Let's Talk: A discursive approach to trainingprofessional community educators

John Bamber

University of Edinburgh

In a process of enlightenment there

can only be participants.

Jurgen Habermas

The Individual Thinker

Enlightenment?

Intersecting Paradigms

Psychological (Entwistle)Sovereign individual

Socio-cultural (Lave and Wenger)Community of practice

Critical (Freire)Site of resistance and social justice

Overview

Ways of Thinking and PracticingMcCune and Hounsell (2005) TLRP/ESRC

Habermas and Community EducationCommunicative ActionDeveloping Practice CompetencePrinciples for PedagogyChallengesApproximating the Ideal: WBL2Any Takers?

Research and Literature

Gorard et al (2006) HEFCENeed to address experience in HE

Haggis (2007)‘activities, patterns of interaction and communication

failures'

Daniels et al. (2007) ESRCRule bending in inter-agency work

Brockbank and McGill (2007)Brookfield and Preskill (2007)

Ways of Thinking and Practicing

CLD studentsCommunity Learning and Development:

• empowerment, participation, inclusion…

Contested Purpose of CLD:• progressive social and political change

Steering Frameworks: SCQF and CeVeBACE Programme Aims - Critical Competence:

• understanding, context, justify activity – why and how

Situated learning

Dealing with uncertainty

Learning for an unknown future cannot be accomplished by the acquisition of either knowledge or skills. There is always an epistemological gap between what is known and the exigencies of the moment as it invites responses, and this is particularly so in a changing world. ..A more positive term, to encapsulate right relationships between persons and the changing world in which they are placed, might be ‘wisdom’.

Barnett (2004: 259)

Habermas and Community Education

Why Habermas?

Democracy and purpose of CE

Knowledge Constitutive Interests

Knowledge: • objects of experience and a priori categories• constituting ideas – importance of reflection

Rationality more than scientific method

Discourse as the crucible of reason

Communicative Action

Communication involves making three types of validity claims concerning:  • the truth of what is said or presupposed• the rightness of the claim• the truthfulness of the speaker.

Validity Claims

Validity claims are ‘universal’ in the sense that they are raised with every instance of communicative action.

Making claims is a reciprocal act.

 

People co-ordinate actions depending on how they evaluate the statements of other people.

 

Rationality ‘proper’ then is the ability to let action be guided by a common understanding of reality, the consensus established through linguistic dialogue (Eriksen and Weigard, 2004: 4).

A moment of empathy

Habermas’s discourse model, by requiring that perspective taking be general and reciprocal, builds the moment of empathy into the procedure of coming to a reasoned agreement: each must put him or herself into the place of everyone else in discussing whether a proposed norm is fair to all. And this must be done publicly; arguments played out in the individual consciousness or in the theoretician’s mind are no substitute for real discourse.

McCarthy (in Habermas, 2003a: viii-ix)

The objectifying perspective

The distinctive feature of Habermas’s work is that processes of knowing and understanding are grounded, not in philosophically dubious notions of a transcendental ego, but rather in the patterns of ordinary language usage that we share in everyday communicative interaction.

Pusey (1987: 23)

Four Types of Action

TechnicalRules of action, methods, techniques

TheoreticalConcepts, hypotheses, rationales, philosophies

MoralCodes of conduct, principles, values, standards

PersonalSelf-awareness, emotional intelligence, identity

Practice Competence

Practice competence can be defined as the capacity to construct knowledge leading to the resolution of particular types of empirical-analytic or moral-practical problems.

NB. Provisional status of knowledge

Critical Competence in CLD

Dimension

Technical

Theoretical

Moral

Personal

Discursive

Communicative

Example

Community consultation strategy

Policy interpretation/critique

Distinguish personal and professional

Self-control; see effect on others

Participate in team activity and goals

Express ideas in speech and writing

Principles for Pedagogy

Learning as an act of reciprocity

Developing knowledge through redeeming claims

Safeguarding participation and protecting rationality:• ideal speech situations

Competence as a constructive achievement:• developing normative structures

Not the tools – the toolmakers tools…

Key Influences

Piaget (constructivist)

Vygotsky (social constructivist)

Kohlberg (moral development)

Norm guided to norm testing discourse

The cognitive structures underlining the capacity of moral judgment are to be explained neither primarily in terms of environmental influences nor in terms of inborn programs and maturation or processes. They are viewed instead as outcomes of the creative reorganisation of an existing cognitive inventory that is inadequate to the task of handling certain persistent problems.

Habermas (2003: 125)

Challenges to the Ideal

From transmitting to producing knowledge

Countering negative theories:• Self, and learning and teaching

Privileging collective, collaborative work

Power and Positionality

Communicative virtues

Situating the curriculum

Approximating the Ideal: WBL2

Strategy

Development Strategies

Investigation

Investigating the Workplace

Analysis

Case Analysis

Case Study

Problems and Issues

Organisational Development

GroupCreative Change

IndividualLearning Review Assessments

Useful Insights?

Justification the key to learning:• ideas, actions, behaviours

Incorporating co-operative activity

Development of practice knowledge

Ideal as standard and model

Any subject-discipline (Biglan, 1973)?