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Let's Talk: A discursive approach to training
professional community educators
John Bamber
University of Edinburgh
In a process of
enlightenment there
can only be
participants.
Jurgen Habermas
The Individual Thinker
Enlightenment?
Intersecting Paradigms
Psychological (Entwistle)
Sovereign individual
Socio-cultural (Lave and Wenger)
Community of practice
Critical (Freire)
Site of resistance and social justice
Overview
Ways of Thinking and Practicing
McCune and Hounsell (2005) TLRP/ESRC
Habermas and Community Education
Communicative Action
Developing Practice Competence
Principles for Pedagogy
Challenges
Approximating the Ideal: WBL2
Any Takers?
Research and Literature
Gorard et al (2006) HEFCE
Need to address experience in HE
Haggis (2007)
‘activities, patterns of interaction and communication
failures'
Daniels et al. (2007) ESRC
Rule bending in inter-agency work
Brockbank and McGill (2007)
Brookfield and Preskill (2007)
Ways of Thinking and Practicing
CLD students
Community Learning and Development:
• empowerment, participation, inclusion…
Contested Purpose of CLD:
• progressive social and political change
Steering Frameworks: SCQF and CeVe
BACE Programme Aims - Critical Competence:
• understanding, context, justify activity – why and how
Situated learning
Dealing with uncertainty
Learning for an unknown future cannot be
accomplished by the acquisition of either knowledge
or skills. There is always an epistemological gap
between what is known and the exigencies of the
moment as it invites responses, and this is particularly
so in a changing world. ..A more positive term, to
encapsulate right relationships between persons and
the changing world in which they are placed, might be
‘wisdom’.
Barnett (2004: 259)
Habermas and Community
Education
Why Habermas?
Democracy and purpose of CE
Knowledge Constitutive Interests
Knowledge:
• objects of experience and a priori categories
• constituting ideas – importance of reflection
Rationality more than scientific method
Discourse as the crucible of reason
Communicative Action
Communication involves making three
types of validity claims concerning:
• the truth of what is said or presupposed
• the rightness of the claim
• the truthfulness of the speaker.
Validity Claims
Validity claims are ‘universal’ in the sense that they are raised
with every instance of communicative action.
Making claims is a reciprocal act.
People co-ordinate actions depending on how they evaluate the
statements of other people.
Rationality ‘proper’ then is the ability to let action be guided by a
common understanding of reality, the consensus established
through linguistic dialogue (Eriksen and Weigard, 2004: 4).
A moment of empathy
Habermas’s discourse model, by requiring that
perspective taking be general and reciprocal, builds
the moment of empathy into the procedure of coming
to a reasoned agreement: each must put him or
herself into the place of everyone else in discussing
whether a proposed norm is fair to all. And this must
be done publicly; arguments played out in the
individual consciousness or in the theoretician’s mind
are no substitute for real discourse.
McCarthy (in Habermas, 2003a: viii-ix)
The objectifying perspective
The distinctive feature of Habermas’s work is
that processes of knowing and understanding
are grounded, not in philosophically dubious
notions of a transcendental ego, but rather in
the patterns of ordinary language usage that
we share in everyday communicative
interaction.
Pusey (1987: 23)
Four Types of Action
Technical
Rules of action, methods, techniques
Theoretical
Concepts, hypotheses, rationales, philosophies
Moral
Codes of conduct, principles, values, standards
Personal
Self-awareness, emotional intelligence, identity
Practice Competence
Practice competence can be defined as
the capacity to construct knowledge
leading to the resolution of particular
types of empirical-analytic or moralpractical problems.
NB. Provisional status of knowledge
Critical Competence in CLD
Dimension
Example
Technical
Community consultation strategy
Theoretical
Policy interpretation/critique
Moral
Distinguish personal and professional
Personal
Self-control; see effect on others
Discursive
Participate in team activity and goals
Communicative
Express ideas in speech and writing
Principles for Pedagogy
Learning as an act of reciprocity
Developing knowledge through redeeming claims
Safeguarding participation and protecting rationality:
• ideal speech situations
Competence as a constructive achievement:
• developing normative structures
Not the tools – the toolmakers tools…
Key Influences
Piaget (constructivist)
Vygotsky (social constructivist)
Kohlberg (moral development)
Norm guided to norm testing
discourse
The cognitive structures underlining the capacity of
moral judgment are to be explained neither primarily
in terms of environmental influences nor in terms of
inborn programs and maturation or processes. They
are viewed instead as outcomes of the creative
reorganisation of an existing cognitive inventory that
is inadequate to the task of handling certain persistent
problems.
Habermas (2003: 125)
Challenges to the Ideal
From transmitting to producing knowledge
Countering negative theories:
• Self, and learning and teaching
Privileging collective, collaborative work
Power and Positionality
Communicative virtues
Situating the curriculum
Approximating the Ideal: WBL2
Organisational Development
Case Study
Analysis
Investigation
Strategy
Problems and
Issues
Case Analysis
Investigating the
Workplace
Development
Strategies
Individual
Learning Review
Group
Creative Change
Assessments
Useful Insights?
Justification the key to learning:
• ideas, actions, behaviours
Incorporating co-operative activity
Development of practice knowledge
Ideal as standard and model
Any subject-discipline (Biglan, 1973)?