A TALE OF TWO PARADIGMS

Betty Ash

PART ONE: In the Hotel Room

It was on the one of those first bitterly cold evenings in October when Winnipeggers walk around muttering about the unfairness of winter's premature arrival that I ventured out into the cold night to meet with Diane Gossen at the Radisson Inn Suites Hotel. A few Seafordites who had been wrestling with the ideas of William Glasser's Choice Theory and Quality Schools as well as with Diane's extension of those ideas into Restitution, had decided to meet Diane at the hotel while she was in town to do a workshop with another school. It was about 8:30 and as I drove along in my rusted out car with no heat and with my windows open to clear the fog, I have to say that I was having second thoughts about going anywhere. Our two day inservice with Diane earlier in the month had been less than successful in my mind and had thrown me into one of my little "What am I doing in this job?" crises which lasted for about a week and created a great deal of stress among my family members.

PART TWO: The Early Days

To back-track a little, let me fill you in on my first days at Ken Seaford. Within the first few days of the announcement of my appointment to Ken Seaford I received phone calls from two staff persons, each requesting a meeting with me in June. The first person with whom I met was the coordinator of the school change project. He explained to me the history of the "Kids at Risk" project, the progress being made, some of the barriers to change and the committee's hopes for the future. In particular he emphasized that it would be important for me as the new principal to be aware of the work of the Professional Development Committee and their desire to create a "School Wide Behaviour Model." My understanding of this message was that until this was attended to there would continue to be some resistance on the part of some staff to look at any other aspects of school change.

My meeting with the P.D. chairperson shortly thereafter left me with the same feeling.

The third encounter that I had with staff prior to actually starting in the job was a few days at a Gordon Foundation Retreat in Carmen. I remember sitting around the picnic table with Patti, Jared, Carol and Jim and trying to get a handle on the connections or the disconnections between the work of the School Change Committee, the P.D. Committee, the curriculum leaders, the hall leaders and the teacher team leaders. All seemed to have different budgets and different priorities. It seemed to me that if we were going to move ahead together as a staff I was going to have to try to find a way to get these diverse groups talking to each other and working together. It was the beginning of THE TALE OF TWO PARADIGMS.

Well, I guess it's always good to have a place to start. I wouldn't have wanted to be wandering around the building with nothing to do. I was prepared to open up the School Wide Behaviour Model conversation but a part of me was apprehensive. I didn't know these people very well but I did know that I didn't want to get myself backed into a corner with some lock-step, prescriptive behaviour model that attempted to apply simple solutions to complex problems. I also knew that I wanted the process to be open, honest and balanced. Ah, it's good to be naive after twenty-five years.

And so we began. All staff who were interested were invited to join a committee which met every Wednesday after school, 3:30 -- 5:00, until the task was completed. We didn't realize that this first step would take a year. The committee was large, diverse and represented all halls and the extremes of both paradigms.

"What paradigms?" you ask. Well, let me explain.

PART THREE: The Paradigms

I first became aware of the importance of thinking about the two main visions of teaching when I read an article by Linda Darling-Hammond (1993) entitled "Reframing the School Agenda." In the article she describes what she calls a behaviourist view of education where the teacher's primary function is to "cover the curriculum", with the curriculum being seen as a chunk of predetermined material presented in small sequential bits.

The alternative view is the constructivist model in which:

teachers must construct experiences that allow students to confront powerful ideas whole. They must create bridges between the very different experiences of individual learners and the common curriculum goals…This more complex approach to teaching requires that teachers combine a deep knowledge of subject matter and a wide repertoire of teaching strategies with intimate knowledge of students' growth, experience and development (p.754).

At the time of reading this article I had been trying to support a number of teachers who had taken on positions of leadership within our school. Several of these teachers had been frustrated and surprised by the struggles which they encountered when working with their colleagues. It didn't matter if it was a "simple" discussion about how to organize a Remembrance Day activity for their cluster of classes or a series of meetings to try to wrestle with the idea of exploratory curriculum blocks, leaders were finding that there frequently were serious differences with the way in which their colleagues viewed the workings of the school. In fact, for transmission teachers who viewed knowledge as being absolute and fixed--"a thing out there"--(Serebrin,1995), there seemed to be no purpose in meeting and dialoguing with colleagues at all. The varying views of learning affected not only their teaching, but also their interactions with their colleagues and their learning as professionals.

PART FOUR: The School Wide Behaviour Model

The Committee met for months. After the first few meetings Sue agreed to chair the meetings. Sue is our upstairs guidance counselor and a person who is respected by staff (other than the fact that she isn't a "real" classroom teacher), is fairly central in her position on issues and at the time was not in cahoots with either the School Change Committee or with the Administration. The discussion was rich. The behaviourists were strong teachers wanting clear rules and clear consequences. Diane Gossen would later refer to this as the strong monitoring position which needs to be in place before moving into the self-restitution approach to helping students develop responsible behaviour. The constructivists articulated a view that focused on the needs that underlie behaviour and the ways in which our structures, methods and interactions attend to or interfere with these needs. As a group we finally reached a stage where we decided that it was important to try to talk to kids and to their families about their values and to attempt to arrive at a statement of Community Values which could be used as a basis for helping kids to make responsible choices.

The Committee devised an interview form which all students took home. The kids were asked to interview their parents and to record the answers on the interview sheet. In keeping with the philosophically schizophrenic nature of schools, we told the kids that they could earn marks by doing this. The questions were designed to promote conversations about what kids and parents thought were important in their lives as students. It was the committee's hope that values could be extrapolated from the information returned.

Almost every form was returned. At about the same time, the Committee provided classroom teachers with a package of materials from which they could choose to assist them with facilitating classroom discussions to identify classroom values. Non-classroom teachers paired up with their colleagues to help out. On two occasions the timetable was put aside and students remained in classes to work in small and large groups to talk about values and to articulate what values looked like and sounded like in action. Some halls took the discussion further by having assemblies to share values and by striking a committee of students and teachers to put classroom values together to make hall values. The process varied in terms of richness and true student voice but most staff made a sincere effort to make the process meaningful.

The Committee then took all of the data from each group of stakeholders and created a statement of Community Values. This was shared with parents and with students. Follow-up activities continued to happen as it was the belief of the committee that the development of responsible behaviour was a process and not an event.

That took the entire year.

Was it successful?

It was successful but incomplete. The success lay in the rich dialogue which had happened among staff. Let me explain.

PART FIVE: Jen meets Rob

I would like you to meet Jen. Actually, Jen is the person to whom I owe my job in Seven Oaks School Division. Twenty-five years ago Jen was already a legend in Seven Oaks, renowned as a creative, well loved, talented music teacher. Already committed to life long learning, Jen had gone on sabbatical.

As a twenty year old graduate of a two year education program I walked into H.C. Avery School to try to fill this woman's shoes.

Jen continued her rich journey in education and our paths did not cross again until we met at the doorway to Ken Seaford. For both of us, this was to be a new experience. Jen in particular had moved from many years in the creative arts field to teaching in a grade eight classroom situation.

Well, in no time at all Jen was living out her transactional philosophy with her students. Every dream of the School Change Committee was being realized in room 321. When we sat down at the end of the year to talk about who might be identified as a resource for others on topics such as cooperative learning, base groups, subject integration, authentic assessment, portfolios, process writing, integrating technology and on and on, Jen's name always came up. Needless to say, this quiet, petite, creative, thoughtful and articulate person also served on our School Wide Behaviour Model Committee.

Now meet Rob. Rob was one of our Curriculum Leaders. As such he was meticulous in his book distribution system as well as in his budgeting. He was however frustrated in his failed attempts to attract teachers to curriculum meetings for the purpose of trying to reach some agreement about which skills should be covered in each year in Junior High. Rob was a dedicated teacher who was totally committed to covering the prescribed curriculum in a systematic, tried and true fashion.

I had actually had a bit of a run in with Rob when he had refused to allow a small group of students in his class to attend a conflict mediators' workshop during his class time despite ample notice of the event. He also did not notify the teacher in charge and the students were simply stopped at the door and not allowed to leave. Furthermore, he made a phone call to the Superintendents' Department to inquire as to who has the final authority over students in a class. The Superintendent bounced it back to me and recommended that I take a firm stand on this matter and that the threat of insubordination could be used to reinforce the position.

Now Rob and I don't always agree on things, but he is committed to his students and is sincerely trying to do a thorough job. I did not feel comfortable with the direction I had been given but I also knew that we had to meet. It was clear to me at the beginning of the meeting that Rob too wanted me to take an authoritative position. I wondered later if that was his way of trying to get me to be responsible for ending our relationship and therefore ending the dialogue between us over issues that were sometimes difficult for him even to think about. Ten minutes into our discussion I told him that I would not say that he HAD to allow his students to attend peer leadership activities. Our conversation was able to continue in a slightly less tense way from that point and we each talked a little bit about the way we believed that kids learn.

In retrospect I think that Rob was operating within what Mary Belenky et al refer to as "blind justice" and that I was operating from the perspective of a morality organized around the notions of responsibility and care. The "blind justice" perspective relies upon:

abstract laws and universal principles to adjudicate disputes and conflicting claims impersonally, impartially and fairly. Those operating within a morality of responsibility and care-primarily women- reject the strategy of blindness and impartiality. Instead they argue for an understanding of context for moral choice, claiming that the needs of individuals cannot always be deduced from general rules and principles and that moral choice must also be determined inductively from the particular experiences each participant brings to the situation (M. Belenky et al, 1986)

In one of our Masters' cohort group discussions Judith made a comment that you cannot create a democratic learning environment unless you have experienced one. I could not morally promote a democratic and supportive learning environment for students and then behave in an authoritative manner with a staff member.

…for our basic assumptions about the nature of truth and reality and the origins of knowledge shape the way we see the world and ourselves as participants in it. They affect our definitions of ourselves, the way we interact with others, our public and private personae, our sense of control over life events, our views of teaching and learning and our conceptions of morality (M.Belenky et al, 1986).

Rob and Jen first came to know each other on the School Wide Behaviour Model Committee. If it were possible to live purely in a particular paradigm, these people did it. Despite their differences they shared some common values that helped them to work together. They were gentle, reflective people who cared deeply for kids and who were 100% committed to teaching. Because of the respect that they had for each other Jen was able to discuss an idea with Rob which probably would have angered him had it been raised by one of the more zealous, non-classroom teacher types on the committee.

In the end it was Rob and Jen who together authored our statement of Community Values. That to me spelled success.

In addition to this, over twenty-five staff members voluntarily pursued in depth professional development activities to try to learn more about the needs which underpin human behaviour. Articles and books were passed around. The topic was discussed at School Change meetings, staff meetings, P.D. meetings, hall meetings and at the grade seven teachers meetings. At the end of the year their was a unanimous request from over thirty-five staff members who turned in P.D. survey forms to embark on a study of Restitution. People were ready to look at new ideas.

Two Annual Statements of Growth which I read indicated some unhappiness with the process. One staff member clearly felt a need for a statement of rules and consequences. One staff member felt frustrated as a leader of this initiative in that she felt that she had not succeeded in making everybody happy. A large number of staff were comfortable with having a process approach to student behaviour and most of the staff was quite enthusiastic about exploring the Glasser and Gossen ideas.

And so we continued.

PART SIX: Restitution

To help finance our professional development theme, Jared and I wrote a proposal to the Student Support Branch to get some special funding. As a staff we decided to try to bring some of the school initiatives and sources of funds together. The P.D. Committee continued to be the driving force behind the Restitution initiative. The P.D. chair now sat on the School Change Committee and each hall was represented. The Community Hall model with a focus on creating small community schools within a school began to expand to other halls. Teachers had scheduled common preps once per cycle and Hall Leaders led formal meetings in which topics such as values, Restitution, student voice, effective teaching practices etc. were becoming common topics of discussion.

All staff attended workshops with Sam, our downstairs guidance counselor on the topic of Choice Theory. When the staff all had at least a basic understanding of these ideas, Diane flew in and spent a couple of days on Restitution. Enthusiasm was high.

We returned to school and started to play around with implementation. We talked about the importance of the words we chose and the tone of voice that went with those words. Informally and in groups we shared our struggles and our successes. As people naturally ran in to some difficulties we began to get a little flack about this initiative being driven primarily by non-classroom teachers. So, in March the P.D. committee asked Tom and Jeff to do a session with staff where they explained the ways in which they were utilizing this process in their classrooms. This seemed to get us through the first implementation dip.

And thus ended year two. Did we have fewer behaviour problems? I wish! Did kids seem less angry and more willing to solve their problems and to plan for the future? Yes.

A surprising number of teachers made positive references to both the values process and the Restitution ideas in their Annual Statements of Growth. We seemed to have a positive direction.

PART SEVEN: Thump

The P.D. Committee had decided to get off to a quick start in the new year. Diane was going to fly in and work with us specifically on wrestling with the glitches that had arisen as we tried to implement some new ways of doing things. We also hoped to further our learning in this area.

Well, reality hit. We had chosen a space that was too small for our group. As a result, small group discussion and role playing were impossible. In fact, any discussion was close to impossible. There also had been some undercurrents circulating around staff that we needed to be clearer about bottom line behavioural issues and ways in which we were handling them. Despite a smooth start to the school year, we were suddenly inundated with a fair number of students whose behavior was clearly out of control and where nothing appeared to be working.

Personally I was not willing to throw in the towel on Restitution but I was feeling frustrated by the intensity of the problems we were facing with students and anxious about the impact these kids were having on staff morale. And so I did a rather foolish thing.

I had been dealing on pretty much a daily basis with a boy named Isaac in grade 8 and with his parents. Isaac is an angry young student who likes to wander the halls during class time telling as many staff as he encounters to "get out of his face" and that he doesn't have to listen to them. If we are in his face too much he storms into the office, grabs a phone and calls his mom to complain. Within a minute his mom calls me to demand that I ask the staff to quit picking on Isaac who of course has no responsibility whatsoever in the scenario. Well, to make a long, long story short…one day, after a plan that had been agreed upon by both school and home had been altered by the parents four times in two hours because of their son's complaints, I decided that we had reached the point in the agreement where he should be sent home. This was about two days prior to our impending inservice. Dad came to the school and informed me that Isaac's mom was in the car in labour. I was feeling frazzled and the pressure to be "consistent" was on. I tried to push the issue with dad to see if there was someone who would be looking after Isaac who could pick him up from school and take him home. Dad went to check with Mom; Mom used a cell phone to call the Board Office and the Board Office called me to say "Let him stay."

I wasn't comfortable with my attempt at being "consistent" when clearly the circumstances didn't warrant it. I wasn't comfortable with providing a scenario which might have been interpreted by staff as having "nothing happen" in the face of outrageous behaviour.

And so there we were in the Kildonan Hall Pavillion. Most people listened passively. The six teachers who are the most authoritarian in their disciplinary practices either sat at the back reading the newspaper or carried on quiet, private conversations. The one thing that we did not want was to spend two days trying to work out glitches and move forward and to have people silently sit, harbouring unspoken questions, concerns and reservations. We had had staff generate some of those questions ahead of time but Diane seemed to be giving quick and easy answers. There wasn't time to mess around with the information or to really debate a point. People seemed to be fading away, giving up, swallowing their concern.

In the final half hour Diane raised the issue about a clear bottom line and asked if this needed discussing. Silence. More silence. Finally Verland, our Vice-principal answered "Yes!" and some venting began and the two days were over. I made a commitment to continue the discussion at school level.

I was sick.

Why were people so hung up on bottom line? Why didn't they talk to us if they felt we had not handled a particular issue to their satisfaction? Why did some people turn over the "power" to deal with an issue to an administrator and then sit back to weigh the punishment and to decide if it was "enough"? Didn't people realize that when they disassociated themselves from the resolution of a problem they were not building a relationship with a child nor trying to help the child to understand and to meet his needs in better ways? Why didn't people want to look at the school structures and our approaches to curriculum and to democracy which also come in to play when we think about student behaviour? Hadn't we made any progress after all that time and study and dialogue and sharing? Was I so unapproachable that people didn't want to talk about this openly?

I never felt more like quitting.

But I'm a very stubborn person.

PART EIGHT: Recovery

Margaret Swain (1992) describes her feelings and her actions when faced with situations which cause her to question her ability as an administrator:

…first I feel discomfort, then I feel personally guilty in some way, then I feel anger or frustration, and finally, after much time and effort, a sense of coming to understand myself and my reactions within a broader context (p. 107).

The P.D. Committee immediately resumed its regimen of weekly meetings. We decided to take the staff meeting time as well as the teacher team leader time (two hours) to begin to get the bottom line issue out onto the table for discussion. We wanted the process to be open and non-threatening. We wanted people to really think through the complexities of situations. With help from the P.D. Committee and in particular from Sam, a master facilitator and mediator, I decided on a process for the staff meeting.

At the meeting people worked in groups to clarify what was meant by a bottom line behaviour, what these behaviours actually looked and sounded like, what the range of consequences were and what the re-entry process ought to be. I didn't join a group but was encouraged to hear people saying things like, "This is kind of a grey area," "But what if the circumstance was thus and so?." People were very serious, very energized and very thoughtful.

We debriefed at the end and agreed to take all of the work back to P.D.

PART NINE: Meanwhile, Back at the Hotel

So, it was forty below in my car; it was the end of a long day; I was barely recovered from my last encounter with Diane and this was such an intense group of people. Did I need this????

Diane greeted me with a hug, Sam poured me a glass of wine, Cal and Jared arrived and soon we were deep in conversation. As usual with this group we covered a lot of territory, but two main discussions stand out in my mind. We were talking about power and we were talking about paradigms. Actually, I think we were talking only about paradigms. The question that Cal and Sam and I raised was the inconsistency that we saw with the Restitution philosophy when on one hand it states that you must have a strong "monitoring" (bottom line rules and consequences) system in place, which is definitely behaviourist, in order to expand to a "managing" position where students identify their need, examine the behaviour which they chose to meet their need, look for alternate behaviours that would meet their need but be more acceptable, and look for a way to fix the situation in a way that helps them to be strengthened. To us it is difficult to get people to even look at a new paradigm, but if you are trying to say that a person can comfortably and morally function in two paradigms at the same time, there appear to be some problems. Like when do you stop demanding your pound of flesh (oops, I mean logical consequence) and switch into the alternate mode? Is this not confusing and unfair to both students and staff?

Perhaps it was this frustration, this conflict which was causing people to shut down. Perhaps some teachers were having difficulty understanding a new paradigm. Perhaps some teachers saw some difficulty with the way in which Diane was trying to meld the two worlds together. Perhaps some teachers were avoiding examining their practice in the light of these new ideas in the hope that "this too shall pass." Given the recent actions of Manitoba Education in its bombardment of educators with New Directions documents rife with contradictory messages, offset by a distinctly different philosophy strongly articulated by our own school division, and whatever history and experience staff members bring to their teaching, life was becoming very confusing. Linda Darling-Hammond (1993) uses the metaphor of an archeological dig being necessary to unearth the tangled influences and the layers of policy with which people in schools have to contend.

This can create a kind of Alice in Wonderland world in which people ultimately begin to nod blithely at the inevitability of incompatible events (p. 756).

We talked about Corie.

PART TEN: Corie

I wish you could meet Corie. Corie is a student in Senior 1 who is a little rough around the edges, who has a heart of gold, who still sucks her thumb and who has primary child care responsibility for her baby brother. Corie is also capable of manning our Student Assistance Center single handed or running our homework club. Corie is emotional. Yesterday I met Corie as she was walking in the door a few minutes late. She saw me and she burst into tears. It seemed that Corie had witnessed one of our students being the target of vicious, racist remarks as she had been crossing the street in front of an irate driver. It took Corie quite some time to calm down and head off to class.

At Ken Seaford we run a Sharing Circle for students. It is open to everyone but it is set up with aboriginal students in mind. Last year we had a philanthropic grant and we were able to provide lunch so the Circle took place during the noon hour. This year kids have to bring their lunches, so because this requires more time to get lunches from lockers or to make purchases in the cafeteria, we allow the kids to leave classes one half hour early. Students are given a special hall pass.

On the first occasion doing this year, Corie went to another class to get her friend who for two years had gone to Circle with her. Her friend is not aboriginal. The teacher did not appreciate Corie coming to call. He also did not want the other student to leave class. A rather tense exchange of words occurred ending with Corie's telling him to "Fuck Off." This became a bottom line issue. Now pick a paradigm.

This story followed the behaviourist route. Corie was sent to the SAC. It took her approximately 10 minutes to calm down and to want to work things out. A public outburst such as this usually calls for the student to be sent home and to return with a parent. Since we were unable to contact a parent, Corie spent the afternoon in the SAC writing about the problem and her plan. She met during that time with the SAC teacher and with me. I made several attempts to contact Mom. At 8:00 a.m. I called. The phone was answered by a very angry sounding "WHAT!" The rest of the conversation was incoherent so I knew that Corie was on her own on this one. She returned to school, spent the morning in the SAC, agreed to meet the teacher at 3:30 and returned to classes.

The teacher was a little bit questioning before agreeing to meet with her. He wanted to know how many periods she spent on an in school suspension, why it wasn't an out of school suspension and whether her parent had been spoken to on the phone or in person. He had been prepared to bottom line this situation but he wanted to sit back and weigh the "punishment." Interesting.

The meeting occurred at 3:30 with Corie needing no prompting to show up. The teacher told Corie that he did not like what she had written on her SAC sheet when she first went into the SAC. He also told her that he did not like the way she wrote on her hands. At the end of the meeting he asked her to come back in the morning with a letter of apology to read to the class. She did this too.

Had this story followed the constructivist route I think things would have been different. It might never have become a bottom line incident in the first place. However, these things do happen so it might have been necessary to send Corie to the SAC. By the first five minute break a meeting could have occurred in which the sending teacher and Corie could have connected. Corie knew what her needs were, she had had time to think of better strategies for handling a similar situation in the future, and she had a plan for talking to both the teacher and the class to show them the kind of person she was and wanted to be. She would have been strengthened by the process.

It occurred to me, not for the first time, that this whole discussion was really about learning and the contradictory views that people held. In the spring of this past year I had written about the struggles of leadership in an attempt to help the many emerging leaders within our school to understand the different beliefs that their colleagues held. I had hoped that if people started thinking about these beliefs and talking about them they would better understand some of the conflicts which arise when teachers are talking together about their work. Now I seemed to be in the same place over the behaviour issue. It became evident to me that this was all about our beliefs about how people (kids and adults) learn. I felt that it was time to put this bottom line discussion to rest and to approach the whole topic from a curriculum perspective.

PART ELEVEN: Yet Another Wednesday Morning

At our next P.D. meeting I floated a proposal for wrapping up the bottom line discussion for this year, with a promise to do a quick revisit next year. I suggested that we continue to nurture and to support the restitution initiatives as planned. I suggested that at the January inservice we take a look at the two main paradigms that influence how we believe students learn and that we give people an opportunity to examine their practices in the light of these frameworks. As a staff we had done a little bit of reading and talking about this already so this was not an idea being pitched at the committee from left field. The reception was warm, perhaps even relieved.

We took a look at Joan Irvine's article at the next meeting. Everyone liked the article and could see the merits of using it as the basis of our next inservice.

Even John thought the article would be useful. John is a teacher who has really struggled with the discussions which have been going on at Seaford over the last few years. In fact, he spent most of the last two years behaving in a very fearful and angry mode. To his credit he decided to move out of the victim mode and to start to talk at a professional level about his struggles with these new ideas. He had joined the P.D. Committee in September and his honest questions and his openness have helped to create a balance and to address a wider range of needs. A bit of fear remains. He did want to know, "Exactly what is the purpose of looking at these two paradigms?" He is afraid that one way will be pushed as being the right way and that he will be on what he thinks will be the wrong side of that issue.

I think that we are reaching a point in our exploration as a staff which Carr (1986) refers to as:

processes of enlightenment in which critical theorems are applied and can be tested in a unique manner by the initiation of processes of reflection carried on within the groups involved in the action and the reflection on it. The organization of enlightenment is the organization of the learning processes of the group; in fact, it is a systematic learning process aimed at the development of knowledge about the practices being considered and the conditions under which they take place (p. 146).

Embarking upon a process of critical inquiry can be frightening. It is a process of cultural transformation and it:

…focuses on fundamental contradictions which help dispossessed people see how poorly their ‘ideologically frozen understandings' serve their interests (Comstock, 1982, p.384). This search for contradictions must proceed from progressive elements of participant's current understandings, or what Willis (1977) refers to as partial penetrations: the ability of people to pierce through cultural contradictions in incomplete ways that, nevertheless, provide entry points for the process of ideology critique (Lather, 1986: 268).

But while this may be uncomfortable it also can be comforting. Teachers need time to read, to reflect upon their practice, to mess around with the many ideas that are thrown their way, to seriously debate the issues, and to look beyond the superficial to the underlying beliefs and values. Developing a common understanding of the paradigms and becoming aware of where we, as individual educators, fit in the context of these two paradigms helps us to develop a language through which we can begin discuss the tensions which arise.

What we believe about teaching and learning is complicated, large scale, hard to define, and close to the soul (Duckworth, 1986, p.486).

A process of critical inquiry also requires a supportive learning environment:

If everyone is a learner then schools need to be inclusive places for all teachers as well as for all students (Swain, 1992: 104).

…coming to a radical new self-conception is hardly ever a process that occurs simply by reading some theoretical work; rather, it requires an environment of trust, openness, and support in which one's own perceptions and feelings can be made properly conscious to oneself, in which one can think through one's experiences in terms of a radically new vocabulary which expresses a fundamentally different conceptualization of the world, in which one can see the particular and concrete ways that one unwittingly collaborates in producing one's own misery, and in which one can gain the emotional strength to accept and to act on one's new insights (Fay, 1977: 232).

There is a need for:

…open, flexible theory-building grounded in a body of empirical work that is ceaselessly confronted with, and respectful of, the experiences of people in their daily lives (Lather, 1986, p.261).

And so we go on.

PART TWELVE: My New Car

I bought myself a new car. I have to say that I was feeling pretty cocky about it. It's loaded; it handles well in normal conditions and on the ice. It has anti-lock breaks and the tires have some type of mechanism that ensures that the tires remain firmly on the pavement even on tight corners at high speeds. Yes, I truly thought I had it made in the shade in terms of worry free driving for the next four years at least. Then it snowed. This car goes NOWHERE in the snow. Never experienced anything like it in thirty years of driving.

I guess one should never get too cocky.

EPILOGUE: A Letter from Glasser

Cal showed me a letter from William Glasser. It seems that there is a major rift in his institute. Glasser is having trouble supporting Restitution. He offered Cal a public presentation of the Golden Apple Award for Quality School Teachers if he publicly denounced Restitution at an upcoming conference. Sounds a little behaviourist to me. I guess we ought not to get too frustrated with ourselves and with our colleagues as we wrestle with ideas. Even the theorists and the purists struggle.

We are not alone in our struggle. Robert Pirsig in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintainance wrestles with a similar notion of two competing views of the world when he talks about romantic versus classical understanding. He writes:

Persons tend to think and feel exclusively in one mode or the other and in doing so tend to misunderstand and underestimate what the other mode is all about.

I think that if we are going to reform the world, and make it a better place to live in, the way to do it is not to talk about relationships of a political nature, which are inevitably dualistic, full of subjects and objects and their relationship to one another; or with programs full of things for other people to do. I think that kind of approach starts at the end and presumes that the end is the beginning. Programs of a political nature are important end products of social quality that can be effective only if the underlying structure of social values is right. The social values are right only if the individual values are right. The place to improve the world is first in one's own heart and head and hands, and then work outward from there (Pirsig, 1974: 62).

Frank Conroy sums up our ongoing struggle in saying:

…understanding does not always mean resolution. Indeed, in our intellectual lives, it is perhaps those problems that will never resolve that rightly claim the lion's share of our energies. The body exists in a constant state of tension as it maintains homeostasis, and so too does the active mind embrace the tension of never being certain, never being absolutely sure, never being done, as it engages the world. This is our special fate, our inexpressibly valuable condition (Conroy, 1991: 70).

Belenky, F., Clinchy, B., Goldberger, N., Tarule, J., 1986Women's Ways of Knowing: The Development of Self, Voice, and Mind. 3-8

Carr, Wilfred & Stephen Kemmis 1986 A Critical Approach to Theory and Practice. In: Becoming Critical: Education, Knowledge and Action Research. London: The Falmer Press: 179-213.

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