virtues in Higher Education Research: Critical Perspectives (pp. 94–109). Oxon, New York: Routledge. Purēns, V. (2017) Kā att īst īt kompetenci. Rīga: RaKa. Schön, A. D. (1987) Educating the Reflective Practitioner. San Francisco: JosseyBass Publishers. Skola(School)2030. (2016) Kompetenču pieeja mācību saturā (Competence-based approach to the content of learning). ESF project Nr.8.3.1.1/16/I/002. Valsts izglītības satura centrs (National Center for Educational Content). Sustainable Development Strategy of Latvia until 2030. (2013) Ministry of Regional Development and Local Government of the Republic of Latvia.

13 Afterword Jean McNiff

Envoi We are at the end of a writing process that has taken months, years even, to bring to conclusion. The process itself has taken the form of individual and collective action research, an experience of rich collaborative dialogue in the development of new ideas and knowledge and the production of texts: between editor and authors, and sometimes between authors themselves. But all writing must come to an end at some point: the final full stop must be written, the final text properly referenced. New ideas generated through the writing process are put to one side, to be worked with another day. ‘So what?’, you might ask. ‘What has been achieved here? What is the importance of all these fine chapters? What is their significance? Is the aim to contribute to an ever-expanding public body of ideas? Or challenge existing ones? What is the meaning of it all?’ Here is my understanding of its meaning, and its importance, for it is an important book, a very important one. This is so on several counts, including those about the power of ideas, the importance of academic ideas, and the significance of writing as public action.

The power of ideas The philosopher Isaiah Berlin (1992) writes about the power of ideas: Over a hundred years ago, the German poet Heine warned the French not to underestimate the power of ideas: philosophical concepts nurtured in the stillness of a professor’s study could destroy a civilisation. (Berlin 1992: 192) There is something very special about working with ideas, often understood as currency for academics but in reality the lifeblood of everyone. They emerge when least expected, and spark a whole cascade of new thinking. For Polanyi (1958), it is about knowing tacitly. Such knowledge cannot be taught; it is acquired through an intellectual tendency towards curiosity, a pressing need to DOI: 10.4324/9781351053372-13

Afterword 183 know. In an episode from Star Trek (2002), Captain Jean-Luc Picard asks Data, an Android: ‘How can you be sure?’ Data responds: ‘I aspire, sir, to be better than I am.’ We can all be better than we think we can be. This is a core feature of what it means to be an academic: a desire to know for the sake of knowing, and then not to be satisfied but to strive to know more. But such knowing as described in this book, the fusion of practice-based and academic knowledge, is not just insider knowledge: it is knowledge from the inside (Harkness and Ingold, 2013–2018), knowledge in the blood, as Jansen (2009) would say: knowledge that is acquired almost by sensory osmosis and supplemented by extensive intellectual and emotional engagement. Further they can respond with confidence to Mary Midgley’s (1989) question, ‘What is knowledge for?’ They know their topics: they have practical knowledge, the knowledge of application; procedural knowledge, the knowledge how to conduct a practice; and the wisdom of experience to know when to move and when to pause (tacit knowledge) (Polanyi, 1958). They know what they are talking about, and we readers have trust in them.

The power of academic ideas Ideas are central to an academic’s life, for several reasons. Their power – that is, those ideas written specifically for an academic audience – lies partly in the prestige value and legitimating capacity accorded them; partly in their use value in the public domain. Like it or not, and no matter what one might read in the media, academia still has prestige value: the university is still held as the highest accrediting body for what counts as legitimate knowledge; the academy is still held as the gold standard in terms of what counts as legitimate knowledge and who makes decisions about this. While this view may be contradicted by the evidence of experience – that is, that you can learn potentially just as much from attending a Further Education college, or even from work experience – nothing will ever detract from the cultural value of attending university as part of one’s life education. Your attendance is entry to a prestigious members-only club. The currency for this club is the understanding and use of academic ideas: that is, ideas that have been produced and tested against the stringent feedback of peers. This is the rationale behind the peer review system of academic texts, especially journals. Regardless of what people may think in terms of the use-value of universities themselves (now everywhere turned into self-serving, self-financing businesses, and sometimes even isolating themselves from the rest of the community), it is still the prestige value that counts for many people. And at the heart of this is the idea of academic ideas, produced, shared and reviewed by an academic audience, without outside interference, and thereby pronounced legitimate.

184  Jean McNiff One of the problems of this situation, however, is that too many academics take refuge behind the word ‘academic’. Many find it difficult to write in any way other than for an academic audience, and challenging to write for a more general readership. This is one of the outstanding features of this book: that academics with prestigious CVs and institutional positions are prepared to write for a more general audience, to present their work from a position of wishing to contribute to greater public understanding and to the public good. And they deserve full recognition of the importance of their efforts and the insights they bring from a range of life experiences. This brings us to the third point.

The significance of writing as public action In writing you make your mark, literally and figuratively. You make your physical mark on a surface, with a pen or on a keyboard; and you make your figurative mark by making your presence felt in the public domain. A key theorist in this regard is Hannah Arendt, for whom key ideas formed a lynchpin around which she built her texts. She believed that the task of thinking people is to give an account of action as taking responsibility for the world (Arendt, 1958), where the world is understood as a space for action and freedom. Such ideas may be explored and brought into real life in the public domain: this is also the job of academics. They encourage us to see ourselves in relation to the world, and then to act. And finally: If you are someone who works with ideas, who listens and reads and makes ideas their own, who always has a question that includes ‘How?’ and ‘Why?’ and ‘What for?’, and who finds pleasure in finding things out, as Feynman did (2001), you can count yourself an academic, whether you work in an office, garden centre, or from home. We are all potentially academics; sometimes we just need a small push to believe it.

References Arendt, H. (1958) The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Berlin (1992) (ed. H. Hardy) The Power of Ideas. London: Pimlico. Feynman, R.P. (2001) The Pleasure of Finding Things Out. London: Penguin. Harkness, R. and T. Ingold. (2013–2018) Knowing From the Inside: Anthropology, Art, Architecture and Design. Project information: 2013–2018. Retrieved 23.8.2022 from https://www.research.ed.ac.uk/en/projects/knowing-from-theinside-anthropology-art-architecture-and-design Jansen, J. (2009) Knowledge in the Blood: Confronting Race and the Apartheid Past. Cape Town: UCT Press. Midgley, M. (1989) Wisdom, Information and Wonder: What is Knowledge For? London: Routledge. Polanyi, M. (1958) Personal Knowledge. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Star Trek: Nemesis (2002) episode from Star Trek: available at https://www.imdb. com/title/tt0253754/?ref_=tt_ch: accessed 23.8.2022.

Index

Abel-Smith, B. 158–160, 164 academic and vocational, structural divides 61 academic careers, different kinds of 169–170 academic citizens 2 academic competencies 11 academic cultures 4; as providing care 30; and injustice 44; 102 academic game 108 academic knowledge 91; as resource for critique 130, 132; legitimation of 41; prestige factors 183; problematics involved 41–42, 92; what counts as 41, 91–92, 121 academic life, as movement into the unknown 84; for promoting values of truthfulness, respect, authenticity and magnanimity 82 academic performance and income 106 academic practice, what counts as 102 academic research: nature of 4, 41; need to promote 114; importance of critique 121, 130; purpose of 4; separation from living practices 169 academic work: and power 101; interpretations of 4, 9, 91–92, 98; narrowing of 4; technologisation of 4. academics: and distribution of power 101; and forms of knowledge 44, 122; and creating pluralistic spaces 44; and influence 102; as dual professionals 5; as income streams 4; as academic citizens, as change agents 101–102; as everyday practitioners and informed citizens 2; as intellectuals 7; as learning from others 101; as proactive agents of change 168; as public educators 82; changing roles of

4–5; different perceptions of 2, 4–5, 7, 26, 104; freedom of 101; locations of 4–5; newer kinds of 7; positive factors 37; qualities of 103; responsibilities of 1–2, 4, 41–44, 102, 117, 168–169; pressures on 31–32, 35, 135; reflecting on histories of 107–108; speaking for themselves 5; supporting teachers 176; teachers as 135; transformational capacity 103; values of 103, 169; what they stand for 2, 5–6; work of 2–5, 8; where they work 5; who counts as? 7 ‘the Academy’ as public sphere 122 action and reflection, different kinds of 171 action research: as engaging with the world 116, 121–122; as improving professional practices 179; as integrating theory and practice 171 Action Research Network of the Americas 106, 113 action research projects 170 Ahmad, Athman Kyaruzi 94, 96, 104; Ahmad, A.K., Krogh, E. and Gjøtterud, S. 103 Albertazzi, D. and McDonnell, D. 86, 87 alienation 94 ‘alternative facts’ 80 Altschull, J.H. 6, 7, 8 Amin, A. 45, 56 Anyon, J. 109, 118 Appadurai, A. 6, 7–8 Appiah, K. 78, 86–87 Apple, M. 43 Applebaum, A. 87 Arendt, H. 79, 80, 82, 94, 103, 184 ARNA scope of 114–115

186  Index ‘as if’ thinking 110 authenticity 74, 82, 83, 87, 89, 90 authors, their positioning 4–5 Bakhtin, M. 45, 107, 118 Ball, S. 5, 8 Baly, M. 164 Bandura, A. 61, 70 Barnett, A. 88 Bathmaker, A.-M. and Avis, J. 61, 70 Baxter, J. 133 Bayram, N. 27, 38 Beckford, M. and Manning, S. 133 Bedford-Fenwick, E. 159 belonging as motivation 178 Benjamin, W. 77, 88 Berlin, I. 5, 8, 41, 182 Bernstein, R.J. 80, 88 Bhabha, H.K. 107, 118 Biesta, G.J.J. 88 Bjørndal, B. and Lieberg, S. 137–138, 149 Black, P. and William, D. 61, 70 Blatchford, P. et al. 59, 71; and Russell A. and Webster, R. 59, 71 Bohm, D. 93 Bosanquet, P., Radford, J. and Webster, R. 59, 71 Bottery, M. 135, 140, 149 Bourdieu, P. 159, 164 Boyer, E. 111, 117–118 Bruner, J. 61, 71 Briggs, A. 157, 164 Brookfield, S. 168, 171, 181 Buber, M. 49, 93, 98, 103 Buchan, J., Charlesworth, A., Grershlick, B. and Seccombe, I. 153, 164 Calhoun, C. 88 Campbell, N. 156, 164 ‘capacity building’ in universities 44 care as: core to nursing practice 157; erosion of concept 155; part of professional education 155 Carillion 154 Carr, W. and Kemmis, S. 146, 149 Cave, T. and Rowell, A. 154, 164 Cavendish, C. 156, 164 challenging assumptions 177 Chen, M. 16, 24 Chomsky, N. 2, 8 circumcision songs 121–122; metaphors of 127–128 citizens, all as knowers 122

Clandinin, J. and Connelly, M. 3, 8–9 Claxton, G. 60, 71 Clow, R. 59, 71 Clwyd, A. 153 Cochran-Smith, M. and Lytle, S. 111, 114, 118 Code, L. 8, 42, 43 Cole, L. 5, 8 Coles, J. et al. 37–38 collaborative working, benefits of 54, 59, 91, 170; dialogue 182; funding and 95; networks 177; value of 66–67, 70, 168, 180 Collins, P.H. and Bilge, S. 7, 9 Comenius, John Amos 107–108 communication and belonging 177 community engagement 46 competence-based education 167 confidentiality, need for 31 Connell, R. 43, 56, 133; and monopoly of truth 43 Connelly, M.F. and Clandinin, D.J. 58, 71 Connolly, R. 165 Considine, M. 83, 88 continuing professional education (CPD) 59; perceptions of its importance 69–70 Convery, A. 60 cooperation 170; difficulties in its absence 175; see also collaborative working cosmopolitanism 78 creating a research environment 63 criteria for doing research 174–175 ‘critical’: meaning of 7; need for 176; studies 113 critical communicative competence, need for 146 critical discourse analysis 126, 133 critical theory 144 critically-oriented model of professionalism 135 critique, importance of 102, 120, 122, 144 cross-cultural supervision: definitions of 91–92; potentials of 94; relationships involved 93; for transforming practices 94 Crouch, C. 88 Cuban, L. 108, 117 cultural differences 92–94, 96, 98 curriculum as ‘quest’ 19 Cushing, I. 69, 71

Index 187 Daniels, J., D’Andrea, M. and Kim, B.S.K. 91, 104 Davies, B. and Bansel, P. 135, 149 De Certeau, M. 2, 9 De Sousa Santos, B. 43, 115 Deem, R. 4, 9 Delle, M. 36, 38 Delpit, L. and Dowdy, J.K. 112, 117 demoralisation of the Academy 8 design strategies, need for 14 Dewey, J. 108, 109, 112, 114, 117 dialogic approaches 43–46, 103; benefits of 52–53; encounters 93; supervision 102 dialogism 41 dictionary definitions of ‘academic’ 168 didactic action research 146–148 didactics 136; analysis of 136–150; and Bildung 138; changing focus 138; didactic relationships 136, 140; meanings of 137; relating to experience 145 ‘difference’ as an asset 45; as source of learning 97 Djerasimovic, S. 44, 56 Donne, J. 82–83 Doxtader, E. 1, 5–7, 9 Dreier, O. 11, 14–15, 24 Dreyfus, H. 141–12, 149 dual professionals 6–7 Dweck, C.S. 60, 71 Easterly, W. 43 ecologies of knowledge 42, 46 Education and Training Foundation (ETF) 58, 60, 73; publications 69; teaching standards 67, 69, 70 education as self-reliance 100 Education Policy Outlook: Latvia (2017) 167, 181 educational improvement through teacher education 59 educational research for supporting knowledge base of academics and teachers 168 Eikeland, O. 54, 57, 93 Elliott, J. 57, 71, 116, 146, 149 Ely, M. et al. 111, 117 ‘empowerment’ as one-way flow 42 Engleson, B.U. 137, 149 enrolled nurses (ENs) 160 epistemic justice and injustice 41–42, 46, 52–53

epistemic responsibility 8; and academics 42 epistemologies, need for multiple forms of 43, 44 equality campaigns 132 ethical knowing 93 European Social Fund projects 167 Evans, B.M. and McBride, S. 88 ‘everyday people’ 1–2, 5; as new kinds of academic 5; how they are perceived 6–7; rights of 6–7 ‘everyday practitioners’ 2, 7–8 evidence-based practice 58 experiential knowing 93, 94, 99, 100, 103, 104; marginalisation of 93; what it can involve 100 ‘expert knowledges’ 43 ‘extended professional’ 59 Eyre, R. 78, 88 Fairclough, N. 123, 126, 128, 133 ‘fake news’, fake everything 76–78; power over truth 77 Fals Borda, O. 115 Fanghanel, J. 4, 9, 88 Far Right in politics 75 Farber, M. 17, 25 Farrell, T. S. 171, 174, 177, 181 Fekete, E. 88 female genital mutilation (FMG) 120–134; and forms of language 120–121, 131; and identity formation 130–131; challenging it 120; (il)legality of it 120; metaphors used in 128–130 Feng, Su and Wood, M. 78 Feynman, R.P. 184 Fillippakou, O. 88 financial crisis 74 Fisher, R. and Simmons, R. 61, 71 Fitzpatrick, K. 3, 9 Florence Nightingale 158, 166 Francis Report 153, 155, 165 Frankenberg, R. (1993) 97 frame conditions 142 freedom and trust 82 Freire 97, 100–104, 112, 118 Fricker, M. 41 Funding as opportunity for collaboration 95–96 Further Education and Training attitudes and culture 58, 59, 61, 63, 69, 70; attitudes towards research 58, 61; its role 59; status 65

188  Index Further Education teachers: as researchers 59; attitudes towards HE 61, 62; backgrounds 61; working with learning support assistants 59 Gadamer, H.-G. 79, 85, 87–89, 97 Galston, W.A. 76, 87 game-based education, to encourage behavioural persistence 15; for changing institutional cultures 24; for process-oriented learning 17; transformative potentials of 10–25 Gaventa, J. and Bivens, F. 44, 57 gender identity 122 Gessen, M. 88 Ghosh, J. 88 Gibbs, P. 81, 82, 88 Giroux, H. 3, 9 Gjøtterud, S. 102, 104; and Ahmad, A. K. 92–105; and Krogh, Dyngeland & Mwakasumba 91, 104 Gläser, J. and Laudel, G. 169, 170, 181 Global Assembly for Knowledge Democracy 116–117 global north and south 41–42 ‘good practice’, what counts as 6 Gregson, M. and Hillier, Y. 65 Guardian Newspaper 154 Gundem, B. 149 Guthrie, S. et al. 27, 34–35, 37–38 Gyldendahl-Jensen, C. 10–25 Gynther et al. 17 Habermas, J. 5, 9, 139–140, 143–144, 149, 150 hands-on care, importance of 156 Harding, L. 88 Harkness, R. and Ingold, T. 183–184 Hattie, J. 58, 73, 148 health care assistants (HCAs) 155–156; lack of training provision 162 Heidegger, M. 141–142; and workshop metaphor 141–142, 148 Heiman, P.G. and Schulz, W. 138, 149 Heron, J. and Reason, P. 92, 93, 95, 101, 104 Hiim, H. 135–150; and Hippe, E. 135, 139, 141 Hind, D. 84, 88 higher education, changing demographic of 7; and funding 85; as public good 84–85; what is it for? 85 Hillier, Y. 65, 72 Honneth, A. 77, 88

horizons 96–97; expanding them 103 Horn, K. 116 Hoyle, E. and John, P.D. 59, 72 Hunt, J. 39 Hunt, P. 35, 39 Husband, G. and Jones, S. 59, 72 hydration, need for 156 Hyland, K. 168, 181 ‘I-Thou’ and ‘I-It’ relationships 93, 98 ideas, power of 182 Illeris, K. 16, 25 improving teaching practices 170 individual learning trajectories 8 Ings, W. 26 institutions: as places for realising freedom 78; as places for recognising interdependence 78 intellectuals: core capacity for critique 75; responsibility of 2 intersectionality 7 Ion, R. 154, 155, 165 Izglītības un Zinātnes ministrija/ Ministry of Education and Science, 2018 175 Jangk, W. and Meyer, H. 137, 150 Janik, A. 150 Jansen, J. 184 Jones, A. 165 Jones, O. 165 Jones, T. 89 Judt, T. 74, 89 Kakutani, M. 76, 89 keywords 1 Khene 98 Klafki, W. 138, 150 Kreber, C. 89 Krogh, E. and Jolly, L. 104 Kinman, G. 35 knowledge: and status 121; constructing it 110; different forms of 42–43, 92–93, 168; potential injustices involved 41; need for pluralism 42; tacit forms 182; techno-rationalism, problematics of 42–43 Kolb’s Reflective cycle 64, 72 Koller, V. 130, 133 Krogh, E. and Jolly, L. 91, 100, 104 LaBoskey, V. 63, 72 Laclau, E. 89

Index 189 language of songs, potency of 121; forms of and power 121 Latvian policy documents 167; and competence-based education 167; and tenure track 169 league tables 6 learning by objectives 146 learning, strategies for supporting it 66 learning support 70 learning support assistants (LSAs) 58, 59–60, 65, 71; need for recognition 69 learning trajectories 9–25; different perceptions of 11; nature of 14–15; need for 10 Leask B. and de Wit, H. 46, 55, 57 legitimation issues: contested nature of 5; of knowledge 55; of opinion 4–6 Leibowitz, B. 89 Levin, M. and Greenwood, D. 94, 101, 105 Levitsky, S. and Ziblatt, D. 89 Lintern, S. 153, 155, 165 Lippman, W. 5, 8 listening, benefits of 69 Loughran, J. 63, 72 Lucas, N. 58, 72 Lycke, K. H., Lauvås, P. and Handal, G. 98, 105 Lyotard, J.-F. 4, 9 MacFarlane, R. 1, 9, 89; and Hughes, G. 59, 72 MacLellan, P. 62, 72 managerialism 4 Manathunga, C. 95, 100, 105 Marx, K. 5 Marshall, J. 91, 105 Maslow, A. 157, 165 Mason, P. 89 Matthews-King, A. 153, 165 Mayher, J.S. 109, 111, 119 McAteer, M. 116 McBride, S. and Evans, B. 89 McDonnell, P. 151–166 McKelvey, C. and Andrews, J. 63, 72 McKenney, C. and Reeves, T. C. 17 McManus, I.C. et al 27, 39 McNair, A. 58, 72 McNiff, J. 41, 57, 58, 92, 105, 116, 146, 150, 181 McPartland, C. 58–73; contributions to the literatures 68

Megeta Orphan Education Foundation 101 Melby, V. 146–148 Meredith, M. 41–47, 50; and QuirozNiño, C. 46, 57; et al 54, 57 Merriam, S. B. 168, 181 Merrifield, N. 163, 165 metaphors and ideological work 130 Mezirow, J. 91, 97, 105; and Taylor, E. W. 96 Midgley, M. 182, 184 Mignolo, W. 43, 57 Misgeld, D. and Nicolson, G. 85, 89 Mokaya, D. 124, 133 Molander 138, 141–142, 150 Moravian Church 107 Moravian College 111 Mouffe, C. 89 Mounk, Y. 89 Muijs, D. 59, 73 Müller, J.-W. 75–76, 86, 89 Murray, R. 168, 181 Nardi, B. 16, 19, 25 narrative approach 111 networks for action research 114, 116 neoliberal approaches, problematics of 135–136; proliferation of 135 neurodiversity: and the academy 27, 35; as personal-professional transformation 32; convening support group 37; difficulties involved 30; need to support principles of 26–31, 35; strategies for managing 30–31, 36–37; value of 26 new beginnings 94 New Public Management 92 Nightingale, F. 158–159, 165–166 Nixon J. 4, 9, 74–90 Norris, P. and Inglehart, R. 89 Norwegian national curriculum frameworks 140 ‘nurse’ as protected title 159 nurses: and patient advocacy 154; as knowledgeable practitioners and theorists 151; leaving the profession 152–153; selection of 162 nursing: aims of 155; and academic status 151; and business 154; and practice of care 155; budget cutting 154; care, quality of 152; current problematics 161; different views of external and internal factors 154–156; difficulties with system

190  Index 152–153; hands-on care 156; historical basis 157; knowledge 151; lack of professional mentors 162; need for practical forms of 151, 158; professional education 155; reclaiming it for the patient 154–166; redefinition of aims 157, 161; registration debates 155; separation from care 156 nursing practice: activities of 155; and national leaders 157; constrained, ‘academic model’ 151; redefinition of 156 Nyerere, J. 100, 105 obfuscation as intentional 77 O’Brien, J. 68, 73 ‘official knowledge’ 43 Ofsted 65 Olina, Z. et al. 181 Oloo, H. 120, 125, 128, 133 Olteanu, C. 171, 174, 177 open concept schools 107 openness 98; and criticality 170; and risk 98; see also Gadamer, H.-G. ‘ordinary people’ 2 Ousey, K. 158, 165 outsourcing, dangers of 154 Outstanding Teaching, Learning and Assessment (OTLA) 58–59; aims 60; 69; attitudes towards 62 Palgrave International Handbook for Action Research 115 Participative approaches, value of 53, benefits of 69 partnership networks 180 Pavītola, L. and Latsone, L. 167–181; and Bethere, D. 170, 174, 181 Peate, I. 161, 166 peer review system 183 performativity 4–5 person-centred forms of research 122 phronesis 93 Pitkin, H. F. 2, 9 places of trust; as places of freedom 82 platform of human needs 156 pluralism, denial of 76 Polanyi, M. 2, 9, 182–183 politics of potential 1 Ponte, P. 68, 73 populism, emergence of 75 populism and pluralism 76 power: challenging it 92; distribution of 101–103; of ideas 183

power and truth 77; relationships between them 77 practical knowing 92, 94; as basis for freedom 94 practices of everyday life 2 pragmatist concepts of knowledge 141; and critique 143; relations with lifeworld 142–143 presentational knowing 93 Price, M. 27, 36, 39 problematising practices 64 professional development 63; benefits of involvement 70 professional work: encouraging understanding of 65; nature of 6, 59; what kind? 158 Project 2000 160 project involvement, benefits of 69 public institutions, as defences 77 public school teaching, experiences of 110 public sphere, nature and purposes of 5–6 Purēns, V. 168, 181 questionableness 79 Quijano, M. 54 Quiroz-Niño, C. 46 Quiroz-Niño and Murga-Menoyo 46, 57 quota schemes 94, 95: responsibilities of supervising 95 Ranson, S. 80, 86, 88, 89 Readings, B. 4, 9 reasons for research 178 reflection: for action 171, 177; for practice 174, 177; space for it 66 Reid, N. 120, 133 relations of power 42 ‘representation’ 1 representation: and ‘the academic’ 4–6; different meanings of 1–3 research culture, fostering one 63–65 research identities, understanding them 65 respect: need for, difficulties of establishing, in institutions 83 responsibility of intellectuals 2 research: and emancipatory potentials 102; and ‘research-informed’ 61; for action 178, 180 research networks, creating them 169; some difficulties involved 176

Index 191 research questions, formulating them 175–176; issues involved 179 Ridley-Duff, R. and Bull, M. 44, 57 rights of women 120–132 Rioba, A. 124, 126, 133 risk, willingness to take it 103 risk-taking 96 ritualised forms of language 121 Robinson, J. 153 Robinson, V. 58, 73 Rolfe, G. 4, 9 Rorty, R. 3, 8, 9, 44, 57 Rosenblatt, L. 109, 110 Rowell, L. 113, 114 Rowland, G. 4, 9 Royal College of Nursing 154 Ruel, M. 124, 134 Rusbridger, A. 77, 85, 89 Said, E. 5, 7–9, 74–75, 84, 86, 89, 90 Saks, E.R. 35–37, 39 Schaefer, L. 3, 8 Schaefer, L. et al. 3, 9 Schäfer, K.H. and Schaller, K. 137, 150 Schanning, E. 145, 150 Schatzki, T. 14, 15–16, 24 Schier, S.E. and Eberly, M. 87 scholarly, meaning of 7 Schön, D. 62, 73, 171 Sennett, R. 90 shared uncertainty 96 Sharples, J., Webster, R. and Blatchford, P. 59, 62, 64, 73 Shaw, C. and Ward, L. 35, 38 Shell-Duncan, B. 120, 123, 124, 134 Shiller, R. 46, 57 Shosh, J. M. 106–118; and commitments to wrighting 111; and dialogic approaches 111; experiences of schooling 107–110; and Zales, C.R. 107, 112 Shosh, J. M. and McAteer, M. 116 Shosh, J. M., Rowell, L., Bruce, C. D., and Reil, M. M. 114 silencing of ordinary people 5 Singh, M., Manathunga, C., Bunda, T., & Jing, Q. 95, 105 Snyder, T. 75, 90, 116 so what? 182 Social and solidarity economy 41, 44, 45–46 Social and Solidarity Project 41–42, 45–55; handbook 50; inclusional

forms 50–51; mapping it 50; planning 47 social hope 2, 3, 8–9 Sourmelis, T. 15–16, 25 speaking for yourself 2–3, 5 speaking truth to power 74 Speed, E. and Mannion, R. 90 standing as and standing for 2–3 Star Trek 183 state-enrolled nurses 161 Stenhouse, L. 59, 73, 149–150 Stern, J. 45, 116 Stewart, W. 58, 73 Stiglitz, J. 84, 90 stories to live by and stories to leave by 3 Streeck, W. 90 stress, factors involved 27, 34, 35, 37; strategies for dealing with it 37 student as teacher 102 Su, F. and M. Wood 90 Sun, T. 44, 57 Sunderland, J. 122, 126, 134 supervisory practices: and power 94; as empowering 95 supporting learning, need for 30 Sustainable Agriculture Tanzania (SAT) 102 Tannous, A. 116 Taylor, E.W. and Cranton, P. 92, 105 teachers: and critical pedagogies 113; as critical researchers 135–136; as life educators 171; as public intellectuals 113; as scholarly presenters 113; job of 140; role of 135 teachers as academics 135–136 teachers as researcher 59 teaching as learner-focused 138, 145, 167; to encourage dialogue and participation 145 Teaching Standards 58 techno-rational forms see knowledge ‘the academic’: how it should be understood 1–2, 103; how to represent it 1; job of 2 ‘The Leader in Me’ 116 ‘the people’, how they are defined 76 theoretical knowledge grounded in personal 168 theory of teaching 136 Tkachenko, E., Bratland, K. and Johansen, J.S. 99, 105 Total Nursing 152, 163–164 Toulmin, S. 41–42

192  Index transculturation 100–101, 103 transformative change 93; and academic freedom 93; potentials of 94; sources of 103 Trump, D.: election of 75; opinions of 76 trust, places of: as places of freedom 82; building 95; for mutuality and for truth telling 73, 81; universities as places for 80–81 truth: and trust and freedom 79–82; and universities 80; and untruth 75; conditions for 81; quest for it 79 Truth and Reconciliation Commission 1 Tucker, A. 90 Tveiten, S. 98, 105 Tyler, R. W. 140, 150 UK Nursing and Midwifery Council 154 UNESCO 47 unhomeliness 92, 95, 96 universities: and contrasting views of society 84; and managerialist values and goals 83; and truth 74, 80; as businesses 3; as committed to the public interest 78; as encouraging dissent and dialogue 78; as places of trust 74; as promoting bureaucratic forms 83; as public institutions 74; different visions of 84; for encouraging critical reflection, dissent and rational discourse 78–79, 81; for seeing different interpretations 81; for speaking truth to power 81; for supporting different ways of knowing 26–27; reactions to market-driven economies 74; roles in a ‘time of trouble’ 74; values of 4, 74, 83

values: contested nature of 5; shift of 4 Venville, A. et al. 29, 31, 40 video games 16 Villa, D. 83, 90 Villafuerte, A.-M. 47–48, 53 ‘vocational/academic divide’ 85 Vygotsky, L.S. 112, 117, 119 Waddell, G., Britain, G. and Burton, K. 34–35, 40 Walker, M. 90 Wambura, J. 120–134 Ware, L. 35, 40 ways of knowing 26; literatures of 28, 29 Webber Allen, N. 36, 39 Weitze, R. 14–16, 25 Weyland, K. 90 Williams, B. 79–80, 81, 88, 90 willingness to be involved 99–100 Willis, P. 156, 166 Winchester-Seeto et al. 95. 105 Winter, R. and O’Donoghue, W. 103, 105 Wittgenstein, L. and game metaphor 141 Wolf Report 61, 73 Wolin, S. 80, 90 Woodham-Smith, C. 158–159, 166 work of words 1, 5–8 World Health Organisation 120, 123, 134 wrighters and knowledge 107 wrighting 106; and critical literacy 111; importance of 106–107 writing as public action 182, 184 Xu, L. and Grant, B. 102, 105 Zuber-Skerritt, O. 91–105