Academia – Page 25 – Silence and Voice

Project Management for Training (Online course) Begins Tonight

I am teaching a new online course tonight: Project Management for Training X75.9952, at New York University’s School of Continuing and Professional Studies. I have taught this course several times before, though this is the first time it is running online.

I decided to make the syllabus publicly available on the course website, in case anybody is interested in seeing it.

This is one of the 3 courses I am teaching this summer, and is thus one of the reasons I have posted so little to my blog on the past week.

. . . and how is THAT Research?

Ever hear that question, usually at the end of some other pleasant introductory sentence? If not, then bravo, you are a traditional researcher doing what you have been taught and in so doing support the stability and safety of the academic industry. Your reward includes crisp peer-reviewed journal articles safely locked within academic databases (thereby keeping the knowledge safe) and proper cocktail discussion (“Oh, you were involved in that work, how interesting . . . .”).

However, if you are a rebel and make a nuisance of yourself by pushing the boundaries for what can be considered research, then I really want to hear your thoughts. Have you written and performed a dramatic reading of poetry using words from the interview notes generated during data collection? How about the use of media, Web technologies, Twitter, discussion boards, autoethnographic inquiry, and the like? Does your work not fit into the design – literature – problem – method – analysis – findings – next steps model? Did you ever wonder who created that model, and what power issues are at stake challenging it? Let me guess, you may have at times even wondered whether the struggles were worth it, how your life would be different if you liked numbers, how you should have been a plumber, and the like.

There are enough times when you (ok, we) have to defend our work to others, I want to reframe the question.

Rather than explain “How is that research?”, I am interested in the internal and personal reasonings about it. Why do I want to express my work in a different paradigm? What is it about my subject or perspective that makes it not seem to fit into a traditional framework?

In my fledgling autoethnographic inquiry, I find that I had to do it (after being subjected to years of impersonal quantitative social science work around organizational learning—it has a value, but is not where I am interested in exploring) since I have trouble researching something out there without exploring how it effects me and challenges / develops my own perspective. I always think, don’t we want our students to understand the content and then apply it to their lives (to demonstrate they understand it)? My autoethnographic work looks at something that is important to me and, while exploring it and seeing what has already been studied with it, I show how my frame develops while inviting the reader to consider something different for their own lives, too. Now isn’t that a way to bridge the research-to-practice gap?

Why should research be any different? Better yet, try not to feel threatened by something different. Hmm, this may in itself turn into an interesting project . . .

Centre for Qualitative Research’s 2008 Video (Bournemouth University)

I stumbled across this video (ok, a colleague sent me a link to it!) about what seems to have been a very interesting qualitative conference last year at Bournemouth University. If a picture is worth a thousand words, then perhaps this video may make an even more powerful statement for what this was about.

"Day Dreams, Night Games" from Kip Jones on Vimeo.

I wonder when the call for papers and information for the 2010 conference will be online, and I am interested to see how interdisciplinary (cf. my life and work) this conference may be. Perhaps I should put it on my proposed list for next year . . .

Adult Educators Speak Only to One Another?

I received an email yesterday from somebody asking if I knew if and where any of the speeches or presentations from the recent Adult Education Research Conference (AERC2009) were available online. Alas, except for the presentations and sessions I attended and liveblogged, I do not know if and where any of them (including the proceedings) are available. This is one of hte many reasons I liveblog—why fence the learning in and keep it only within the group?

Pity.

There were so many good ideas, so many calls for adult educators to both look back to remember our roots as well as look forward to redefine our work and differentiate ourselves. Alas, speaking to the troops is always easier than speaking to others, yet I have to wonder if these calls for self-reflection will lead to anything. Will we just speak to ourselves and bemoan the formal decline in the profession, or will we do something, anything, about it?

I do not want to be too harsh, yet it remains that as a specific field within education, adult education is in decline to the sexier fields of educational administration, human resource development, organizational studies, communication studies, and cultural studies.

Perhaps it is time for me to also redefine my work? Funny to think about that, as I have never stopped redesigning myself (cf. the Madonna effect), always seeing how my work and contributions develop (not quite change) depending on need and my own interests. The more I learn, the more I think I can offer.

Perhaps adult education as a field should do the same?

Seeking Integration: Spirituality in the Context of Lifelong Learning and Professional Reflective Practice

Cheryl Hunt from the University of Exeter is linking spirituality to adult education. The spiritual turn from Houtman and Aupers (2007), as there is decline in conventional religions but there is a search for grass-roots spirituality. Her theoretical framework is from Heron’s ways of knowing and the Orientation to Reflective Practice (Wellington and Austin, 1996). She also uses Dreary and Forman (2004).

For adult educators, she engages in this via professional reflective practice. Reflective practice can help us be more effective in the exercise of individual professions. There are the 5 areas of reflective practice, as per Houtman and Aupers.

Immediate
Technical
Deliberative
Dialectic
Transpersonal

There is more about this model within the proceedings than she is listing here in the session, especially based on a large chart that was on a slide and is in the paper.

There are a number of concerns that link academic / professional knowledge and practice something “deeper.” In a seminar series, she got a sense of the fragmentation in many people’s lives, and to link all levels of oneself, and all parts of oneself. Some of the feedback that was received came in the form of creative writing and poetry.

Thinking about the theory that underpinned the results was Heron (1996) on cooperative inquiry, where the use of language is rooted in deep experience and non-linguistic understandings.

Transpersonal perspective to spirituality is more of a secular spirituality in her work.

There are some really nice next steps, including the British Association for the Study of Spirituality (BASS), a new international conference: Spirituality in a Changing World in May of 2010, and a new journal, Spirituality. Right now, discussions about spirituality are held in different silos, and they are trying to bring those various contexts and meaning together.

For questions, one person said that there is a lot of perceived need for this and that it is very fractured in the various professions and disciplines. Somebody shared that she was from the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS), and how they integrate with many of the models and frameworks that Cheryl discussed. Libby Tisdell asked about an example, and Cheryl discussed her experiences of community which got lost when she studied it during her dissertation. The look at her first child at birth was like the “shimmering moment” that looks back and looks forward almost at once. Interestingly, the management theories in academia tend to move far away from these discussions. However, the more recent work on spirituality and management is getting more developed than it is in education.

There was an additional question about how spirituality and religion is kept separate, and this is a significant issue, both in the US as well as in the UK.

Having spoken with Cheryl via email in the past, I am really looking forward to reading her paper.