Auto-ethnography

If ethnography is the patient observation, recording and interviewing about the meaning of what is observed, auto-ethnography has some difficulties. Observing our own selves and lives presents challenges. An outsider ethnographer comes with their own package of assumptions and has to put these to one side to enter into the spirit of what is happening. The assumptions of the auto-ethnographer about themselves and their own life and motivations is perhaps too entrenched to achieve this. We are not asking for objectivity to be achieved - turning one's own subjective self into an object is probably impossible. In grammar, the reflexive verb has the same subject and object (such as "I enjoy myself") so we term this way of thinking as reflexivity. Equally, we cannot observe ourselves, but can observe our reflections (through video, tape, or channeled through other people's eyes. So we call this discussion "reflective".

Ethnography built its roots on the social anthropology of far away places, quickly colonised by the sociology of the near at hand. Ethnographers were generally strangers to what they were observing, who tried to make friends to view things as though from inside. The anthropologist Hortense Powdermaker made this her title of her autobiography: Stranger and Friend (1966). 'Native' ethnographers who knew matters from the inside were likely to make fewer assumptions but had to learn how to think out of the box, and not be institutionalised by the context in which they had been brought up. Their focus may have been on their own culture, but was broader than being on their own role within it.

Auto-ethnography is sometimes used in place of autobiography or memoir, so I will clarify the difference. An autobiography attempts to record ones life, from memory, in chronological order. Details might be checked with others, and with documents. Depending on the audience, some details are likely to be censored, and others spun to shed best light on the subject. Words have social and legal consequences, which the wise autobiographer thinks through. This of course is anathema in ethnography where all detail, observed and spoken, play a part in the whole picture.

Whether auto-ethnography is possible I am putting on hold for the moment. Rather I am laying ground rules for robust study of one's own role and performance in life and in work. Then we can judge its viability.

The auto-ethnographer can remove the problem of autobiography by concentrating on those things which would be censored. The details of course are not for publication, and a mixture of anonymity and fiction could provide a comfort zone. For example, a group could discuss anonymous fictional accounts rooted in the censored incident with the ground rule that the author does not self identify. An author can feel distanced from the fictional account and even comment without embarrassment alongside fellows. The group can then draw general conclusions across the accounts discussed.

The autobiographer writes 'self' without 'other'. The ethnographer tries to study 'other' with as little self as possible. The auto-ethnographer needs to learn to treat self as other and lay on one side presuppositions, assumptions, status, self esteem etc. Some guidance may help.

• it may help to arrange to be interviewed, to tape, by an experienced interviewer (experienced on the topic and in interviewing). The interview needs to be probing, hard edged, challenging. The transcript is the subject through the eyes of another.
• it may help to ask others to write anonymously an account of the subject on the prescribed topic. For example, a Headteacher asked her staff for accounts of how they perceived her management style. Ensuring that these are anonymous and cannot be used managerially adds to their authenticity.
• The use of an administrator to ensure texts such as emails are properly anonymised will be essential - otherwise it constitutes an ethical threat.

Phenomenology.
Much appears to be but is not necessarily so. A philosophical position rooted in not making presuppositions has been called phenomenology, the study of appearances or manifestations. Our self esteem is such a set of appearances: in making them the centre of study, we have to learn to 'bracket out' any presuppositions about ourselves and seek for an open mind. Our internalised understandings and stereotypes get in the way of having an open mind, so we need to get back to 'the things themselves', without its mental spin in our heads. So far, this strategy can have benefit in auto-ethnography when personal point of view is consistently bracketed away to leave raw data, as opposed to interpretation. In the end, it may be all interpretation, but to be able to study the way we interpret events is itself instructive. After Schutz, the study of our everyday experience of x or y became popular. It works best with phenomena without concrete existence. To study a chair requires observation. To study our experience of using a chair, or quality in chairs takes it to another level. Quality is a phenomenon that we find meaningful; but quality cannot be distilled into a test-tube. So phenomenology is highly relevant to our wish to research of everyday experiences of work, play, or domesticity. We can separate the thing itself from our interpretations of it; both offer insights.

Personality.
For auto-ethnography, we might dig a little into what kind of a person we are. Personality research has clustered its many points into five umbrella 'traits' - these might be our starting point. I use the OCEAN mnemonic:

• O - am I open to persuasion? or are my ideas fixed? if I am between, what is fixed and what is open? Can I trust my judgements? or am I self-centred and over-confident (false self esteem)?
  
• C- am I conscientious? or lazy? does conscientious mean 'doing one's duty' or 'doing as I am told'? does this leave time for personal creativity?
• E - am I extroverted, or introverted? do I prefer company to being alone? in company, do I need to dominate? do I want everyone to know my opinions? do I want people to agree with me? Or am I fearful of being contradicted and prefer to keep my council? Where in between am I?
• A - am I agreeable or disagreeable? If agreeable, am I prepared to disagree with another over a matter of fact or opinion? Will I stand up for truth and justice? If I am disagreeable, do I just like to argue for the sake of it? Am I cynical and dismissive of the efforts of others?
• N - am I neurotic (that is, excessively anxious, worried about everything) or so laid back I never bother to get out of bed? Where in between to I plot myself - what worries me, what can I accept with reasonable relaxation? How fearful of the past and future am I? Can I enjoy the present?

Working in a team: The Belbin test
Am I a leader/organiser? content to be a follower or foot-soldier? am I the ideas person? am I pernicity about detail? Do I finish what I start? am I a saboteur? Is the balanced person a mixture of all these?

Self-definition - how do I define myself?
Identity
How do I define my identity? By nation, colour, religion, football team? Family, work, relationships? Try to summarise your identity in a sentence. Which parts give you the greatest satisfaction and self esteem? With give you the least of both?

Criticality
Am I critical of the state of the world? The injustices, the divisions between rich and poor, the haves and the have nots. Do I think the status quo should be changed for the greater good even if I am privileged in it?

Summing up
To research one's self, life and work requires us to draw on detailed observations, some of which could come from video, and some from other people. There has to be a strong 'other people' element. A critical friend can work with the individual in new schemes, the discussion becoming data. The principle of allowing no assumptions to be unexamined should be maintained throughout. This will also reveal insights into how we view and interpret our world, and what motivates our point of view.

There is a benefit. The researcher may be a teacher with 20 years of experience. This has strengths and weaknesses - an understanding perhaps about educational processes, perhaps, but assumptions that are socialised but unhelpful, parochial 'the way we do it here' attitudes which prevents change. The aim will be to distill the good whilst understanding and eliminating the unhelpful.

Epistemology

Epistemology is the study of how we know what we know (or claim to know). It contains the roots therefore of whether knowledge and research is reliable and believable. Knowledge evolves, so is never absolute. Knowledge of science in 1900 was very different from science knowledge in 2000, and scientists are constantly updating it. This applies to all disciplines.

• Skepticism lies at the heart of epistemology, constant questioning of evidence and interpretation. Knowledge claims should never be taken for granted but always doubted, tested and deconstructed in order to build a more secure version of that knowledge.
• Objectivity simply means we can touch and feel the object, and can therefore measure it. Science is based on measurement, and through description searches for hypotheses. Measurements are not always meaningful, as we know too well in education - we need to be skeptical about what is measured, why and how. In quantitative questionnaires, for example, what is asked and what is not asked is important. Also, the truth is not always found in majority opinion, as Galileo once understood.
  
• Knowledge is in fact no more than a truth claim, which may be reliable and may be not. The concept of 'truth' suffers from the same problems as 'knowledge' - it is a fallible claim that someone makes, and must be tested.
• As individuals, we have a basic foundation of beliefs we believe to be true. This is called foundationalism.
  
• Not all knowledge is measurable. You cannot measure quality, but only perceptions of quality. Research that we call qualitative looks for reliable strategies in different ways.
  
• Perceptual knowledge tries to make sense of what we see, hear, taste, smell and feel. We see an object as a tree, an oak, a table. We can be tricked or mistaken. We can have hallucinations. We look therefore to justify our sense perception, to make absolutely sure.
• A priori arguments or assumptions are things taken as true at the start. If we meet a four footed creature we make the a priori assumption it is an animal. It may be a statue, or a robot, so we are not always right. Our conceptual system labels things in order to help us make rapid identifications. Our concepts might become stereotypes which emphasise similarities but mask differences. Racism for example is rooted in negative stereotypes.
• Moral knowledge. A positivist would say that there is no such thing as moral knowledge or ethics, since they are not observable or measurable. Most would hold however that this is a travesty. That genocide is morally wrong would generally be held as a meaningful statement. There is however great diversity in what counts as ethical - ranging from rational judgements to the application of moral laws in scriptures. Few today would recognize as moral demands in my own upbringing not to shop on a Sunday, and not to enter a pub.
• Religious knowledge, or knowledge about God is a next step, and of course is problematic and controversial. What place do we give to religious experience? Is a phenomenology possible? And can the believers interpretation of religious experience ever be bracketed out to reveal the 'pure' experience? Probably not. Is there a link between mysticism and mental disorder? What is the link between drug-induced mysticism, fasting induced hallucinations, and other religious/psychological phenomena?
  
• Feminist Epistemology presumes that positivism is a male obsession with black-white, where the reality is grey (or pink/green or whatever, richer and more interesting. Many qualitative approaches owe their early development to feminist research where understanding human experience is given greater value than experiment.
• Social Epistemology addresses what counts as knowledge of society and social relationships.
• Procedural Epistemology explores the construction of simple rational arguments as the basis of computer AI (artificial Intelligence).
  
• Hermeneutics as Epistemology emphasises that all we have is interpretation, and we need sharp and critical tools to interpret these interpretations. In this case (and this is widely found today) epistemology is less about the absolute justification of knowledge/ what is true, and more about the refining of our rational processes. This is a stark recognition that we know little or nothing in any hard sense, and we assume a great deal. We started with skepticism, and completing the circle, this is where we end. Recognizing that we can be sure of nothing, we have to make a convincing case which persuades others to see things as we do.
  

Stephen Bigger, 2010

Reference:
Greco, G and Sosa, E (eds) The Blackwell Guide to Epistemology Basil Blackwell, 1999.

Muslim Pupils Empowerment

A former student has developed this programme to educate Muslim pupils and students about Islam - it is worth a look.
http://www.dcsf.gov.uk/violentextremism/toolkitforschools/downloads/Toolkit-OMPEP-June%202009%5B1%5D.pdf

Critical Ethnography

Just reading Critical Ethnography: Method, Ethics and Performance by D Soyini Madison from the University of North Carolina (published by Sage, 2005). She is an anthropologist ethnographer interested in human rights, traditional religious practices, myth, and performance She has done fieldwork in Ghana and Italy. Former Fulbright Scholar, and Rockefeller Foundation Fellow. All of the above themes feature in my various blogs and publications.

First thing to say, this is an excellent book, a must-read for anyone involved in qualitative research. This blog will summarise some main points which interest me. It was written with postgraduate students in mind so is clearly written and well structured. I am reviewing as I read so this post will evolve until finished over the next few days.

What is critical ethnography?
Basically it is ethnography with political intent. It combines the process of observation and data collection (anthropological ethnography) with critical studies, a process of asking questions critical of the status quo and society in general, therefore having an interest in transformational politics, human rights, equity and so on. It begins, she says, with researchers recognising their social responsibilities to address injustice. The researcher takes a position within the research. Some attempt to be 'objective' observers: whether anyone can be objective about anything is hugely problematic, so to resolve this post-positivist research focuses on understandings and human interactions instead. The critical researcher takes an ethical position on abuse of power in the status quo, exposing abuses, seeking out the voices of the oppressed, and working with all sides to propose new ways of political and social working.

Ethnography has had a long history in social anthropology and sociology, a researcher patiently observing and recording, interviewing participants to unravel different points of view. Ethnography is thus focused on 'The Other' and is non-self-centred. There should be no theory-practice divide. Critical ethnography is the performance of critical theory, or critical theory in action.

Research methods.
Chapter 2 emphasises the importance of research methods, as contrasted with "deep hanging out". She describes how critical theory involves her line of questioning (interview schedules), different kinds of questions to be asked, and how to code the transcripts. This is extremely useful for anyone learning how to research-interview well. The types of questions suggested will provide much richer data for the researcher. Chapter three illustrates using examples.

Chapter 4 deals with ethics. After a survey of the usual philosophers, she tries to get to grips with an interesting facet, based around the notion of Other. Ethnography, she holds, consists of a research studying 'Other' - other people's customs, points of view, ways of thinking. Any researcher engaging with qualitative research must take the 'other' very seriously indeed. It is too easy to impose one's own ideas on to the data and make the line of questioning too narrow. Madison emphasises the importance of voices of the researched, and the importance of asking the right questions, about rights, propriety, equity, power distribution and abuses and so on. She uses the work of Maria Lugones, on 'Loving Perception'. Lugones uses the metaphor of 'world traveller' as we travel through difference, unfamiliarity and alienation, taking us out of our comfort zone. This takes skill and understanding which is accumulated gradually. In the same way a researcher has to tune into other people's ideas and points of view and get over their unfamiliarity. We may approach these with stereotypes, even caricatures, in mind. One seeks to feel at ease, 'humanly bonded', finding some link that sparks a new relationship. We should, she says, be enough at ease to be playful, experimental, creative. Lugones contrasts arrogant perception (feeling we are superior) to 'loving perception (feeling we are bonded with the interviewees). In this love and caring should lie ethics, not a code to be followed, but a principle to honour.

Chapter 5 is about merging methods with ethics, encouraging openness, dialogue and conceptual accuracy. Chapter 6 has 3 case studies involving marginalised groups. Chapter 7, Performance Ethnography deals with performance (e.g. theatre) as experience, social behaviour, language and identity. Following Victor Turner she deals with performativity, process and cultural politics. Then a section deals with staging ethnography - the possibilities of theatre.

Chapter 8 gives examples of how to write it up. Four useful terms are writing as... relational, evocative, embodied and consequential. Relational means recognizing a relationship between writer and reader, the writer communicating with the reader and trying to enrich them. The opposite is writing to impress, egotistical writing. Evocative means that the writing evokes strong feelings, memories and associations that are powerful to readers as well as writers. Embodied recognizes that the whole body writes, and critical writing interconnects the body with others, the reader engaging with the text with all their senses feeling a sense of engagement and (non-sexual) arousal. Consequential means that writing should break through comfort zones and engage with political struggle, and thus have personal and social consequences.

Finally, chapter 9 gives 3 more case studies, one on cultural performance as fieldwork, one on oral history as performance, and the last on communitas, breach and redressive action (after Victor Turner).

A very thought-provoking book.

Post under construction. To be continued

Children learning from literature

This is a draft of a paper accepted for publication. Any comments welcome.
http://sites.google.com/site/literature4learning/

Abstract

This article asks how children might benefit from stories in their general education. It distinguishes between story for entertainment and stories for learning. Stories not only can be memorable, but can stimulate a child reader to think intellectually, socially, morally and spiritually if they are encouraged and taught how to do this. It argues that the reading of stories is part of critical education and introduces the idea of embodied learning. We conclude by asking whether stories are valuable as just stories, or whether there needs also to be some pedagogical purpose.

Sex, maternity and paternity in Genesis

Readers might be interested in my parallel blog, a critical conversation about the Bible. You will find a Genesis thread on
http://4004bce.blogspot.com/2009/12/sex-maternity-and-paternity.html
You might also be interested in my edited book, Creating the Old Testament: The Emergence of the Hebrew Bible (Basil Blackwell).

Liminality and Victor Turner.

Published in the Journal of Beliefs and Values (vol 30 number 2, August 2009, pages 209-212) is a paper on Victor Turner, liminality and ciltural performance. It can be found at http://eprints.worc.ac.uk/565/ Victor Turner noticed as an anthropologist how performance marked a change of status (e.g. from childhood to adulthood), the performance itself being an in-between state. He applied this later to performance generally, where a carnival or play puts people into this liminal (=threshold) state after which they emerge changed.
See also the thread 'victor turner'.

Phenomenology.

There has been an active interest in phenomenology among my PhD students, so here are some thoughts. Especially they are how to do it thoughts rather than charging back to the big names. We will do that later.
Phenomenon is a Greek word meaning something which appears to be, as opposed to something which has substance. There are things we hold to be real, even though we cannot touch or measure them. Respect, love, success, wonder, motivation are all such things. The question is, how do we research them? One aspect lies in the question, What do we mean by real? How do we separate opinion from reality? Beneath opinions about respect, does the word 'respect' describe something real? or is it a concept, a classification of certain behaviours. The method traditionally used is to strip off ("bracket out"] statements identified as opinion, to see what's left. Edmund Husserl, the founder of phenomenology a hundred years ago, believed that something real existed beneath the opinion: these views are labelled "transcendental phenomenology". Seeing/glimpsing reality was called eidetic vision. This conclusion is however not essential to the method.

In education, we cannot phenomenologically study a school, or a class, or anything measurable with substance within it. But we can study learning, behaviour, ethos, relationships, morals or any other significant intangible. Psychology is fond of psychometric measures, so we have seen historic attempts to measure 'intelligence', and more recently emotional intelligence using intelligence tests. Personally I have no confidence that they measure anything other than the superficial. Robert Steinberg even claims that wisdom can be measured, but only by reducing the concept of wisdom to something measurable, around the notion of balance. I agree that we can put together a crude check-list to determine whether something is balanced or not, whether other points of view have been sought, and a win-win situation sought. But I would not identify this with wisdom.

Intangible realities could apply to many aspects of everyday life. What is my everyday experience of work? of leisure, of pleasure, of value, of well-being? Much phenomenology used in research today comes from this emphasis by Alfred Schutz. But how can we do this rigorously and well?

Data collection needs to be completed in the qualitative paradigm. Much can be learnt from ethnography, with its emphasis on observation and interviewing, especially in its auto-ethnographic aspect (that is, being part of what is being observed). Normally it is important to know how a range of people react to the phenomenon, so a sample of respondants will be put together. For example, researching respect, you might first determine what a sample of people mean by respect by asking that straightforward questionnaire question. This is called phenomenography. The more the data collection focuses on the researcher herself or himself, the more care has to be taken to establish reliability. This is a triangulation question; interviewing others, keeping a long-term fieldnote diary, being interviewed by another research are all responses to the need for triangulation.

Finally, the analysis needs to keep firmly to the phenomenon, looking at it from many perspectives - psychological, philosophical, sociological, and critical. Bracketing out opinions on the phenomenon produces a body of data which can be analysed interpretively and hermeneutically, so a broad picture of the phenomenon and its various interpretations can emerge.

Phenomenology is a way of looking at everyday intangible things. The research methods and analysis I have described are mainstream qualitative, and the same concern for rigour and reliability needs to be built in.

Tony Brown and William Golding

I came across by chance the biography of William Golding by John Carey, recently published by Faber and Faber. I rarely read literary biographies, let alone pay £25 for them, but this one was different. It was in part the biography of Tony Brown.

I worked with Tony from 1974-1977 and he welcomed me to his house just before he died from cancer. I was a teacher in a Salisbury school, where he was a part-time teacher of music. He drove an ancient Ford Popular, which looked antique even 40 years ago. We chatted in school, though what wisdom Tony received from so callow a youth I do not know. What I took from him I understand when reading this book - we were religious atheists together, socially aware communitarians before Blair made this popular. He lived in a lovely thatched cottage, near Salisbury, Wiltshire in a Bowerchalk garden, with bees. I was a gardener then, and have increasingly found this an important relaxation. I was no musician though. Tony's four children all played for famous orchestras, Iona Brown becoming a well-known conductor with St Martin in the Fields.

Tony spoke of his chess games with Golding, and his increasing withdrawal from the world and from writing. My last journey to Bowerchalk was to deliver a get well message and flowers from the school staff, but was detained for a while with conversation. After Tony died, much too soon, Golding wrote a very moving obituary for the Salisbury Times. And he began to write again.

One last thing. My neighbour but three now was a twin in the class Golding taught at Bishop Wordsworth, Salisbury as Lord of the Flies was being written, which famously includes twin boy characters. He thinks that all the boy characters in the story were recognizable as classmates. The twins later appeared as extras in the film of the book.

Sometimes, in life, our lives touch someone who makes a significant impact. We hope also that we might have an impact on others starting out on the journey we are finishing. Thanks, Tony for those chats long ago.

Maharajahs and air forces.

This unlikely title is the product of a weekend trip to London. Sunday was a visit to thew Hendon RAF Museum, and Monday to the Maharajah Exhibition in the V&A Museum. Both were excellent, so do not be put off by anything I say here. My issues are philosophical, about the way we view and value history.

The Maharajah Exhibition first. No expense has been spared, bringing a superb range of artifacts together and linking them with a sober commentary. It is a glittering display of wealth, power and opulence. My question is, why are wealth, power and opulence valued?

The Maharajahs came out of the collapse of the Mughal Empire, with monuments such as the Taj Mahal. Yet they were tyrants and despots. Aurangzeb for example executed Sikh gurus when expanding his empire with military might. Power is won by military action, and power is kept by military action. The exhibition celebrates the careers of these men of power and their repressive regimes. True some of them claimed a philanthropic bent, but only in ways which increased their status and stature. For example, in order to give starving subjects work and income, did the Maharajah build schools, universities and hospitals? or excourage new food production techniques, and new technology? Of course not, they built new palaces in the latest taste. The Maharajahs and their families were grotesque, and their values grotesque, and their excesses of money over sense are celebrated here. Also, the British East India Company pulled strings and were the real power behind these thrones. They can be seen in processions in their top hats and red livery, failing to sit on the floor comfortably. What were the British doing in India? Aside from the usual flannel heard, they were making money and exerting power. Queen Victoria made herself Empress of India to impress her German cousins, but never bothered to go to the investiture. Their presence there was always improper, but the old Maharajahs were not a better answer.

There is another side. The artifacts made by the craftsmen and women who laboured brilliantly to achieve results of fabulous beauty and zero utility. Elsewhere in the V&A is the William Morris gallery: he asserted that all things must at the same time be useful and beautiful. That throws out most of the Maharajah 'stuff' - certainly beautiful, but of no practical purpose but to declare power and status.

The RAF Museum has links to abuse of power, despots and suffering populace. A museum of war materials is always treading a tightrope. I remember visiting a small gallery in Tottenham Court Road in the 1980s celebrating Iraqi munitions. The poison gassings took place at about the same time. The rest the world knows. That RAF Museums (and there are several) celebrate the defeat of tyranny is a bonus. Yet we are on our own knife-edge: are we celebrating killing machines? The bombers such as the Lancaster, B17, Vulcan; the 4000 lb to 12000 bombs that flattened Dresden? Are we celebrating the kills? The bomb tallies on the planes, the aces with their 20, 40, 60 or 80 'victories' (or is it 'victims'?). Presenting a war museum is tricky. In my book, it needs to show that war is ghastly (Hendon manages this well). Also that killing should be no joy (the feelings of people involved is always ambivalent as they have lost friends and want revenge). Looking forward, there should be some thought to oranising the world without aggression, war, despotism, and above all without war crimes.

The Saigon Museum of War Crimes sets the agenda well, and I have written about this before. War causes things to be done on both sides that ought not to be done. The aggressor is in no way exonerated by the fact that it is war, for it is their war. Saigon remembers "the American War" and "the French War". Defenders at least have some moral defence, within the limits of humanity. Our war musuems remember the dead who perished in defence of freedom. And this is right. If the Nazis had won, we would now live in a world without ethnic minorities, without any disabled people, without people or colour, without Jews, and without human rights. Even leaving the morals and human rights to one side, this would be a diminished world, a depleted world - and actually a pointly world. Human civilizations do need a way of policing for good, and war museums need to keep a firm hold of this. The current inclusive practice of remembering the second world war alongside the former enemy is a good tradition, so both sides together can think of the enormity of what happened, and what might have happened.

Lived Experience 3. Obsessive Compulsive Disorder

This comes from MvM, chapter 5. It purports to be a study of Obsessive and Compulsive Disorder, and is by Mary Haase.

This issue for me in this chapter is how a phenomenological study needs to be more than superficial and descriptive (although the descriptive might be interesting if this is new to you). This chapter is based around interviews with OCD sufferers and places the accounts of disorder alongside parallel accounts of 'normality'. The details of each are specific to particular sufferers - do they have OCD only, or a more complex syndrome? Are they typical? The accounts are chosen as exotic and strange. If you consider taking 40 minutes to put your knickers on strange, and inability to drive a car without feeling you have killed someone pecular, then you will enjoy this chapter. If you have never encountered this before, you may learn from it.

The chapter is based on a very simple qualititive methodology, of interviewing and transcribing. What does it tell us about the real lived experience of OCD? The writer is a reporter, not a sufferer. The writer has to try to step into the shoes of the sufferer. She has to understand that counting fenceposts and paving slabs is normal, that adopting behaviour, however strange, that ensures your husband or wife's survival is natural, that keeping the environment scrupulously clear is essential. That is not achieved in a brief round of interviews. Everything that screams to the writer, "This is odd" has to be bracketed out. The writer has to see oddity as ordinary, as their target interviewees do.

So what is the lived experience of the OCD sufferer? We can recount the daily rituals. But why do the eyes say 'I see' and the brain depict the memory as the opposite - that the switch is on and not off, that the door is unlocked and not locked, even though it has been checked 50 times? Why does the brain see an off switch self switching to on? Or see electricity leaking out of plugs like gas? The experience of OCD is to see falsehood based on anxiety as true. That we can psychoanalyse it makes little difference, and show within childhood why this might have originated. How does it happen that the suffer knows rationally what is real but is nevertheless overcome by the conviction that their actions has caused or will cause someone's death.

This task as set is difficult. I use it only to show the danger of being satisfied by a surface description when the underlying realities are not only more interesting, but are actually the point. The task is not to paint people as crazy, but to sympathetically show part of what is going on, as a contribution to finding answers.

Lived Experience, part 2.

The previous post explored an aspect of phenomenological research which explores lived experience. This post looks at Writing in the Dark: Phenomenological Studies in Interpretive Inquiry edited by Max van Manen, 14 case studies of this kind of research, with introduction, conclusion and commentary by MvM. We focus here on his concluding chapter (16, pp.237-252), called Writing in the Dark. It is, true to form, a phenomenological study of the lived experience of writing.

a) addressive and allusive writing.
We are talking here about writing which is not superficial and contentless but is intended to have meaning. This could apply to a novel, or to autobiography, diary, blog. It is addressive when it addresses or speaks personally to the reader. It is the intention of the writer to speak to readers (in the phenomenology of experience of reading, the same point is approached from the opposite direction). The text is allusive when it causes the reader to compare what is being read with their own experiences; the text alludes to the readers own life.

b) being self readers.
There is a danger of superficial and sentimental writing and reading. Once we start to focus on this deeper experiential level, we should go back to our own writings (and for that matter oral memories) "where meanings resonate and reverberate with reflective being" (p.238).

c) what is real?
Gazing into the dark is MvM's description of trying to find the ineffable 'real'. He uses mythology to emphasise that naming the intangible destroys it, because the words then become a substitute for the reality. The name becomes a stereotype, a typical definition rather than a dynamic (ever changing) description of reality. This is the intimate connection between the real and the interpreted.

d) 'seeing' and insight.
Reflective writing in the phenomenological mode can be a struggle, as different points of view are tossed around and worries about intention and meaning are wrestled with. The writer, says MvM, "may find an updraft and suddenly soar" (p.246), "really 'seeing' something". Such moments of insight generate the desire to 'see' more. Conversation shares interior knowing, but writing is scriptural, producing authoritative text (that is, text which is corrected, manipulated, artificial, and to some extent ambiguous). Reflective writing may more resemble conversation than corrected polished product, more hand-written text than ever editable word processed text. We may need to get back to quickly composed and unedited writing, rather like in this blog.

e) Darkness
Behind writing ( and reading) is a domain of total absorption. We read a book and get pulled into it. We write, and create a new state of being, a new environment, a new family of characters. We are delving in the unknown, in darkness. We, writers and readers, are open to what comes, receptive, but passive. We experience this new world through the minds of the characters within it, whether these are fictional or images from our past. The state of mind opened up is a form of wonder, an experience unformed by our mind, and uncontrolled by it. It is an experience we get absorbed by, and becomes part of us.

Summing up
Writing is a process that opens up a new world within us, through which we can reappraise who we are and what we are about. Reflective writing is therefore hard to do, as it makes us vulnerable; but having started it, it may be hard to stop. It is a private affair, but being able to share it with one or more empathetic yet critical others sharpens the process. Responding to reading, whether of fiction or critical studies, in a personal way can elicit new ideas and streams of thought. There is no perfect answer or solution; it is a process or journey rather than a destination.

Researching Lived Experience

Most people need to reflect on and seek to understand their own experiences and the experiences of others. Qualitative research generally uses observations and interviews to discover the points of view of a representative range of people. However, it is easy to be superficial or to be biased.

The book Researching Lived Experience is by Max van Manen. That might refer to experience I have lived, or that others have lived, and probably both. This is to research something which is non-substantial. A chemist, physicist or biologist studies substance, things measurable and observable. This applies also to the brain-science part of psychology, where measurability is important. There are however things we hold to be true which have no substance. I would not deny that my experiences of love, anger and vulnerability are real, yet researching them requires different approaches as compared to experimental science. In my experiences, I need to distinguish between what might be real, and the ways in which I interpret experiences, a kind of level 1/level 2 approach. I remember as a 16 year old having a fleeting but seemingly everlasting experience of transcendence, being part of the universe and not a lonely individual teenager. Abraham Maslow speaks of these as 'peak experiences'. The experience was and is taken to be real. There are aspects I could discuss - what induced it? Was it a medication-induced hallucination? No, as it happens, but some transcendental experiences certainly are. Is one real and the other not? Did the experience change my life, or not? Why do I remember it still, and do I hope for another such experience? Why? Also I could ask if others have such experiences, and look for patterns. This opens up for me a research pathway of glimpsing what I might be looking for. Moving to level two, the interpretation, people had interpreted such events as religious conversion, enlightenment or transcendence depending on their culture. Though interesting, these are different concerns.

The philosophy stemming from this is phenomenology and the research therefore phenomenological research. The phenomenon being research needs to be identified or the research has no clarity. A phenomenon is something 'manifest', i.e. held to exist and be true, without having physical substance. The philosophical quest is whether we can 'see' the phenomenon or whether we can only talk about it at the level of interpretation. 'Seeing' was called by Edmund Husserl (the founder/father of phenomenology) eidetic vision from the Greek 'to know'. He believed that this is possible; hence his version of phenomenology is called transcendental. Those colleagues who emphasised the processes of interpretation embedded in it contributed to the field of hermeneutics (the word comes from theologians interpreting the Bible, but is now secularised) - Martin Heidegger for example studied how humans experience time, emphasising opinion and interpretation rather than attempting scientific proof, as Husserl was doing. Alfred Schutz emphasised experiences of everyday life, and it is this line of phenomenology that is followed by such as Clark Moustakas for Psychology (in Phenomenological Research Methods) and Max van Manen for Education.

All phenomenologists employ the strategy of bracketing, called from the Greek epoche (pronounced e-po-kay). This means putting brackets around intrusive material such as opinion and interpretation, so that the 'real' is left revealed, however elusive. There needs to be considerable and careful thought about what is bracketed, and we have to remember that the stuff within the brackets might be as interesting as the stuff outside them. In other words, bracheting is an elicitation device for discussion, and if that discussion involved several people and points of view, so much the better.

In the next post, I will explore examples from Van Menan's edited work Writing in the Dark where he encourages his students to write about particular life experiences phenomenologically, which shows the method in practice.

Faith schools.

28.10.2009.
The question here is whether there is value in faith schools. Anglican and Catholic schools in Britain were among the first to be developed, before the state school system, and it is only recently that Muslim and Jewish schools have developed, with other religions taking an interest. Current policies have promoted these as responsive to parent needs. From the beginning, the object was the religious conversion and nurture of pupils. The parallel purpose was to make children good (that is, to enhance religious observance and moral behaviour).

I have come across two books of interest. Reflecting on Faith Schools edited by Helen Johnson of Kingston University; and For Goodness Sake: Religious Schools and Education for Democratic Citizenry by Walter Feinberg, both from 2006. Johnson balanced the views of the headteacher of Islamia School against the philosophical tirade of Roger Marples against indoctrination and for children's rights to be critically and openly educated. Other chapters (originally short conference papers) explore circumstances in war (Bogata), a comparison of a Catholic and a Jewish school, Methodism and Southlands College, Australian Catholicism, and historical-political aspects. Among the issues are, should education include religious teachings and make moral (behavioural) demands? how should education work on the attitudes of pupils? Are there benefits from a traditional framework for learning? The editor's own interest in reflection comes in two separate 'commentaries', but does not really penetrate into the book as a whole. Most chapters are descriptive rather than reflective.

The reality is that compulsion is not a lasting mechanism for developing religious convictions. Religious education may be supported by parents, but pupils  are) not always persuaded. The fact that Christianity is based on miracle (the virgin birth and resurrection) adds to resistance. The dilemma for the curriculum was: how should the balance be achieved between religious instruction and critical thinking? The 1944 Education Act wrestled with it, insisting on a compulsory place for religious education, which it has had ever since - but as a part of a melange of literacy, numeracy, science, humanities and the arts. The concept of the broad curriculum is still with us.

Today, curriculum balance is an issue only for private schools. A fundamentalist Christian school, or a Muslim school could, if it chose, emphasise religious teachings at the expense of critical skills and knowledge. The events of 7/11 led to many fundamentalist Muslim schools being suspected as harbouring terrorists, which systemically they were not, even if a few individuals were radicalised. Such decisions about curriculum emphasis are not inevitable; Muslim schools have made curriculum decisions which are western and secular, whilst maintaining a key but minority place for religious (Islamic) education. Some have encouraged multifaith understanding by broader curriculum encouraging visits by members of other faiths.

Education needs to prepare pupils for life in a global world. Our question however is whether this is best served by a faith school based on the beliefs of one religion, or whether open inclusive schools without religious privilege are better fitted.

Feinberg sets himself this task. He studies a range of religious schools in America and draws out in particular the issues of education for a plural society, liberalism, moral development and critical thinking. Whilst not hostile to religious schools per se, he indicates that to be educationally acceptable, these features need to be in evidence so that exclusivist bigotry does not take over. Feinberg gives examples of critical engagement within the religious community encouraging a thinking engagement with the religious tradition. He stresses the potential flexibility of interpretation and the importance of challenging authoritarianism. However, the fact that there is this latitude in belief does not irradicate the religious exclusivity of the institution.

I am not generally in favour of faith schools, but am the first to admit that secular schools can miss out on important aspects of learning if they are hostile to religious faith. Propositional scientific knowledge is important, but questions of what kind of people we are and the quality of good relationships are also vital preparations for life, and faith schools tend to be good at these. My problem with faith schools is the assertion that belief is truth, but this is not inevitable. A faith school could develop a positive criticality which examines the religion's truth claims rationally. A faith school need not have unquestioning fundamentalist assumptions and beliefs. This criticality would go a long way to help pupils disentangle the inner 'truth' from the fiction within religious belief. Pluralism should encourage and enable pupils to find common ground between faiths, through which dialogue becomes possible. I would argue that this should better develop a pupil's mature spirituality.

One last thought. 'Faith' schools is strange terminology. A catholic school, or a Muslim school, gives central place to its religious beliefs. My own personal faith, in the potential goodness of humanity and the possibility (but not inevitability) of global moral progress, is secular and not religious. There is an unexplained assumption that only religious people have faith. This is not so. Religious people have doctrine, so if the term 'religious' school has fallen out of favour, the accurate replacement would be 'doctrinal school'. This of course properly exposes the exclusivity (or lack of inclusivity) of the enterprise.

Research and past experience

D Clandinin and F Connelly, in Personal Experience Methods in the 1994 Denzin and Lincoln Handbook of qualitative research (413-427) note: 'Experience... is the stories people live. People live stories, and in the telling of them reaffirm them, and create new ones' (415). Life history has thus become a widespread method of research of various professions. Some base generalisations on a substantial number of life history interviews (for example Goodson and Sikes, Life history research in educational settings, 2001). Researchers also look back into their own life histories in a variety of ways, reflecting perhaps on their careers, or on a particular piece of research they have completed, such as for Masters or a doctorate. There are issues of accuracy and authenticity in this: humans are capable of lying both to others and to themselves, and on other occasions do not reflect with full understanding. So the quality of looking back (retrospection), or reflecting on past experience has to be taken seriously. From a methodological point of view, reflection on a period of research, such as to a doctorate, can be helped by having a written record of one's thoughts from beginning to end. The research diary is the traditional means of achieving this, modelled on the fieldnotes used in anthropology, but being sure to note down feelings, attitudes, beliefs and suchlike as well as 'facts'. The strictures of John van Maanen, Tales of the Field: On Writing Ethnography, are helpful here, that fieldnotes are not definitive but have been affected by processes of selection, interpretations and partial observation, and maybe by the unrepresentative use of informants (interviewees). Research diaries therefore consist of material to be critiqued, and should not be supercialially accepted. Two of my students were helped by arranging to be interviewed at the beginning of research by an experienced practitioner briefed to be probing. Critiquing that transcript reveals the journey travelled, which might otherwise have become blurred. Other students write their fieldnotes using blog technology, which has the advantage that supervisers can offer guidance frequently. If this becomes a daily habit, a researcher focusing on their own professionality reflects constantly on whatever happens, or whatever thoughts and issues they are wrestling with. I deal with this more fully in Bigger, S (2009) The Potential of Blogs in Higher Degree Supervision, in Worcester Journal of Learning and Teaching issue 1 (online, full text here).

The substantive issue is how to interrogate our own past histories. In talking about reflection on action, Donald Schon (The Reflective Practioner, 1983; Educating the reflective practitioner, 1988) encourages reflection on comparatively recent history - a job that has just been completed for example. Why were certain decisions made, what conclusions have been drawn of success or failure. This encourages habits of evaluation in groups: self evaluation has some sort of control as it is tested by the views of colleagues. Once we attempt to be self-evaluative over a longer period, such dialogue with other participants becomes more difficult. Even straight-forward timelines become difficult as the years blur into each other.

We might even question the purpose of a timeline. To establish an actual factual record does not tell us much about quality. If I can be certain for example that I taught Cambridge Classical Background in 1978, it doesn't tell me whether I taught it well. Or what I might mean by 'well'. Max Van Manen distinguishes between technical rational information (stage 1), contextual reflection (stage 2) including attitudes, values and ethos, and dialectical reflectivity where quality and ethics are critiqued (Linking ways of knowing with ways of being practical, Curriculum Inquiry 6(3), 1977, 205-228).

Max van Manen is a key proponent of the use of phenomenology in pedagogy and the curriculum. A phenomenon is something which is considered real but has no substance for observation. For example, Max van Manen completed early work on tact and tone in pedagogy, and more recent work on pupil privacy. There has to be a great deal of data collection and discussion about the meaning of such words, and the claim made that they are somehow real as opposed to constructed and conceptual. Quality is another such word. What people mean by quality is one level; what is real quality is a higher level. What we assume about the phenomenon (tact, tone, quality) is an interference which we have to put to one side (or bracket out). Many of these phenomena are things in everyday life we take for granted, which means we have not thought deeply about them, our assumptions and stereotypes satisfy us.

The beginnings of analysis of our past experience might be phenomena applicable to us. Whilst tone and tact (to pupils as well as to colleagues) might get us started on pedagogy, and quality might provide roots for views of good practice and self-evaluation, we probably need to construct a matrix of phenomena relevant to us. Respect, justice, community and so on. The case for an item being a phenomenon rather than a concept may have to be debated. What is wisdom? I think it is a concept, not a reality, a judgement that something is sensible rather than foolish. And what of God? I think also a concept, a picture of the highest good, and not an entity which is real. I am sure some readers disagree, but do be sure of your grounds.

I conclude this section by inviting you to look back at your life and career using such markers as tone, tact, respect, fairness, justice, equity, community. There will be aspects in which we feel we have been treated badly, others where we feel we have treated others badly, and still more where others are acting or being acted upon. From this step, observations and recommendations will come.


# post still under construction

Children as social critics for social justice.

This is the text of a lecture on education and schooling (7th October, 9.15 a.m. at the University of Worcester) recommending that the central thrust of the school curriculum is to produce pupils who are adept social critics, of television, the media, their reading and even their schooling. This critique, I hold, is social justice in action, demanding fairness for all irrespective of race, class, gender, ability or background. This is to turn children into activists, concerned with their communities, the environment, and the whole way the world is run. They will be the voters and politicians of the future, so this is akin to them becoming political activists, as Clive Chitty argued in a lecture later the same day in the University of Birmingham.
The full text of my lecture is on:
http://sites.google.com/site/sbiggervaluesineducation

The Bushmen of the Kalahari

I began to be interested in the Bushmen of the Kalahari in the 1970s when reading Laurens Van Der Post's stories A Far Off Place and A Story is Like the Wind, about a friendship between white and Bushmen children. We now know not to believe as fact everything that Van Der Post said (see the biography Storyteller by JDF Jones). The Bushmen (also called the San) have been called a relic of stone age humanity, with interest taken by archaeologists. This is a typical academic gravy train with little substance: they are contemporary people, not museum pieces. That they have suffered at the hands of both white and black is incontrovertible - if you are in doubt, Sandy Gall's The Bushmen of Southern Africa: Slaughter of the Innocent is essential reading. Their hunter-gatherer lifestyle has become virtually impossible today, and their knowledge and skills are in danger of dying out completely.

My current interest is in their spirituality, thanks to an invitation to contribute to the journal Alternation of the Association for the Study of Religion in Southern Africa. A link to this paper will be added here when available. This post is to set out the agenda.

Christian missionaries have painted a picture of animistic African tribes worshipping trees and stones and indulging in blood sacrifices. None of this is true of the Bushmen/San so their traditional spirituality is of interest. Fortunately there has been high quality ethnological and anthropological research from the 19th and 20th centuries, preserving information that no longer exists. I am not, as some do, placing these in an evolutionary sequence but allowing the Bushmen the dignity of others trying to see the world through their eyes. If we in the west were stripped of our scientific explanations for things and left to make sense of the land, sea and skies, we would be in a similar position. Their understanding of their environment and the living things within it are based on observation and long communal experience (tradition). For gathering, the women developed an encyclopedic 'ethnobotanical' knowledge of the nature and properties of plants (for food and healing), and their locations and seasons. For hunting, the men had wide understanding of animals and their habits, and some understanding of internal organs from cutting up the bodies. This is the beginnings of a scientific view of their world, as Louis Lieberberg notes in The Art of Tracking: The Origin of Science. The sky and stars were invaluable for time keeping and guidance, and they recognised that there were near and far astral bodies and pictured constellations in their own way.

Some things however lie beyond understanding by observation. The weather and especially the rains. Disease, sickness and death. Social discord and jealousy. For this, no natural explanations worked, so they assumed supernatural forces. especially gods in the east and west, with the spirits of the dead living with them and working for them. These gods were not worshipped, just recognized as existing and to some extent feared. One tried not to offend them, and to try to escape their influence. A young person might die because the spirits wanted a new child or wife. Given their lack of knowledge about germs and viruses, this has had explanatory power over the centuries - and they recognize that their attitudes and social customs are those handed down by the old ones.

The trance healing dance gives an illustration of several processes. It is the central social ritual, with some but restricted significance on theology. Those, usually men, who go into trance and heal, recognise that there is an inner power which can rise up, overcome them, and give them special powers. They recognize these powers in many things around them, and they avoid certain foods and certain times. When healing, the tranced man goes from person to person healing them - the benefits are psychological and psychosomatic. Their frequency was about twice a week. When crises are felt - a big family row, for example, this is their solution. In trance the men may see the messengers of the gods, or even the gods, as surrounding the camp, and their duty is to frighten and chase them away, because they bring sickness with them.

It will be interesting to wonder whether better health education will have an impact, and whether the natural/supernatural division will continue afterwards. But it has in the Christian and Muslim worlds, so it probably will. Except the San do not rejoice in the promise of an afterlife, it is, as they see it, just how things are. When they begin to see that there are natural explanations for many of life's mysteries, my guess is that trance dances will still be felt to be socially useful.

1930-1960 Blog

I have been diverted recently to my other blog on world war two history and literature (and especially children's literature) on http://1930-1960.blogspot.com. You might like to try it. This is part of a conversation with Owen Dudley Edwards, writer of the excellent book Children's Literature in the Second World War, which puts together writers, readers and global events. My current post is on Rupert, 1939-41.

Spirituality Education.

Spirituality is a never-ending topic. It gets thoroughly confused with religiosity, which is not only quite different, but may well be its opposite.
I focus here on Cathy Ota's and Clive Erricker's Spiritual Education, a compilation of conference papers from 2002. The papers give me a few pegs to hang critique on, whether I like the paper or not. Some papers are wide of the mark. Christiana Welch purports to report on North American Indian (="First Nation") Spirituality but is in fact talking superficially about how the First Nations are represented in 'cowboys and indians' narratives.

David Tacey's Encountering Tradition in a Postmodern Context. Tacey admits to being religious in a generalised radical way but part of a revisionist project [176]. He balances faith with the secular, and espouses a need for prophetic revival, that is a new critique and renovation of tradition. My problem comes with 'Tradition'. Christianity fossilises a two millenia old spirituality, which was already at second hand when the New Testament was written. I have the highest regard for Jesus the 'prophet' (that is, social critic) but despair over the quagmire he has been buried in. Liberating Jesus is part of our task of liberating the dispossessed. The radical Jesus has been colonised and exploited from 30CE until today. And may I burn at the stake for showing dissent, following his example.
Judaism fossilises a spirituality which was five hundred years older. An exile to Babylon had led to a spike of nationalism from which the Hebrew Scriptures were created. All religions attempt to fossilise an historic form of spirituality, giving peacock status to this prophet or that. Our world is rather different. It cannot be critiqued by an Ezra or Nehemiah concerned with racial purity, or a Paul, who never met Jesus, obsessed with a risen spirit. This does not diminish their contribution, but it removes their authority. Authority and spirituality do not mix, for authority removes freedom of thought and belief. Tradition enshrines the authority of this person or that. Siddartha Gautama, the Buddha made it clear that worship and blind obedience were counter to his holistic humanistic (if maybe metaphysical) philosophy, and adherents should not blindly obey.
He offers a case study of 'Elizabeth', a revisionist Catholic. She rejects secular spirituality as a cop-out without resolving her need to be spiritual and religious at the same time. She suffers from the need for external authority to ease the stresses of deciding for oneself. Tacey concludes by emphasising the micro, the personal spiritual experiences of wholeness, integrity and worth. He argues that this is a back-door into religion and will help us to rediscover tradition.
The are several problems, in addition to the fragmentation that he discusses. We may find these religious traditions wanting, with discriminations and assumptions that violate human worth and dignity. Assumptions of original sin rather than original innocence, for example. The great figures of religious traditions (Jesus, Muhammad, Nanak) were reformists with spiritual insights who declared the religions around them as unworthy. They may well continue to do so if they could investigate the religions that draw on their names. 'Rediscovery and renewal' should enable the world to escape labels, and isms, sects, cults and denominations and allow the concept of unity to mean something. It will be unity in diversity - and our individual takes on what the concept of God might mean, will be part of this diversity. But it does not have to make unity impossible.

Mike Pike asks, in 'Reading and Responding to Biblical Texts' why the Bible cannot be read as literature, for personal enlightenment and as personally relevant. The short answer is that most biblical texts were written not as literature but as preaching, so that the use of these texts for personal development is problematic. The texts demand a point of view; personal development demands openness. Interpreting biblical texts requires particular skills, such as Paul Ricoeur develops in his studies of hermeneutics (not mentioned by Pike), such as Figuring the Sacred: Religion, Narrative and Imagination (1995). The use of real literary analysis on biblical texts was pioneered by Robert Alter (The Art of Biblical Narrative, and with Frank Kermode he edited The Literary Guide to the Bible, neither cited by Pike) but this did not aim at personal fulfilment and development, but was literary criticism. Of course we want children to develop their own life stances, whether they are reading the Bible, Michael Morpurgo or Philip Pullman. The problem with the Bible is its claim (and claims on its behalf) to truth and authority which demands that the point of view stated has to be accepted as the true point of view. This is not on. It is indoctrination and not education. Education is possible when such stories are actively subjected to the form of literary criticism appropriate to the age of the child. I am developing a range of discussions on this topic on http://4004bce.blogspot.com and will be happy for comments on points of detail.

Mark Halstead, writing on metaphors for spirituality, is spectacularly wide of the mark, writing that children need help in understanding that metaphors are not literal. Children are experts in pretend play and pretend story, which is all a metaphor is - to explain A I pretend it is B. Children are also deeply spiritual, responding to life, brimming with excitement, and becoming engrossed in creative activities. The trouble is that adults mess them up by asking wrong questions and, to be frank, lying to them. Remember Santa Claus? Schools despiritualise children - extending the thought that Ivan Illich so brilliantly began in 1970. They do it by having a point of view, a set of 'truths' to be imposed, and disallowing free thought in children. Children can pretend all day, and therefore make creative links and wise observations. It is adults who cannot hear what they have to say.

Wisdom and education

I remember an 8 year old girl once telling me, "A wise person is someone who knows a lot about many things, but is humble and not proud and uses what they know to help other people". She must have been talking to Robert Sternberg.

Robert J. Sternberg explores (2004) the balance theory of wisdom. At heart it claims that a wise action works towards a common good.

Wisdom is the use of one’s intelligence and experience as mediated by values toward the achievement of a common good through a balance among (1) intrapersonal, (2) interpersonal, and (3) extrapersonal interests, over the (1) short and (2) long terms, to achieve a balance among (1) adaptation to existing environments, (2) shaping of existing environments, and (3) selection of new environments. This article discusses the balance theory of wisdom, and how wisdom can be assessed and developed.

The phrase 'common good' can be problematic unless it is shaped democratically. The Nazi definition of common good was aimed at only part of the population, and was probably not even true for them. Sternberg describes his book (2003) as exploring perceptions of wisdom in America, and may therefore not be generalisable elsewhere. Wisdom is a concept rather than a reality - the balance sought in the definition is more effectively a tool to analyse actions - are the actions for the common good? are they based on sound reasoning and research? have people's needs and views been taken into account? is it likely to be effective long term as well as short term? does it help to improve our world/environment?

Judgements that actions are wise or not may depend on our approval or disapproval of the actions - are actions we disapprove of automatically thought of as unwise? Even if they meet all of the above criteria. The criteria may help us to reject such subjective views of wisdom, but there may be subjectivity in each of the criteria. If the only actions that can be considered wise are those which have a consensus, there is no room for the paradigm-breaking steps which will take people a while to get used to. The need for consensus will in fact hold development back, linking action to the lowest common denominator of understanding. We have to view such paradigm-breaking actions as being in the common good even if they are not so recognised. Sternberg notes elsehere (2003:180):

Whereas the wise person is perceived to be a conserver of worldly experience, the creative person is perceived to be a defier of such experience.

A wise person however it not someone who protects ancient beliefs but someone inspires people now to make a better world for tomorrow. That person is likely to be a paradigm breaker, a thinker of new thoughts, and above all a person who inspires.


[Sternberg, Robert J. (2003) Wisdom, intelligence and creativity synthesised, Cambridge University Press; Sternberg, R. J. (2004). ‘What is wisdom and how can we develop it?’. Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, vol. 591, no. 1, pp. 164-174. Online: http://ann.sagepub.com/cgi/content/refs/591/1/164.]

Old Testament Study

The conference of the Society for Old Testament Study took place this week. The topic was the extent to which the Old Testament/Hebrew Bible gives us a defensible history of Israel. The general conclusions are that the Bible writers have their doctrine, ideology and theology and cheerfully rewrote history. If we are lucky, we might get a glipse of something 'truthful' (or example, king David probably was a minor warlord; but the story of his major conquests and empire are later fantasies. The Bible writers were mostly writing around 500-300 BCE and were fabricating their past history. They had emerged from exile and disaster and been sent to Palestine and were determined to forge themselves into one people. The twelve tribes comes from this time, a mighty fiction of national unity tracing the origins of this mixed group back to a single ancestor, Abraham. Before you dismiss me as a crank, this is the accepted view of scholarship, including Christian and Jewish worshippers. I explored this twenty years ago with a number of scholars, in Creating the Old Testament: The Emergence of the Hebrew Bible. Those ideas are now mainstream. It places Abraham, Moses, David and Solomon on a similar level to Robin Hood. It sounds negative, but actually it is positive, as the truth usually is. Once we understand what the writers meant, we can get on with our own lives free of deception.
Follow this thread on http://4004BCE.blogspot.com

See also on ideas about God, http://4004bce.blogspot.com/2009/08/hebrew-god.html

Dealing with death.

Watching the end of the BBC TV series Robin Hood has led me to wonder about how death is approached in literature for children, and thereby in education. This is also at a time when there have been high profile celebrity deaths that created a degree of public emotionalism. In Robin Hood, Robin is wounded by a poisoned dagger which allows him a protracted and reflective death. As he eventually dies, his dead wife Marion comes to fetch him and leads him by the hand into "an even greater adventure". As they walk off screen, his body slumps. His death loses gravity. The act of murder has released him into a better world, reunited him with his heart's desire. His death is implicitly condoned.

What do children think of death, and what do we tell them when a loved one dies? Today's gun and knife culture may encourage some children to kill: could their mental model of death encourage them to depict death as a good thing, and remove a sense of guilt?

Death is becoming a common theme in writing for children. Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials is littered with child and adult deaths, and includes a visit to Hades, whose bounds were broken allowing the shades freedom in a celestial melting pot or nirvana. Part of his purpose was to remove the fear of hell and project a picture of a blissfully happy afterlife modeled on Friends Reunited.

Garth Nix has made a career writing about death in curious ways. His Abhorsen fantasy trilogy is about necromancy, the dead returning, people entering death and sometimes escaping from it. Death is greatly to be feared, and mixed up with magic and destruction. His Keys of the Kingdom cycle have a young asthmatic boy, Arthur on the point of death during a cross-country run, being taken into a fantasy house where he in declared heir and wins the keys of power which will enable him to gain control of time by removing the upstart despots who rule each day. The house is like an afterlife, in which the basic function is archiving people's lives and actions. So a companion, Turquoise Blue (from the colour of the ink) had died of black death in the middle ages. The last volume, Lord Sunday, does not appear until the new year, so we must wait to see how it all resolves, and whether the seven books have only been a dream.

Michelle Paver's six volume Chronicles of Ancient Darkness (starting with Wolf Boy, 2003) charts the life of two young people, Torak and Renn. The setting is the stone age north, where totem tribes were hunter gatherers. This was the pre-scientific world of magic, shamans ('Mages'), spirits and demons. The voice-over narrator assumes these beliefs. Torak is the world's redeemer, with special powers, but is otherwise just a vulnerable lad. Renn also has special powers, and superb personal qualities, which she uses to support, protect and manage Torak. Wolf, a real wolf, is pack brother to both of them. The world is, Tolkein style, threatened by a magic stone than needs destroying, against the greed for power of rogue Mages, the Soul Eaters. This is a world where people live by hunting, showing respect for the lives they are taking and other flora and fauna. In death, the three souls leave the body, and provided the right rituals take place, keep together. They can however be harnessed for evil means, such as made to possess animals or children. The death of anything, even for food, and even plants, is not taken lightly. However, when declared an outcast, anyone who encountered him was supposed to kill him, and killing people or animals who threaten clan security is sanctioned - usually these are declared possessed of evil. Torak, Renn and all other young people carry weapons routinely for their own safety, usually made safe by clan custom. For child readers, there are questions about the nature of the soul or souls (the eternal spiritual entity that resides within our body, and about how we should view life and death in daily life.

There are two views of death currently at odds - that our inner self will survive death and move to some other sphere, disembodied; and that our inner self is simply the accumulations of feeling and knowledge which, on death, is simply switched off and ends. Logically, what holds for a human should also hold for a dog, cow or slug, and a slug heaven is rather difficult to imagine. Religions have promoted belief in an afterlife, emphasizing the need for reward or punishment. Hinduism is more open, recognising the mystery and relegating reward and punishment to our future embodied lives. Today, the autonomous self is promoted, with self esteem, self respect and an expectation for self empowerment. That this self has an eternal future is viewed as self evident. Modern spiritualities have replaced the efforts of traditional religions, although they borrow angels, demons and other conceptual paraphernalia.

This leaves us a quite serious question, what do we teach our children about death? Given the popular media and the stories they read, they cannot be very clear.

Michelle Magorian, Just Henry.

Michelle Magorian became famous for the wartime evacuee story Goodnight Mister Tom. Here in Just Henry (2008) she sets her story around 1950. It is just at the ending of ration coupons. Austerity appears everywhere - bomb sites still flattened, the family relics of war apparent, with missing fathers, dead fathers, desperate mothers. This is an 'all live happily ever after' story but the detail makes it interesting. I am not retelling the story here, it is for you to read; rather I pick out some issues to contemplate. There is an anti-discrimination theme, with treatment of an illegitimate boy and the son of an alleged deserter dominating the first third of this 700 page book. Henry has his mind poisoned by his Gran (mother of Henry's dead war hero father) who declared herself a dependent invalid at the age of 53, not only adding to Henry's mother's burden, but physically hitting her and Mollie her infant. It is painfully gradually that Henry sees her for what she really is. The heroes of the tale are the new teacher Mr Finch, and the 60 year old writer Mrs Beaumont, who teach the children actively to resist prejudice and develop a can-do attitude to life and relationships. Both adults are rebels, non-compliant, creative, putting good relationships ahead of all else. A historical job of the story lies in the detail on 1950s films and cinema, presented as a source of entertainment visited several times each week.

The children are from the first ROSLA cohort, when school leaving age was raised from 14 to 15. They are in a secondary modern school, although Henry deliberately failed the 11 plus to please his Gran. Grace is dyslexic and has been expelled from 13 schools for idleness and insubordination, Pip is illegitimate, Jefferies whose father is accused of desertion. These become an unlikely group of friends. Secondary modern kids are presented as talented artistically and vocationally. Things work for these children because of cooperation - their careers were what they wished, but only good will made it possible. It is not a meritocracy - jobs went to people who had friends and relations in the business - railway, films, drama and singing, music. The cooperation of this special group of children and adults beat off the horrendous conservatism of society generally, represented by Gran who is actively malicious, the school headteacher who is prejudiced, Grace's absentee parents who think success comes through punishment. The only part of the plot I shall give away is the irony of bigoted Gran's discomfort to find her own son to be a deserter and her favorite grandson to be illegitimate.

Similar but different issues about negative views of people leading to prejudice are apparent in each generation. We have to have eyes open for the next threat - whether asylum seekers, Muslims, economic migrants from Eastern Europe, travellers or whatever. Empowering all should be a key to policy, strategy and pedagogy.

Power - Obama's bio

As a youth, Obama was taken to Indonesia when his mother married an Indonesia student who was then recalled back home after the coup in the 1960s. This extract comes from the realisation of political realities, making passive acceptance the only way to live safely.

"Power. The word fixed in my mother's mind like a curse. In America, it had generally remained hidden from view until you dug beneath the surface of things; until you visited an Indian reservation or spoke to a black person whose trust you had earned. But here power was undisguised, indiscriminate, naked, always fresh in the memory. Power had taken Lolo and yanked him back into line just when he though he'd escaped, making him feel its weight, letting him know his life wasn't his own. That's how things were; you couldn't change it, you could just live by the rules, so simple once you learned them."
Barack Omama, Dreams From My Father, p.45.

The socio-political status quo acts as a powerful block to free enterprise. It blocks opportunity for all, and replaces it with opportunity for those favoured. We need to did out who benefits from the status quo. There are cases where that benefit can be removed (as in the recent case of banker's bonuses) and others when benefits need to be spread more fairly. Power and its benefits is therefore a powerful problematic in the analysis of society and social institutions.

Also some thoughts from The Audacity of Hope (2006):

"I find the President and those who surround him...possessed of the same mix of virtues and vices, insecurities and long-buried injuries, as the rest of us. (p.48)

He goes on to talk about values and empathy, the importance of trying to see things from someone else's point of view even when (or especially when) you disagree with them. It strikes me also that this is an agenda for personal reflexivity, that is, evaluating one's own position and life journey. We might think of our contribution to life, the world, and to knowledge; our attitudes and prejudices and were they come from; our feelings of threat, the borderlands where our comfort zone ends; and life traumas that may have an impact on out thoughts and feelings. For work in education, how we ourselves were 'injured' by the system may affect our current views, just as the winners, the minority, those who succeeded and went on to hold political or economic power, are concerned to maintain whatever helped them succeed, even when it failed the other 80%. And working out our values is one thing, distinguishing between reality and rhetoric is another. Obama adds: what is it you actually spend your energies, time and money on? This is what we really values and may be consequential or inconsequential.

On his induction to the Senate, he cites the octogenarian Senator Byrd with general approval despite his once belonging to the Ku Klux Klan. He says,

"I wondered if it should matter. Senator Byrd's life - like most of ours - has been the struggle of warring impulses, a twining of darkness and light" (p.75)

He sees this as an analogy for the senate, over time supporting both civil rights and slaveowner rights. "Struggle of warring impulses" points in all of us to those tensions which pull us in different directions - the pull of greed over the nag of altruism; the joy of power over the benefits of cooperation. For teachers, the imperative for order over the freedom of creativity. Identifying our own tensions and ambiguities is part of reflexity in action. Which we call darkness, and which light, is also not unproblematical.

Finally here, talking about the Constitution as a defence againse absolutism and tyranny, he says,

"we must test out our ideals, vision, and values against the reality of a common life, so that over time they may be refined, discarded, or replaced by new ideals, sharper visions, deeper values" (pp.94-5)

This also is reflexity in action, the process of probing, checking and testing. It puts one's life on the line, exposing some things we hold dear as empty, some gods as idols, some certainties as delusions. If research does not do this, I for one would find it not deserving of my time, and not worth the candle.

A New View of Society

Last week we were in Scotland, ending with New Lanark and Biggar. The latter was probably not home of my forebears, although my paternal grandparents came from Scotland, settling via Canada in Dublin where the Bigger family had a history. Probably grandmother Macmillan family was 'settled' in Canada to make way for sheep. Grandfather was a bookbinder, an artisan. Together they had thirteen children in Dublin, a large Protestant family.

A society which promoted wealth over poverty, fostered ignorance through child labour rather than education, and oppressed its already traumatised workforce, leads us to New Lanark and Robert Owen. The cotton mill there is now a World Heritage site, with exhibitions, preserved buildings, and one mill rebuilt into a hotel which was filled, when we stayed, with Freddie Mercury fans attending a tribute concert. A ghost train in an exhibition mill let Annie guide us round her times, the work she did, how her family lived - and how she was educated. Robert Owen was the first employer to open a nursery school in the mill, ensure that both children and adults had opportunities for education, introduced a health service, and ran a fairtrade shop for the benefit of workers. For him, healthy intelligent workers were worth investing in. If all other employers did likewise, society itself would change.

His treatise A New View of Society argued the point, but failed to win over his fellow employers. Rather it made him enemies. I quote merely his essay heading quotations:

Any general character, from the best to the worst, from the most ignorant to the most enlightened, may be given to any community, even to the world at large, by the application of proper means; these means are to a great extent at the command and under the control of those who have influence in the affairs of men.

It is not unreasonable to hope that hostility may cease, even when perfect agreement cannot be established. If we cannot reconcile all opinions, let us endeavour to unite all hearts.

Truth must ultimately prevail over error.

It is beyond all comparison better to prevent than to punish crime. A system of government therefore which shall prevent ignorance, and consequently crime, will be infinitely superior to one, which, by encouraging the first, creates the necessity for the last, and afterwards inflicts punishment on both.

This was a radical, new, rationalist view of society which sowed seeds for the modern world.

Do we today need a new view of society? Education has not created utopia. Nor has it empowered young people. Nor does it provide the skills and creativity that citizens and employees will need in twenty years time. Employers and entrepreneurs are more likely to be created by school failure than by success. The curriculum fails to excite, and refuses to allow focus on things that do excite. There is no flexibility, no broad measure of achievement other than mechanistic SATs and exams. There is no room for the joy of ambiguity, or wrestling with problems and issues. None of this is the fault of teachers; rather it is the myopia of policy makers of both ruling parties since 1988, supported by media idiocy.

If the answers to my questions will be challenging to find, we need now to begin asking the right questions of how education, the curriculum and assessment fits children and young people to become adults who have something worthwhile to contribute to their world, a world in which there will be no smooth sailing. I hope this is a world without prejudice, persecution, oppression and injustice - such is certainly worth fighting for.

Night Thoughts, Thames Television 1987

I wrote these seven short talks in March 1985 and recorded them in early summer for later transmission starting 27.1.1986 for one week, in a two minute block at the end of each evening’s programmes after which ITV went off air. See http://ftvdb.bfi.org.uk/sift/title/615699 and http://ftvdb.bfi.org.uk/sift/series/11342.

The series specialised in a spiritual/religious reflection relevant to the time, with a mix of contributors including Chad Varah and Trevor Huddleston. In my case, as an atheist, my comments were more spiritual than religious with the general theme of multi-faith religious education, which at the time was my bread and butter, having been a religious education teacher and then a teacher trainer. I was invited because of an account of a talk I gave in Banbury on multifaith religious education, reported in the Methodist Recorder (I wrote the copy). My stance was that informing children about a range of religions would reduce the tendency towards prejudice and racism but increasing understanding and enthusiasm, taking away the fear of the unknown. Today, I am pleased that diversity is generally more comfortably accepted than then. However, the anti-racist task requires more than making children/people more informed. Some ‘nice’ and well-informed people are racists and profoundly bigoted.

Writing something meaningful in 200-250 words proved to be an exacting task, a very important discipline for my later writing. Reading it to camera proved no less simple. Here are the talks followed by a few comments.

Monday. Teaching World Faiths.

Imagine, if you will, a class of six year olds. Their teacher decided to hold a Passover celebration to be fair to Ben, the only Jewish boy in the school. The children acted out the Elijah story, visited a local synagogue, made a Menorah candlestick and other items, and as a climax held a Passover meal. With the help of Ben’s parents, food was prepared in accordance with Jewish food laws, a search for bits of hidden leaven was made, and the wine (really grape juice) flowed. The ritual followed simply. Ben recited the four questions in Hebrew, unleavened bread and bitter horseradish were eaten, the afikomen was hidden, and found. By this time, Elijah’s cup had been mysteriously drained. A child called out, “Three cheers for the Jews”, which prompted a spontaneous response. The children had learnt that most important of lessons, that learning about people, their culture and religion can be fun, and can be meaningful. They had taken a big step towards understanding and empathy.

Next term I unexpectedly received a card, skilfully crafted by a six year old hand, wishing me Eid Mubarrak, a Muslim blessed fast-breaking greeting. The Muslim children had also shared their celebration, the end of a month of spiritual discipline, prayer and fellow-feeling for the hungry.

A nine year old Sikh boy from another school exclaimed, when I recognised a picture of Guru Nanak, the first Sikh spiritual teacher, “How do you know about our Gurus? No one in school knows about them. Later I ended the assemby with the words “And now for a Sikh prayer”. Sikh children responded with devotion, others with genuine interest and respect.

Teaching world faiths is not a chore, but a joy which can be exciting, stimulating and truly moving.

Discussion:
Teaching world religions was a new development in the 1980s. None of us were trained properly to do it, and many teachers did not dare. They got rather confused about who believed what, though to be fair the children grasped things rather more quickly if clearly taught. I tried things out in various schools, covering Judaism, Islam, Hinduism and Sikhism. I gave a talk about this to a Methodist group in Banbury, which I wrote up for the Methodist Recorder. Thames Television researchers saw it and invited me to record seven daily talks about religious education. The scripts, otherwise not archived, have emerged from my attic, and here they are.

In my lifetime as a teacher of religious education, the curriculum moved from being pro-Christian and Bible based, to an attempt to lead children to understand religion itself. The teachings of the major faiths therefore became more central. I regard this as an important shift, but there is still a further shift to be made. The curriculum has promoted the major religions, aiming for understanding and empathy. And that has been useful. However, we are in a post-religious age, and there are secular ethical and moral positions. Religion has over the years been harmful where personal freedoms have been curtailed and orthodoxy has been forced. We as a species need to decide over the next century or two whether religion, and in particular fundamentalist and tribal religion which regards all others as wrong, is in itself helpful or harmful. For me, the potential for harm outweighs the potential for good.

Tuesday – Without Prejudice.

The 1944 Education Act, still the current law on religious education states that religious education should be “not distinctive of any particular religious denomination”. Wisely, Christianity is nowhere mentioned. I recently sat five young children down around a tape recorder to discuss beliefs and customs – a Hindu, a Sikh, a Muslim and two Christians, from the Moravians and the Brethren. Each contributed openly and with deep interest and fascination without condemning others, and without condescension.

Teachers are committed to developing children’s understanding through open and unbigoted investigation. Religious education partly involves learning about religious stories, rituals, festivals and beliefs. In part it illuminates what, beneath the surface, religion means. In part, too it explores issues that religion ought to confront, such as purpose, meaning, justice and social concern. One such issue is prejudice, deep-seated in all societies and a profound influence on children and their parents. Fortunately in the primary school children’s opinions have not yet hardened into prejudices, and attitudes are mostly positive and open.

It is the task of religious education to confront prejudice by encouraging children to reflect upon its root causes – ignorance, low social concern and patronising assumptions. This task requires sensitive handling, but will be well worth the effort.

Discussion:

The law regulating religious education changed in 1988 in the Education Reform Act. Christianity was made the dominant religion, but the requirement for a broadly based curriculum covering the other religions was enshrined in law. I recognise that the term ‘other religions’ is demeaning, but this division of status is implied by the Act. Practitioners were not deterred from good multi-faith practice by the new law. The LEA Agreed Syllabuses continued to cover five or six world religions.

Over time, I continue to emphasise that issues of purpose, justice and prejudice should be the starting point for religious education. I later developed this further in ‘Challenging Religious Education’ (linked here): religious education should challenge children’s assumptions and open them up towards inter-faith understanding and global relationships. A sound knowledge of world faiths is not enough to conquer prejudice – prejudice itself and its effects have to be one of the lens through which children should develop understanding of why people have valued religions.

Wednesday – Frogs

Each March hundreds of frogs migrate through our village for their annual courtship rituals in a small pond in our garden. Some die on the road, though we help as many as we can. We are powerfully reminded that life goes on. Frogspawn is often taken into school to let children see it hatch and develop into tadpoles. I have seen tanks of oxygen starved dead tadpoles in many places, so a greater emphasis on care for fellow creatures would be helpful. I recently overheard a proposal, thankfully thwarted, to kill and dissect tadpoles in a primary school. The pupils would learn one vivid lesson, that wildlife can be mistreated and killed for our benefit and interest. That lesson, if learnt young, will not go away but be there fore life.

“I am, therefore I exploit”. This sums up a widespread western attitude to the world and the environment. For Buddhists, non-violence is a vital principle that should govern our relationships with all living things. Bushmen of the Kalahari and Australian Aborigines, both cultures savagely and wilfully hunted down within recent history, regard people as part of creation, not as its kings. Theirs is an intimate and harmonious interaction with their world, expressed through attitudes, myths, rituals and behaviour.

We too in the developed world have powerful myths. “Life came by accident and destroys itself selfishly and wilfully”, we say. This of course says more about us than about life. As for our responsibilities to life forms and the environment, we have a great deal to learn from such groups as the Bushmen.

Discussion:
I was influenced then by the writings of Laurens Van Der Post, especially his children’s story A Far Away Place in which white and Bushman children relate comfortably and learn from each other. The filming came at a time when the frogs were breeding in the garden, and my other more prosaic ideas were falling through. A teacher training student had proposed to dissect a tadpole, and I had dissuaded her for the reasons given, and with the more persuasive instruction to consult the headteacher.

Religious issues seem to me to be central ethical issues of life itself. In fact, ethics are an absolute must for all subjects of the curriculum – this is a real preparation both for childhood and for adult life. Respect for life is part of this, more trendy today than then. Animals are still generally assumed to not have rights – we kill to eat, and kill animals such as foxes, badgers and seals who threaten this carnivore business by being carnivores themselves. There is a balance which we have not yet found.

Thursday – Teaching Christianity

“The trouble with multi-faith religious education”, an infants teachers said to me “is that Christianity loses out”.
“By no means”, I responded “in fact Christianity can gain a great deal”. By not demanding that children accept Christian dogma, teenage rejection diminishes. The clash between religion and science disappears. Some denominations get a fairer deal – Mormons, Rastafarians, Jehovah Witnesses and Pentecostals.

Take Jesus. That Jesus is Messiah is a Christian belief, but not an objective fact. That this is meaningful to Christians is a fact worthy of exploration. Educationally it is inappropriate to demand belief, as if we are in a fascist state; nor conversely to make a dogma of agnosticism, the “don’t know” cop-out. Children need to be allowed to weigh up evidence, positive and negative. They can legitimately explore how the life of Jesus helps Christians visualise something of what God is or does. The virgin birth and resurrection, described by Christians themselves as ‘myth’, become less problematic. Pupils are able to discover what different Christian groups claim, and why. They ask what Christians mean when they represent God in human form, and how the belief in God’s continuing presence in the world affects the way believers think and behave. Whatever they personally decide, they will have a greater understanding of Jesus’s importance.

Discussion:
British education has been an imperialist Christian enterprise that discussions of religious education can become meaningless. The objectors referred to here of course were arguing from the point of view that religious education should preach and convert. I taught in a school in the 1980s that regarded its multicultural intake as all ‘English’ which was represented by hymns such as ‘Onward Christian Soldiers” in Assembly. Imagine a hymn today, “Onward Muslim Soldiers”!
My promotion of rationalism generally received short shrift – that was not what they meant at all. Yet I would still assert it today. The impact of preaching within religious ‘instruction’ did lead to total rejection of religion (Christianity) which had been ‘shoved up our throats’ and went the way of Santa Claus, that other major adult fraud against children. Uncovering the one led to rejecting the other. Adults (teachers and parents) should not lie to children and leave problems to be sorted out later. God becomes a problem, as does death and Santa Claus. Adults follow social pressure to conform, to confirm the lies. I discovered the truth about Santa Claus aged about 3. I am still angry about the deception. A friend traumatically discovered it aged 10, and is still traumatised by the shame. Rationalism is the only way. Talk to children as to adults. Do not patronise.

Friday – Integrated Learning.

We divide knowledge too easily into convenient sealed packages or “subjects”. Integrated learning, common in primary schools, can help children see themselves and their world as a harmony, with various perspectives enriching the counterpoint. I worked recently with a class of seven year olds on the topic ‘Earth’. This explored the world they experienced and invited their deep inner reflection.

In observing our earth, we interpret what we see. Human issues emerge – of value, feelings, mystery and responsibility. We reflect on meaning and purpose, putting feelings into words in a poem, or creation story perhaps. We reflect on our place on earth, our potential for good, and our habits of possession and destruction. We express our feelings, our hopes, our wonder or sheer joy, through art, drama, movement, music or creative writing. Myths, stories, poetry – like the Psalms of old – express similar responses in religious language. We encounter and enjoy life and growth, with wonder, respect and concern. And we contemplate death, the ultimate mystery.

Such reflective attitudes to life and the world are the stuff that religion should be made of. Enriched by it, children can begin a real dialogue with others, their environment, and with the world they inhabit.

Discussion:
It has always amazed me how the simple truth, that knowledge is unified and too important to be divided into so-called ‘subjects’, should cause politicians and the Daily Mail to get their knickers in such a twist. After 1988, the National Curriculum divided ‘knowledge’ savagely into subjects with learning objectives and content in ways which made integrated thinking impossible. Children, after all that abuse, cannot therefore think holistically, and nor than the teachers who were trained post 1988. Most of those dedicated experts trained before that were edged out by the inspection regime which recognised compliance but not talent. Still today, attempts to return to a sensible curriculum are met with cries not to return to ‘topic work’. I agree in the sense that we should not return to superficiality; but we should be building connections across all aspects of knowledge and help children to make ingenious and unexpected links, which will be the creativity of tomorrow.

Saturday – Symbols.

We take symbols for granted, but children cannot. To recognize what common emblems mean gives them a good start. When they express themselves through symbols they create, children gain a deeper understanding of why symbols are used and what they seek to express.

Religions express deep concerns through more than emblems. Clothing (like prayer shawls), food (like the Eucharist) and images all point to symbolic meaning and evoke devotion. Initiation rituals act out commitment. Sculptured images and icons, of Jesus, Durga, Krishna or Buddha, evoke a realm of meaning far beyond the significance of their raw materials, deeper even than the real lives of those depicted.

Religion explores concepts and insights far beyond descriptive language, and often resorts to pictures. Images can be verbal. If God by definition is beyond description, not attempt at description can be authentic. So we use symbol. When we call God father, mother, creator the sun, even the wind (or spirit) we say nothing about God but a great deal about ourselves. We may prefer to visualise God through a human being – a Jesus, or a Krishna.

Religion involves profound human concerns, the human spirit expressing what it feels and means by creating images for what it finds impossible to describe. Yet symbols alone, without reason, justice or compassion, can be diabolical, not benign. The value of a symbol lies in the quality of what is symbolised, not in its origin.

Children can symbolically express their own feelings and ideals through art, drama or creative writing. Exploring ideals, insights and perplexities through symbols and symbolic metaphors of their own making can greatly enrich their learning and understanding.

Discussion.
The confusion between symbolic/metaphorical language and literal description presents crucial lessons to be learnt. Much that is accepted as ‘real’ is in fact metaphorical: a radio ‘wave’ does not resemble the sea, nor does an electrical ‘current’. Yet we need metaphors to understand things, by analogy. Religious writings are full of imagery; working out the reality is far more difficult and is always problematic. Education’s task is to make a child’s understanding of metaphor to be liberating and thereby an aid to learning and understanding.

Sunday – Religion and Science

The clash between religion and science began long before Charles Darwin; but the problem is a false one, created by a religion more concerned with literal biblical interpretation than with deep contemplation of life. It was a clash of rival certainties, with appeals to authority coming from different directions, from religious teaching on the one hand, to observation of the universe itself on the other.

Dogmatic approaches to the hypotheses of science, or to religious beliefs, tend to close the mind to wider – and deeper – possibilities. Science observes, records and seeks to explain, contributing tiny pieces to the cosmic jigsaw. Imaginatively filling in gaps, it theorises on what the completed jigsaw might look like. This raises more questions, which it then takes into account. This process ideally begins in the primary school when children explore and experiment, stimulating their scientific skills. When children learn to ask the right questions, they begin to glimpse the wider picture and become part of the universal search for knowledge and meaning.

Religion in contrast contemplates ultimate meaning. We each perceive this in a personal way. We express it all too inadequately through our attitudes, behaviour, art, stories and rituals. We are human and may prefer a quick, easy fix, and off-the-peg belief system. Children are aware that life is miraculous, the birth of a kitten or lamb, the pupating butterfly. They respond with wonder and excitement. Within the egg lies the mystery of life. The Hindu Vedas recognized this when they celebrated the birth of existence as the hatching of a cosmic egg. For Jews this creative mystery is God, fashioning order from the void by the divine word. Christians and Muslims continue this insight. Children can respond to the mystery through their own art, poetry and speech. They may find traditional responses enriching, or constraining. Their personal responses can deepen with time, or dulled by dogma. Yet together scientific investigation and inner reflection are formidable tools for reflection and understanding, helping children to come to terms with their world and, more importantly, with themselves.

Discussion.
Christian creationist views have come to blows with science since Darwin, but other religions to not so much share the same battleground. Scientism, which is the use of scientific ‘knowledge’ as the only basis of understanding, is an atheistic fundamentalism which battles against religious fundamentalism. Yet there is middle ground in which positive dialogue takes place.