Research, Teaching and Learning: making connections in the education of adults Papers from the 28th Annual SCUTREA Conference

Compartments, connections and consciousness: changing perspectives on a learning journeyCheryl Hunt, University of Sheffield

IntroductionThe biography of an individual, like the genealogy of a concept, is always a story about unity through diversity, continuity through change (Carr, 1995: 19).

Autobiographical research and writing, in enabling researchers to link the personal and the structural, individual life-histories and collective social movements, and public and private worlds, can be seen as central to the social scientific enterprise (Boud and Miller, 1996: 6).

Am I the same person (the one token housewife with young children) who was offered a place on a new MEd in Continuing Education almost twenty years ago? Was she the same person who, ten years earlier, fresh from a degree in psychology, had walked tentatively into a classroom as a student teacher? What relationship did both those persons have to the part-time tutor/co-ordinator who, throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, ran training courses for school governors and staff development programmes in community education?

How did all three coalesce to become an academic charged not just with 'doing' education but with writing about it in a form judged acceptable as research output and worthy reading for a new generation of MEd students? When did the erstwhile psychology student realise it was OK to stop writing passive/objective phrases like 'The apparatus was set up' and to introduce papers with the word 'I'?

If, as Boud and Miller (1996: 6) indicate, the autobiographical I is now legitimate currency within the social scientific enterprise, I suspect that opening a paper with a circular series of questions may not be! Nevertheless, it seems appropriate to do so since not only were the questions above prompted by pondering the conference title but, in trying to answer them through reflective writing and discussion in another forum, I have become increasingly aware of the circular nature of the relationship between my own learning, teaching and research activities.

Over the past few years, I have been heavily involved in the processes of reflective practice (Schon, 1983), a key tenet of which is that professionals should seek to articulate their theories-in-use: the often unacknowledged ideas, connections and assumptions that shape their practice. In my own case, as an educator whose students are themselves educators/trainers of other adults, attempting to articulate the connections between what and how I have learned, how I teach, and what I present in a research forum is now an essential part of my practice and something that I also try to facilitate for others.

Rather than discussing connections between learning, teaching and research in the abstract, therefore, I intend to approach this paper through what Brookfield (1995) would term the 'lens of my own autobiography'. I shall also draw on the documented experiences of former students. The key question I want to address is whether it is possible to connect directly with, and in what terms one can speak about, that which both links 'public and private worlds' (Boud and Miller, as above) and provides 'unity through diversity, continuity through change' (Carr, as above).

Modelling connectionsThis question has been formulated relatively recently in a learning journey which has taken me from being a fairly passive mature student, through active involvement in the politics of participation, to a

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Research, Teaching and Learning: making connections in the education of adults Papers from the 28th Annual SCUTREA Conference

point where I now embrace the principles of 'participative knowing' (Skolimowski, 1985) and, especially, the need to define and locate the 'self'. I suspect that debate about the latter can usefully be contextualised in terms of what constitutes consciousness and spirit. I shall conclude this paper by describing a model which may be helpful in this respect and which can perhaps also provide an alternative viewpoint both to a modernist perspective founded upon differentiation and compartmentalisation (which creates separate entities and hierarchies of research, teaching and learning) and to the 'anything goes' fragmentation and uncertainties of post-modernism.

I shall begin, however, with a simple and probably less contentious model of possible connections between learning, teaching and research, assuming for the moment that there is a qualitative difference between these activities.

A number of statements can be made about the apparent interconnections shown in Figure 1. In respect of the Learning circle and its overlap at points A and B with the Research and Teaching circles, I could claim:

I learn and I research my learning and I teach from my learning.

Of the Teaching circle and its overlaps at points B and C, I could claim:

I teach and I research my teaching and I learn from my teaching.

And, similarly, of the Research circle, I could claim:

I research and I learn from my research and I teach from my research.

Figure 1 makes the connections look real and convincing and, at times when I have consciously undertaken reflective practice within a properly structured framework, the claims to which it lends itself might have some validity. However, for most of my professional career in adult/community education I do not recollect having given much thought either to naming the specific activity in which

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Research, Teaching and Learning: making connections in the education of adults Papers from the 28th Annual SCUTREA Conference

I was engaged at any one time or to how it might connect with other named activities: I just got on with it.

Perhaps the pressure to separate and define what constitutes learning, teaching or research, and then to re-conceptualise the relationships between them, is a peculiarity of academia where promotion still largely depends upon compartmentalising one's work under various headings which privilege what can be placed in the research circle. Perhaps this in itself is merely another manifestation of the reductionist, quantitative, paradigm that has characterised much of Western science. Perhaps such issues are not even important!

Whether they are important or not, in general I continue to find that the everyday process of 'getting on' with activities takes little account of 'academic' questions about the particular nature or definition of activities. In terms of Figure 1, I sense that I habitually operate in the kind of black hole represented at its centre (X) where separate identification is lost. I will attempt to illustrate this with reference to some real events.

Real-life connectionsA colleague recently asked me for information, to include in a booklet on the history of our department, about a range of training programmes for school governors and in community education which were initiated in the 1970s and ran throughout the 1980s at a time when the notion of 'education for participation' was influential and lifelong learning was a new buzz-word.

I spent a nostalgic hour with some files whose existence I had virtually forgotten but in which lay several articles, photographs and other information that constitute part of my life-history, particularly in the sense of having given shape to my professional career. They also provide metaphorical snapshots of periods in the lives of students whose history and development became entwined with my own. In reminiscing, I realised that for a few years our individual stories had merged to form another, collective, one from which it would be almost impossible to disentangle who had learned what from whom, who had been the ‘teacher’ and who the ‘taught’, and which of our activities might be defined as research; it would be difficult, too, to identify exactly where any of these things fused with educational policy-making.

Stories entwinedThe progress of one particular student, partially encapsulated in the following extract from a newspaper article, may help to exemplify this complexity:

... She had a handful of dusty A-level certificates when she started the Sheffield community education course (a one-year certificate) as a parent in 1981. Now, at 46, she has a PhD in psychology and a growing reputation as an authority on dyslexia. Her transformation stemmed from the discovery in 1980 that M, her five-year-old son, was dyslexic. ‘I went home and wondered what to do about it. I realised I didn't know enough about dyslexia or about how children are taught.’

The Sheffield course was her first attempts to fill the gaps. ‘I loved the research, being able to choose what I wanted to do ... I also enjoyed thinking about the link between The ideology and what actually goes on.’

From researching dyslexia on the course, A went on to take a degree in psychology, and then a doctorate. ‘I think it helped a great deal that I was involved in M's problems in a more academic way. As I gained more knowledge the school began to take more notice of me. My research moved from being a means to finding out more to a means of achieving more. My concerns fed back into helping M in a more structured way.(Buckley, 1991: 21).

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Research, Teaching and Learning: making connections in the education of adults Papers from the 28th Annual SCUTREA Conference

A is now an international expert on dyslexia and has a direct influence not only on its diagnosis and treatment but on the related policies of educational institutions. I currently meet her more often in the pages of academic journals than I do in person but, in 1981 when we were neighbours with children of roughly the same age, I played an active role in encouraging her to take part in the community education course.

At that time, I was part-way through an MEd, undertaken for interest when my eldest child started school: it had given me confidence to stand for election there as a parent-governor. Chatting in this capacity to other parents, I had identified a need for parents to know more about the education system and had set up a local discussion group at which headteachers, education officers, local councillors and others had become regular speakers. The membership of the discussion group, and its intended and unintended outcomes, subsequently formed the basis for my MEd dissertation which focused on what happened to women when their children started school. This resulted in several research publications and an invitation to teach on the university's school-governor training courses.

I discovered that, like myself, many parents had become governors in an attempt to support their children but that, in the process, they had often become interested in pursuing educational issues in their own right. Then (as now) there were few opportunities for those not already employed in education to attend courses on education: the certificate course in community education was an attempt to fill this gap.

A joined the course after attending the parents’ discussion group and becoming disillusioned by the apparent lack of interest in dyslexia displayed by several speakers who wielded considerable influence in local schools. At several meetings over our respective kitchen tables she showed me the growing pile of notes she was acquiring in an attempt to understand and take action over her son's learning difficulties. I suggested that she pursue this interest under academic supervision and in a structured way which might also provide her with a qualification.

Not only did she do so, as noted above, but she later returned to the certificate and associated courses as an occasional tutor in order to raise awareness about dyslexia; currently I draw on her published work in the MEd course which I now direct. I could not begin to disentangle the historical threads of our respective learning, teaching and research.

The same is true of links with another student mentioned in Buckley's article: F, 'who had left school at 15' and 'felt he was lacking essential knowledge' to help his eight-year-old son. Buckley notes:

On the course F found his interest developing beyond the immediate practicalities of his son's schooling. From his initial curiosity ... F found himself joining the executive committee of North-east Derbyshire's Community Education Council.

Such Councils, some comprising up to fifty representatives of local communities, were a major plank in the implementation of Derbyshire's community education policy. They controlled a substantial part of the county's education budget and were empowered to make funding available for educational activities locally. F was ultimately instrumental in shaping several of these. He later also provided me with valuable introductions to key local people which enabled me to undertake research into the work of the Community Education Councils.

Iterative cyclesTo provide further evidence of iterative cycles of research, learning and teaching where the beginnings and endings of each are never clearly distinguishable, it is worth noting that this research had itself been prompted by what I had earlier learned about the Councils' work while I was teaching on a staff development programme for Community Tutors who had played a major part in helping to establish the Councils.

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Research, Teaching and Learning: making connections in the education of adults Papers from the 28th Annual SCUTREA Conference

In a previous SCUTREA paper (Hunt, 1995), I documented how the work of the Councils had eventually been brought to an end as a result of changes in national politics. I noted that I had felt humbled at that time by the receipt of a phone call from a councillor whom I had long regarded as a powerful figure. With his voice full of emotion he had telephoned immediately after a turbulent meeting, at which it had been decided that the Councils could no longer be sustained, to say ‘I know you can't do anything about it but you do know what's been going on here. Can you tell people about what we tried to do?’. This councillor's belief in the power of the written word and, implicitly, in that of the university, gave me a new perspective on the nature of research and what might be expected of me as a researcher.

In the 1995 paper, I was attempting to articulate and, to some extent, justify my own transition from community educator to 'academic'. I drew on the words of an MEd student which had helped me to delineate my new role: ‘I need you to provide a context in which I can challenge, and validate, my work, my beliefs and my professional practices’. I argued that the function of an academic as both tutor and researcher is to provide a framework through which to reflect back to individuals and communities what already exists in a form which can be challenged, changed or celebrated. Debate about what constitutes learning, teaching and research and how they may be connected clearly fits such a framework!

Black hole, new light?Such debate, however, does not necessarily address the felt-reality of the black hole represented at 'X' in Figure 1 where words and activities lose their apparently separate identities. I suggest that this is the realm of the 'self', the place where ideas and experiences are absorbed, often apparently beyond the reach of the conscious mind, and from which they re-emerge as subjective knowledge. This place is a 'world within' which, though it frequently manifests itself in thought and behaviour, seems enormously difficult to enter. As Peck (1990: 54) puts it:

Examination of the world without is never as personally painful as examination of the world within, and it is certainly because of the pain involved in a life of genuine self-examination that the majority steer away from it.

I am increasingly drawn to the view that this 'world within' is where not only are Boud and Miller's 'public and private worlds' mediated but Carr's 'unity through diversity, continuity through change' can be located.

Figure 2 is an attempt to represent this in diagrammatic form. It is based on a model, largely derived from Eastern philosophical traditions, that I have found useful in attempting to address the question of what constitutes the 'self'. For ease of discussion I shall use the first person plural in describing it and its implications. However, I readily acknowledge that the model is not unproblematic, and that it may not be acceptable within other people’s philosophical frameworks.

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Research, Teaching and Learning: making connections in the education of adults Papers from the 28th Annual SCUTREA Conference

Try to imagine, nevertheless, that a line from A to B represents the 'life-force' that upholds our physical being. We will each have grown up attributing different names to it but what we call it matters less than how it seems to manifest itself in the physical world. For present purposes, imagine that the line operates like the beam of a powerful torch, illuminating and making us aware of everything in and near its path. The inner circle represents our innermost nature, the attributes we bring with us into the world and a link with whatever it is that gives and sustains life. The middle circle encompasses the realm of the mind, containing all the ideas, values and beliefs (represented by the blobs) that we accumulate during the process of our lives. The outer circle denotes the physical world of the body.

The body has to be activated by the life-force in order to do anything but what it does and how it does it will be dependent upon both the nature of the person 'inhabiting' the body and the content and number of the mind-blobs that are lit up at any one time. The effect of the latter can sometimes be dramatic. Imagine, for example, that the broken A-B1 line represents you on the way home at the end of a long working day. Some of the lighted dots may contain ideas about how tired you are, how you are going to collapse on the sofa, how you deserve a drink, and how much more worthy you are than Z who always goes home early. Physically, your eyes and head may be lowered, your shoulders bent, your pace slow.

Now picture walking through your front door to find the phone ringing. On the line is a good friend whom you have not seen for a while, inviting you out for a meal. It is likely that your body language will change in response, not because you have consciously chosen to change it but because a completely different set of mind-blobs has suddenly been lit up. They have activated a different physical behaviour pattern and, in terms of Figure 2, 'you' are now represented by the strong A-B2 line.

Demonstrably, therefore, when we say 'I am ...’ (tired, a teacher, or whatever it may be) we speak only a partial truth: essentially, we invest all of our life-force, all that is 'I', in something that is clearly so much smaller than that. Not only do the unlit areas of the mind effectively not exist at any given moment, thereby allowing us to hold conflicting views quite comfortably, but we rarely notice the

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Research, Teaching and Learning: making connections in the education of adults Papers from the 28th Annual SCUTREA Conference

lighting-up process: for the most part, we merely react to what the light is shining on, thinking that is what we are. Even more significant, I suggest, is our general neglect of the 'A' which appears to give rise, through the agency of the mind-blobs, to all the 'B's of our behaviour patterns.

Though behaviourists might argue that what I have described as a torch beam has no inner source, that it originates not at a mysterious 'A' point but as a consequence of an individual's interaction with her/his physical environment, it does not seem appropriate to dismiss entirely the possibility of an 'inner reality', a connection with a dimension of human existence which words and intellectual debate cannot penetrate but which itself enters and sustains 'everyday' life. Indeed, such a possibility, of a dimension generally referred to in terms of 'spirit', lies at the root of many of the world's great philosophical traditions (Huxley, 1946).

ConclusionIn this last section I have briefly attempted to address my own felt-reality of a ‘world within’ which houses my individual experiences, ideas, feelings and behaviours. Through the processes of reflection I can sometimes identify in words the origins and effects of these, and how, through personal and professional interactions in private and public domains, they have become intertwined with those of others to become my theories-in-use. But I sense that there is something beyond both the words and the activities and events which they describe - and that this is not ‘mine’ but a universal, a shared attribute of humanity. It is possible to connect with it cognitively through philosophical literature which addresses the concepts of spirit and consciousness, and in the form of diagrams which attempt to locate and determine relationships even in arguing back when what is being located has no physical substance; connection can also be made in other ways through, for example, meditation and similar practices.

I offer Figure 2 and the discussion associated with it as a coda to a paper on connections between research, teaching and learning for two reasons. First, to provide a focus for debate which moves beyond the structures and compartments of modernism and the isolated individualism of post-modernism into a different framework. Second, to suggest that whether, or when, we call ourselves ‘learners’, ‘teachers’ or ‘researchers’, and what, exactly, the associated activities are, or the connections between them, it matters far less than, literally, the spirit in which we live and work.

ReferencesBoud D and Miller N (eds) (1996), Working with experience: animating learning, London, Routledge.Brookfield S D (1995), Becoming a Critically Reflective Teacher, San Francisco, Jossey-Bass.Buckley D (1991), ‘Adult classes’ in The Independent, 12.9.1991,21.Carr W (1995), For Education: Towards Critical Educational Inquiry, Buckingham, Open University Press.Hunt C (1995), ‘Journey through the looking glass: some reflections on crossing the community/higher

education divide’ in Bryant I (ed) Vision, Invention, Intervention: Celebrating Adult Education, Papers from the 25th Annual Conference, University of Southampton, SCUTREA, 80-85.

Huxley A (1946), The Perennial Philosophy, London, Chatto and Windus.Peck M S (1990), The Road Less Travelled, London, Arrow Books.Schon D A (1983), The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action, New York, Basic Books.Skolimowski H (1994), The Participatory Mind: a new theory of knowledge and of the universe , London,

Penguin Books/Arkana.

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