Session Information
10 SES 13 A, Developing New Epistemologies for Strengthening the Moral Bases of Academic Practices for Social Wellbeing
Symposium
Contribution
This interactive symposium, drawing on existing research in Ireland, Israel, the Arab Gulf States, South Africa and the UK, explicates our intentions for a collaborative international research programme about how we can learn from and with one another to encourage practitioners to act rationally and with educational intent in matters of the public good. We ask, ‘How do we develop new epistemologies for strengthening the moral bases of academic practices for social wellbeing?’
Background to the research
We work in a range of contexts as providers and professional developers, supporting practitioner-researchers, mainly from the teaching profession, to study their work, using a range of practice-based methodologies, with a view to offering descriptions and explanations for their practices in the form of their living educational theories (Whitehead, 1989), and to show how they hold themselves accountable for their practices.
Theoretical frameworks
Drawing on Schön’s (1995) ideas of the need to develop new epistemologies for new forms of scholarship (Boyer, 1990); and from an understanding that such new epistemologies are the grounds for the development of virtous practices in higher education (Arthur, 1995; Nixon, 2008) and in the community (Broudy, 1981), we encourage the practitioners we support to ask and research questions of the kind ‘How do we improve what we are doing?’; and we, as higher education providers, do the same.
Methods
Our evidence, drawn from data gathered and analysed in our local contexts, constitute an international knowledge base of practitioner-researchers’ print and multimedia narratives, showing how they, and we, hold ourselves accountable for our personal and institutional practices, while demonstrating respectful appreciation of our normative politico-cultural backgrounds. We generate evidence to ground our claims to be influencing the development of new epistemologies in relation to our values of democratic and dialogical public debate; and these values emerge in practice as the standards by which we test the validity of our claims (McNiff and Whitehead, 2006).
Outcomes
Through our collaboration we hope further to develop practitioner-generated networked debates that will contribute to new forms of global knowledge economies grounded in commitments to freedom (Sen, 1999) and the development of open societies through reflexive and dialectical critique. We explicate the significance of our work across education sectors, agencies, and countries as contributing to policy debates about the need to promote professional education as the basis of peoples’ self-determination for socio-cultural transformation and renewal.
Anticipated publications
Building on our established publications base (see for example http://www.jeanmcniff.com/israel.asp, http://www.jeanmcniff.com/qatar.asp and http://www.tojqi.net/articles/TOJQI_1_1/TOJQI_1_1_Article_1.pdf), we intend to disseminate our work further through books and journals, as well as through electronic networks, forums and websites. The narratives that emerge from these networked communities show the processes of fully engaged citizens who wish to come together, on an equal footing, to find ways of living cooperatively for mutual survival. Through our linking of knowledge and socio-cultural evolution (Popper, 1952) we explicate our understanding of the role of universities and education providers for social and planetary survival.
Search the ECER Programme
- Search for keywords and phrases in "Text Search"
- Restrict in which part of the abstracts to search in "Where to search"
- Search for authors and in the respective field.
- For planning your conference attendance you may want to use the conference app, which will be issued some weeks before the conference
- If you are a session chair, best look up your chairing duties in the conference system (Conftool) or the app.