Gina’s Blog

Comments

1. Hi Gina, we (Cohort 1) used to often be referred to as ‘co-researchers’ but it became a somewhat hollow term that has faded away. I think it’s sad and shows how far we seem to be drifting from Hepple’s vision. Cohort 3 people seem to have never even heard the term and were surprised by it. They said the LFs “tell us what we need to do and then we do do it.” Still early days for them…

   
   Linda H
   April 18th, 2005

2. Hi Linda - I think co-researching is a term that is easy to talk about maybe not so easy to truly undertake - at least that’s in my experience. I’m still working to understand exactly what it means. Have you ever explored it in your work? If you did, how did you find it?

   
   Gina
   April 19th, 2005

3. I think anybody would have to start by ditching the assumption that you know what’s best for other people and are therefore entitled to make decisions on their behalf. From there it may become easier to allow people to make their own choices, and indeed their own mistakes. Currently trained schoolteachers seem to find this goes completely against all of their inclinations and even those who understand the need for it tend to make only a token effort which they can’t keep up for long. But they are incorrigible, so the problem is how to prevent all the control freaks from inveigling themselves into positions of authority in the first place, and that requires a stuctural change which infringes upon their material accroutrements so they will fight against it all the way.

   
   Andy
   April 19th, 2005

4. Finally. Someone who makes sense on this blog. You’re onto it, Andy old son. You’re banging your head against a brick wall, though… How can a “trained schoolteacher” (as you put it) do anything other than what they’ve been trained to do? They were trained by a trained schoolteacher who was also trained by a trained schoolteacher, and back we go ad infinitum (not to mention nauseam). Once indoctrination into the world of schoolteachers is complete, you have what is essentially a factory-produced drone for whom the very idea of others “making their own choices and mistakes” (as you said, Andy) is anathema. And you’re also trying to push diarrhoea uphill by wanting to keep the control freaks out… Who on Earth would want to submit themselves to the authority of established control freaks other than people who either are already control freaks themselves, or would like to be?

   
   Anthony Revill
   April 19th, 2005

5. Good lord what monster have I unleashed? Can we stick to co-researching please? Though I suppose I could leave you two here to bash teachers to your hearts’ content. I don’t hold out much hope that teachers are going to co-research with their pupils. In NZ I saw a little of it - I had enough flexibility to ask what those in my classes wanted to learn but with higher authorities handing out controlled curriculums and demanding so many checks and balances it’s much harder. It’s an awfully simplistic view to generalise about one group of society or to see one side as all wrong.

   Still, I’m musing about co-researching in general, not necessarily in the teaching world. what could it look like?

   
   Gina
   April 19th, 2005

6. Hi Gina, co-researching with pupils is something my Local Learning Network tried in quite a small way. We asked each of the six schools to get classes to agree what makes a good literacy lesson and a bad one working with their school council reps. (TAs in attendence but not in charge) Then the 2 main school council reps from each school met together for a one day conference and workshops to share their ideas. (Again with teachers and TAs taking a backseat I promise!! Mostly scribbling notes actually!) The outcomes were presented to the heads of the six schools at the end of the day.
   We made posters of the ‘good lesson’ results (and the bad ones lol) and placed them in all staff rooms. The recurring theme of ‘more practical activities’ provided the focus for our next phase of action enquiry with schools gathering together their best practice from all staff and sharing it all at a huge meeting. This led to each school chosing an aspect of practical teaching methods to focus on and commiting to impliment this for a two week period that term then to report back.
   Phew!! So that’s sort of what I think it could look like in schools. And now the networks lost it’s funding

   
   Linda H
   April 19th, 2005

7. Hi Linda - that sounds brilliant - so in this case those who are being taught have an input into how they want ot be taught. (we can’t let this get out it might improve schools Shame you lost your funding. I think that’s a major issue - the resources to practice co-research…

   
   Gina
   April 20th, 2005

8. Yes , resources are vital, without the time ring-fenced for regular meetings we would never have built up the levels of trust between the schools that then led to us being able to draw the children into the process of looking at their own learning in such a positive way. People might not have felt open enough about their own practice to have had the confidence to listen to the pupils either. Still money has to come from somewhere, and we are hoping to be part of another network next year with some of the same schools and some new ones. Focus will be raising self esteem and it’s effects on literacy. Not sure if I’ll be involved but hope so……

   
   Linda H
   April 20th, 2005

9. But
   Considering Adam Smith’s contrast between self-interested market behaviour and altruistic benevolent behaviour; Dont you have to be honest and say mans base behaviour will tend to fall, more often than not, in the first category. To either take the road of lest resistance, or the road that benefits them above all else - rather than the second behaviour that benefits the common good.

   I like to be led, motivated, challenged. For me this can only be truly done by some one who is going somewhere, inspiring, and thought provoking.
   Perhaps ???Control freaks who have inveigled themselves into positions of authority??? have given leaders and motivators a bad rap in dictatorships, governments, schools and work places.

   Wouldnt launching into ???a structural change which infringes upon their material accoutrements” or try to effect some change against our paternal natures, only end up with us playing the semantic game, replacing the title of teacher to Co-researcher ??? Dictator to Prime Minster / President.

   Hence the experience ??? ???co-researching is a term that is easy to talk about maybe not so easy to truly undertake.???
   Could some level of success in these areas be more attributed to the enthusiasm of something new, entusiasm that is infectious to begin with.

   I hope this blog is open to the uneducated, like myself, to make such comments

   
   peter (long winded)
   April 21st, 2005

10. Hi Pete you nutter - uneducated??? You???? ha ha hhaahha ahahaaaaahah ahem who says school and university is the only way to be educated? Not me…

    
    Gina
    April 21st, 2005

11. Peter invokes the ‘Human Nature’ argument, as has been used to justify inequality ever since not long after people using technology first produced enough surplus wealth to be worth fighting over. But what is Human nature really, and has it always exhibited this inevitable inabilty to cooperate that the Smithsonian free-marketeers would insist is the case?

    Not only has “human nature” changed many times in the past, but there is really no such thing as a static human nature. We are products of our environment, particularly of the economic system in which we live. People living under feudalism are motivated by feudal motives and think them natural and fixed, just as people living under capitalism are motivated by capitalist motives and think those natural and fixed. Occasionally in history people undergo what is now called a “paradigm shift” in values, based on an economic transformation.

    Why do people claim human nature makes cooperation impossible? They say it is because our natural disposition is to behave in a way incompatible with the achievement of a classless society based on common ownership and control of production. In particular, it is argued that most people are inherently greedy and ambitious, so that they want more than their fair share of material goods and try to dominate others.

    Any serious examination of how people behave even in capitalist society shows how one sided this argument is. Of course there are many examples of greed and selfishness. Yet for every act of selfishness there are many more examples of self sacrifice, courage or caring. There are the most memorable examples ?? the Chinese student who single handedly faced down the tanks in Tiananmen Square or the man who made himself into a human bridge during the Herald of Free Enterprise disaster. But there are also countless other everyday examples ?? parents who devote their lives to caring for handicapped children, workers who choose to do abysmally paid caring jobs rather than earn a higher wage elsewhere, the generosity of many people with little money themselves in their response to charities and appeals.

    The basic flaw in the human nature argument is that it believes human nature is fixed like that of an animal. This ignores the fact that people can behave quite differently according to different circumstances. The very definition of what is `natural’ behaviour has varied tremendously across history and between different societies. To the American Indian private ownership of the land was `unnatural’, to the 18th century landowner it was the most basic human right. To the Ancient Greeks homosexuality was the highest form of love; to the Victorian English it was the lowest. So people change with changing circumstances. But does this mean there is no such thing as human nature? And if humans are so different from animals, how did we come to be different? In other words, what makes us human?

    The question is not a new one. The Ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle said that human beings were different from animals in that we were gifted with the power of reason. But this still leaves the question of how we came to possess such an ability. What was needed was to bring the question down to earth and it was Karl Marx who first achieved this. He pointed out that `men can be distinguished from animals by consciousness, by religion or anything else you like. They themselves begin to distinguish themselves from animals as soon as they begin to produce their means of subsistence ?? their food, shelter and clothing.’

    It was left to Marx’s lifelong collaborator Frederick Engels to put forward the first convincing theory of how using our hands to produce things was the driving force in human beings’ evolution from the apes. Engels described his theory in an essay he wrote in 1876 called The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man. The ideas expressed within it were obviously based on the scientific evidence of the time. To say this was limited compared to what we know today would be an understatement. The first prehistoric human remains were only discovered in 1856. Darwin’s book The Descent of Man had just appeared in 1871. What is amazing given these circumstances was just how farsighted Engels’ theory turned out to be.

    Engels proposed that the first stage in human evolution began when our ape ancestors began to walk upright. Perhaps this was a reaction to being forced out of the shrinking forests of Africa and on to the savannah, but no one really knows for sure. What walking on two legs did achieve was to free the hands for using and making tools. And using the hands in this way had one particular important consequence. It led to social labour. As Engels put it,

    `The development of labour necessarily helped to bring the members of society together by increasing the cases of mutual support and joint activity, and by making clear the advantages of this joint activity to every individual.’

    This in turn led to the development of humanity’s other unique features ?? our ability to communicate via language and our ability to reason ?? both linked to the development of a bigger brain.

    A crucial part of Engels’ theory was his insistence that language and our powers of reason were the last of humanity’s unique features to develop. They were the result of human beings adopting social labour, not its cause. Such a view was far too radical for its time. A much more popular position was that advanced by Darwin, who was convinced that growth in brain size and intellect must have occurred before the transition to walking on two legs and using our hands to manipulate tools.

    Not surprisingly it was Darwin’s theory that won the day. But history has proved Engels right. Darwin’s ideas distorted research on human origins for almost a century because everyone was looking for a `missing link’ with a large brain and an ape like posture. It was not until the discovery in 1974 of a true missing link ?? a complete three and a half million year old skeleton with an ape sized brain and an erect posture (the now famous `Lucy’) ?? that Darwin’s evolutionary sequence was finally abandoned. But although recent discoveries have confirmed Engels’ claim that the defining feature separating human beings from other animals is our ability to engage in purposeful, social labour in cooperation with other human beings, there are still people who see competition and aggression as central to our origins. One justification for such a view stresses our close relationship to the apes.

    One of the main blows to the religious view, which sees human beings as God’s children and totally separate from the animal world, is the scientific finding that we share an amazing 99.6 percent of our genes with chimpanzees. These same people invariably also say that class society, women’s oppression and warfare have their roots in supposedly universal ape behaviour patterns such as widespread aggression between males who fight over passive females.

    But in fact there is an important qualitative difference between human beings and apes. All animal behaviour, including that of apes, is primarily determined by inherited biological make up. It is part of a chimpanzee’s make up to show flexibility in its actions and a high capacity for learning. Given these are qualities we value in human babies, it is not surprising that chimps at the zoo can often astound us with their apparently `human like’ behaviour.

    Nevertheless, there is a crucial difference between us and apes. Only human beings are capable of passing on what they have learned to successive generations, primarily through our capacity for language. Chimpanzees today are still living much the same way as they have done for the last several million years. Human beings on the other hand have in the last 30,000 years gone from living in caves to sending rockets to the moon. But there is another flaw within `naked ape’ type arguments. Their descriptions of apes as predominantly aggressive and competitive turn out to be incorrect. They were based on studies of chimpanzees in London Zoo carried out in the 1930s. More recent observation of chimps in the wild show earlier studies are about as valid as trying to draw a picture of human society after studying the long term inmates at Dartmoor Prison. The recent studies provide a completely different picture of ape society. They indicate that there is widespread sociability and much less aggression than was thought. Females are not passive but play an active role during sex and in ape society as a whole.

    A quite different source for the idea that human beings are naturally aggressive and competitive comes from mistaken interpretations of human history. The idea that we are a species `born from blood’ has resurfaced most recently in connection with speculation about the reasons for the demise of the Neanderthals.

    Neanderthals were proto-humans who lived in Europe and parts of the Middle East from about 150,000 to 35,000 years ago. Although `Neanderthal’ is now often used as a term of abuse to mean animal-like or barbaric, Neanderthals were far more similar to us than to animals. They made and used tools, had discovered fire and possibly even had language. Because the Neanderthals appear to have died out at around the same time as modern human beings were spreading out across the world it has been suggested that our ancestors wiped them out in an act of primeval genocide. But there is absolutely no factual evidence for such a viewpoint.

    For a start, there is still the possibility that Neanderthals did not die out but were absorbed into a common human stock. Even if we did remain separate and if competition for resources did eventually lead to the extinction of the Neanderthals, this is quite different from any act of genocide. In fact the latest archaeological discoveries on Mount Carmel in Israel argue that we coexisted peacefully with the Neanderthals. As one commentator puts it, `Two human species, with far less in common than any two races or creeds now on the planet, may have shared a small, fertile piece of land for 50,000 years, regarding each other the whole time with steady, untroubled, peaceful indifference.’

    One of the main reasons for the continuing popularity of claims that human beings are prone to domination and killing is the fact that we live in a world where society is divided into rulers and ruled and where there is widespread warfare and brutality. It is easy to take it for granted that things have always been like this. But for the greater part of human history there were no classes, no private property and no armies or police.

    We know this to be the case not just from historical studies but because there are still small groups of so called hunter-gatherer people, like the !Kung San of the Kalahari Desert in Africa who still live much as our ancestors did. Among such people there is no division between rich and poor, and no chiefs or leaders. The universality of such a way of life among hunter-gatherer groups has led one anthropologist to suggest that this `lends strong support to the theory of Marx and Engels that a stage of primitive communism prevailed before the rise of the state and break up of society into classes’.

    There is one final question about what makes us human. It is how do people change? If humanity’s past shows us there is nothing about socialism which goes against human nature, how do we achieve a socialist society today? One view which is often heard nowadays says that `to change society, you must first change yourself’. If only individual men and women would cure themselves of `selfishness’ or `materialism’ then society would automatically get better.

    The answer is that ordinary people’s own experiences contradict the official ideas of society. The result is that a worker’s consciousness is a contradictory one. Many psychologists now view thought as a kind of `inner speech’. There is an internal dialogue going on in our heads which echoes the social struggles in the world outside. In this case, consciousness must be a battle of words. We take it for granted that children have a questioning nature. They are always asking, `Why?’ In most people this side of our nature is too often stifled early in life and instead we see a passive adaptation to the values and language of a society that does not reflect most people’s everyday experience.

    However, in a period of social crisis this disparity between the dominant ideas of society and the reality faced by workers can become so great that the questioning side of the human character can surface again. still live much as our ancestors did. Among such people there is no division between rich and poor, and no chiefs or leaders. The universality of such a way of life among hunter-gatherer groups has led one anthropologist to suggest that this `lends strong support to the theory of Marx and Engels that a stage of primitive communism prevailed before the rise of the state and break up of society into classes’.

    There is one final question about what makes us human. It is how do people change? If humanity’s past shows us there is nothing about socialism which goes against human nature, how do we achieve a socialist society today? One view which is often heard nowadays says that `to change society, you must first change yourself’. If only individual men and women would cure themselves of `selfishness’ or `materialism’ then society would automatically get better.

    The answer is that ordinary people’s own experiences contradict the official ideas of society. The result is that a worker’s consciousness is a contradictory one. Many psychologists now view thought as a kind of `inner speech’. There is an internal dialogue going on in our heads which echoes the social struggles in the world outside. In this case, consciousness must be a battle of words. We take it for granted that children have a questioning nature. They are always asking, `Why?’ In most people this side of our nature is too often stifled early in life and instead we see a passive adaptation to the values and language of a society that does not reflect most people’s everyday experience.

    However, in a period of social crisis this disparity between the dominant ideas of society and the reality faced by workers can become so great that the questioning side of the human character can surface again.

    
    Andy
    April 23rd, 2005

12. I’m interested in how to set up co-research, how to encourage it and how to monitor and evaluate it, because I’m a teacher - although I don’t recognise myself in the generalisations of Anthony and Andy. My main textbook for teaching has been Postman and Weingartner’s “Teaching as a Subversive Activity” and most of my teaching involves studying a text (often one chosen by the students themselves) and asking what is this about? why did she write it this way? How do we know he is right? what are they trying to make us think? - and this questioning of everything is the ultimate in subversion.
    The research topics, that I am required to teach by the control freaks of the curriculum that excite Anthony so much, allow students to research the very power and control forces behind the curriculum document. I will certainly try to encourage this, rather than research on Paris Hilton, but it is their choice.
    One of the really interesting things about wroking with teenagers is that they are just starting to be aware that their ‘own experiences contradict the official ideas of society’ as Andy puts it, and I enjoy encouraging their questioning of this discrepancy, and helping them make explicit their awareness of this ‘inner speech’.
    I am happy enough in co-researching with students - helping them define their topic, refine their key questions etc. What is more problematic is them co-researching with each other. Some just like to work alone, some see sharing as copying, and then there are the problems with authenticity if it has to be assessed.

    
    Stevie the Pirate
    April 25th, 2005

13. We’re way off the point here Andy Ol boy, I was saying with co-research as a concept of education would possably lack motivation, for the student co- researcher, except where the choice of education was the students.

    The ‘Human Nature’ argument, was not used to justify inequality but as a reality check;

    We are after all human ??? what is ???human nature??? but the way humans tend to behave, not some concept, Its always subjective.
    A very large part of my job is to educate ??? The people I deal with have a very different cultural expression of life than that you would find at a university maybe. My style of educating ??? or motivating (after all it???s the same thing) would be vastly different from education at a different level. Its based on observation/understanding of their culture, who they are, what they value and want in life. Their Human Nature.They dont want to be educated so you need to motivate them to change.
    Is the life of a Kung San of the Kalahari Desert in Africa, the kind of life you would want for yourself ??? or your children? Sure among them there is no division between rich and poor, and no chiefs or leaders, ???primitive communism???, but a complete study shows huge dysfunction in other more important areas of their society, did you read about the lack of accountability for use of resources, the marginalisation and eventual elimination of minorities within their culture.

    Religion, education, capitalism, communism is subject to the same base motivations of human nature; Some in society want to progress, some don???t, other digress, while some even wish to regress.
    You always have groups ??? groups have their icons, heroes, and the student facing down the tank. There are those who are leaders by the definition of their actions.
    Human nature ??? how can you deny it.

    
    peter
    April 26th, 2005

14. Hi Gina - would Summerhill fit your ideas about co-research in schools? I remember the book as a standard text when I was studying Education, and it might be worth looking at the Ofsted report which was one of the rare occasions when an inspection interested the national media.

    http://www.summerhillschool.co.uk

    Its one of the places I would have liked to work.

    
    Shirley
    May 4th, 2005

Leave a Reply