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Over the past two decades, adult education both in its theorisations and practice has privileged the use of experience as a learning resource. Adulthood has been theorised as a state of having more experience and adult students as having an enhanced capacity to learn through reflecting on their experiences. There is now a lively debate about the epistemological status of experience which focuses on the discursive construction of experience, and one outcome of this debate has been to render problematic the links between experience and learning.
It is no coincidence that this debate has gathered momentum in the contemporary condition of postmodernity where the intellectual and cultural challenges posed by postmodernist ideas have foregrounded the significance of epistemological issues. One aspect of postmodernity as a socio-cultural condition, characterised by globalisation and the information- communications revolution is a `disembeddedness' or undermining of certainties and hitherto secure foundations, including those asserted by disciplinary knowledge and epistemology as a guarantor and boundary- maintainer of that knowledge. Globalisation overturns universalism and instead emphasises `particularity, localism and difference which generate a sense of the limits of culturally unifying, ordering and integrating projects' (Featherstone 1995, 114). Education in postmodernity becomes increasingly based on specific cultural contexts, on localised and particularised knowledge and the valuing of a multiplicity of experience (Usher and Edwards 1994).
Postmodernism has been defined as an attitude of incredulity towards `grand narratives' (Lyotard 1984) or universal stories which do not recognise themselves as stories but unproblematic givens. It is important here to emphasise the `incredulity' - universal stories are not so much rejected, rather they can no longer be taken on trust. One reason for this is that they have proved themselves to be oppressive and exclusive, totalising and potentially totalitarian. In postmodernism, it is their status as discourses rather than `truth' which is highlighted and it is this emphasis which allows a foregrounding of their enmeshment in the operations of power, for example in their elevation of scientific knowledge and downgrading of practitioner knowledge. We now have to ask of these stories - who is speaking them?; what power does speaking these discourses confer?; who is being excluded as a consequence?
Epistemology can itself be conceptualised as a discourse - a discourse about the warranting of knowledge which works through a simultaneous process of exclusion and inclusion. In this way, a standard or a set of rules is discursively constructed about the nature of the knowing self, about what constitutes knowledge, and about the appropriate methods and procedures for warranting knowledge claims. For our purposes, the main characteristics of these rules are their universality and impersonality. Universality or generality is dichotomously opposed to particularity, and impersonality or objectivity to the personal and the subjective. Here then we find pairs of binary opposites which structure the way knowledge and knowledge production or research is conceived and validated. As a consequence, what becomes dispriviledged and marginalised is local knowledge, the personal and the particular.
The postmodern context of a renewed interest in the local, the personal and the particular where the notion of secure foundations is questioned seems, on the face of it, to warrant the use of the anecdotal or personal narratives in making experientially-based knowledge claims. As we have seen, postmodernism has questioned the criterion of universality, a universal standard or set of rules, in judging such claims. This places adult educators in a troublingly paradoxical situation. One can acknowledge the force of the postmodern critique, especially as this resonates with traditions such as giving voice, acknowledging difference, and recognising the operations of power. On the other hand, it is difficult for adult educators to act `postmodernistically' and go beyond the boundaries set by conventional epistemology. In supporting the learning of adults, we can accept the place of experience as local and particularistic, yet adult educators are also implicated in a discourse which forces them to discriminate between, and thus exclude or include, different claims originating in individual or collective experiences. In short, experience as local, personal and particular seems to somehow need both affirming and transcending at the same time. We both value and devalue experience.
This paper presents the authors' reflections on two case examples involving the development of professional adult educators through postgraduate teaching - specifically through a reflexive classroom practice that foregrounds the problem of the local, the personal and the particular. Each case presents learners as contextualised selves who make personal judgements yet must do so in the light of transpersonal standards and decision rules. The first case problematises the writing of the self into the research text and introduces the idea of a `learning trajectory' which incorporates the development of a reflexive understanding by the researcher working in a context where there is a requirement to produce warranted knowledge. The second case illustrates how sets of apparently impersonal rules are rendered problematic in particular instances through different interpretations or local knowledge. It is important to recognise that both reported examples were originally conceived as addressing practical problems in curriculum development in adult education - respectively, i) how to exemplify action research within a postgraduate research training programme, and ii) how to reflect on the operation of rules in practice situations. The examples have been re-cast to illustrate the `problems' faced by localised knowledge and personal experience in the context of transcendent standards (methods and rules).
One of the benefits of the postmodern turn to thinking about research as a reflexive practice which privileges the `local' is that it can incorporate the experiential dimensions of situatedness and affect by attending to the narrativity of research (Atkinson, 1990; Ricoeur 1991; Schratz and Walker 1995). This emphasises that the research text is a story that constructs a world where the researcher is part, although not necessarily the `author', of the story. The narrativity and textuality of research can be contrasted with the conventional notions of research as a technical, abstracted process where scientific method is assumed to be the universal standard.
Mapping situatedness and affect into a research trajectory allows us, as Schneider (1988, 81) notes, to engage practically with the experiential questions which are intimately inter-related to the technical aspects of conducting an investigation. The researcher can now ask: `Which highlights are there?', What has bored me, made me excited, irritated, frustrated, enjoyed, hurt and why?, `Which theories can I make friends with?', `How do I select appropriately, where do I get lost?', etc. The case example is intended to demonstrate that scripting oneself as an affective researcher can assist in becoming an effective researcher especially in a reflective practice context, and that dealing with the textuality of research evidence gives a vital interrogative and critical handle on the surface data of practice.
One of the present authors teaches an elective course within his faculty's research training programme entitled `Action Research and Reflective Practice'. Reflecting on his own rather disappointing first experience in attempting to convey what action research was all about by initially having students consult the literature in this area, he recognised a contradictory attempt to introduce the idea of action research by trying to get students to respond to someone else's text rather than engage directly in action and produce a text of their own. The problem was re-defined as how to establish the conditions for `real' action research within the confines of the classroom and timetable. At the same time, he was aware that the research students - fifteen in all, of both sexes, different ages, and from different cultures - swapped stories and talked informally among themselves outside the class about their research, including how they were feeling about the particular stage that each had reached (the students were at various stages on the trajectory).
At the next class, the teacher made no announcement that he was going to engage the students in some action research, but invited the class to divide into three groups of five students each. He then handed all the students in each group a small blank card. Then he asked each individual to write one word only that best described her/his current feelings about doing research at the stage they were then at (whether just beginning, or some way along the trajectory). Each group of five cards was then collected, shuffled, and handed back to members of the same group, ensuring that nobody received their own card. Each student then read aloud the word on the swapped card and gave their own interpretation to the group of what it meant. That interpretation was then checked against what the author of the word had meant, after which others were invited to comment, and so on around the group. Each group then reported to the class as a whole on what it had discovered about the way its members felt about doing research; each of these reports incorporated local experiences which had given rise to particular understandings. A list of personal feelings and their meanings was then compiled, for review by the whole class. The class had generated data, collaboratively explored its meaning, and suggested further lines of inquiry to follow (in this case, were the affective responses and/or their interpretations cultured or gendered, and if so how?)
The act of writing, and the subsequent exchange of comments on the `text', helped to authenticate each student's experience through unfolding personal stories (for example, about how and why they came to be doing research) in the context of others doing the same. The opportunity for shared comment (which in principle could be available to build another text) extended the limits of participants' understanding about the role of feelings in research and how these related to the formal requirements of an investigation and its reporting. Voice and action are co-implicated in this exercise; participants were empowered through ownership of the processes of writing, reading and exchanging their experiences. The groups and the class as a whole began to develop a constructively critical edge which questioned the given-ness of experience by looking at a number of alternative ways in which different experiences could be rendered.
A number of features of this exercise are worthy of note:
1. The validation of personal experience proceeds through an exchange of particulars in conversation, and not with reference to abstract standards, yet ...
2. the personal concerns of researchers are embedded in beliefs about such standards, i.e. in what are taken to be methodological requirements for successful research, however ...
3. these concerns cannot be adequately addressed solely by attending to questions of `method' as such, i.e. as transcendent standards, therefore ...
4. `methods' need to be viewed as procedural particulars which are situationally (and dispositionally) appropriate rather than as universal remedies for research problems.
The exercise follows closely one provided by Adrian Furnham (Furnham 1988, 180-81) in his examination of lay attribution theory in processes of legal reasoning. In the first part of this exercise, a small group of students was presented with a set of short event descriptions and were given one week to decide on their own whether the events as described constituted, in some cases `murder' and in others `negligence', according to sets of specific rules which they were also given and which they were asked to apply as they thought appropriate. Having made their initial decisions, the group then met to discuss each case and the participants' reasoning processes. The exercise was conceived as a problematic in the use of rules, and as one initially removed as far as possible from students' own teaching concerns. The rationale that was given was that any practice involves the `making of cases' by describing situations and subsuming them under rules, so that one of the ways in which one can begin to unpack practice in a reflective sense is to examine how judgements under rules are actually made.
According to Schauer, rules `speak to types and not to particulars' (Schauer 1991, 18). They also exhibit an `open texture [and] ... ineradicable contingency' (ibid, 36). Here then was an opportunity for students to demonstrate these qualities of rules in their case-by-case discussions. The first judgmental problem was in deciding whether particular events were indeed instances of a general type as given by the rules. The second was in ascertaining what the rules actually meant in order that their possible application to the case in hand could be considered. Individual decisions were debated in which it quickly became apparent that none of the descriptions of the cases was clear cut. All participants introduced hypothetical local variations to each set of events; this complicated the process of trying to reach a consensus about the events themselves, before even examining what was stated or might have been intended by a particular rule. It was interesting to discover that the sources of these variations were threefold:
what appeared to resonate with `common sense' and a `basic understanding of certain situations'
what an individual's `personal stance' regarding the events would be (regardless of what the rules appeared to say)
what it would be reasonable to infer by `filling the gaps' in what was actually known about each case.
Each source of variation was illustrated by drawing on local experiences and anecdotes in the ensuing discussion. Though they may have appeared to be remote from the case in hand, they helped to inform the tacit understandings and values in the judgements actually offered. It quickly became clear that it was not possible to have a discussion at all without being able to make use of these resources, which effectively was the local knowledge brought to the cases. We draw from this our own `rule', i.e. that the local and the universal, the particular and the general, are always co- implicated and it is this which makes the subsumption of events under rules possible. What was happening here was not a matter of addressing the personal whilst ignoring the rule. On the contrary, the personal emerged through addressing the application of the rule in particular contexts, just as vice versa the rule became concrete through deploying the personal.
The group was then invited to consider the experiential value of negotiating the applicability of rules in these somewhat `artificial' cases, to `real' cases in their own teaching practice. Prior discussion had demonstrated that the meaning of events and rules was not transparently given in the text, but required the reading of those bringing their own situated understandings to bear. This is true of any text and any practice. Participants told stories of how they had interpreted or evaded formal institutional rules which were supposed to govern their own practice, for example in recording class attendance or fulfilling a range of other specific administrative requirements, rules which demonstrated their ill- fitting nature as generalisations intended to cover all cases. The stories provide evidence of what Schauer usefully describes as recalcitrant experiences, defined as `events that call into question in particular cases the generalisations [framed by rules] that usually serve us quite well' (Schauer 1991, 39). It is in the plastic arena of conversational discourse, with its qualifiers and exceptions to rules, that recognition is afforded to the personal and particular in judgements concerning the applicability of rules in given instances, and where therefore rules are actualised. Given this, local knowledge is a requisite for the sense-making needed in the use of any rules.
Our case examples demonstrate this very clearly. In the first case, the technical and experiential dimensions of research revealed themselves to be co-implicated. The problem, which the exercise helped to resolve, lay in the discomfort felt by practitioner-researchers at being forced into a scientific discourse emphasising only the technical dimension and repressing the everyday discourse of the local, the personal and the particular which the contextuality of any research introduces. In the second case, as we have already noted, the rules could not be actualised and the sense-making process required could not get under way without the deployment of local knowledge and the mutually interactive addressing of the personal and the particular with the impersonal and the general.
Ultimately, any process that deconstructs the binary oppositions displaces hierarchy and demonstrates the significance of their co- implication. When the universality of scientific discourse is made problematic, when knowledge is seen as always relative to the local situation of those producing it (Sassower 1995), a political dimension comes into play. Emphasising the local, the personal and the particular challenges the deeply embedded notion of the `modest witness' of Western science (Haraway 1997) - the scientific researcher whose accounts simply mirror reality, who inhabits no culture, and whose situated embodiment has to be ignored.
The research process is constituted by everyday conversational discourse as well as technical scientific discourse. The problem of relating the personal to the transpersonal is not one that occurs in the former discourse but arises only when the latter is accorded a monopolistic position. When the narrativity and textuality of research is recognised and given its due place, what emerges is not just a more satisfactory way of doing research but a political act that challenges powerful and oppressive epistemological hierarchies.
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