How might we orient students towards Critical Inquiry?

One of the results of the rampant marketisation of HE has been a kind of "qualification inflation" as individuals have sought to distinguish themselves from each other: as the market drives everyone to acquire a degree, a degree or even a masters becomes less meaningful as a mark of distinction (unless it is from an elite institution). So what's next? It seems that PhD is the qualification that everyone is reaching for - often irrespective of a burning desire or capacity to produce original work.

Educationally, PhD presents some interesting opportunities. It remains largely open and unregulated. Whilst undergraduate qualifications have become increasingly tied-up in the bureaucracy and quasi-legalism of learning outcomes, modules and assignments, PhD is (technically) a blank canvas. That means there are opportunities for teachers to explore things with their students which they are unable to do at other levels: it is the space for inquiry which is so sadly lacking from education beyond kindergarten.

However, PhD does require the defence of an approach to a problem, and deep intellectual engagement with outcomes. In all sciences, it requires criticality. In the social sciences, criticality entails politics and ethics. It is in criticality that the real challenges for supervisors lies.

Criticality is about questioning assumptions; often questioning the things that were drummed into you from school onwards - all the things that you had been conditioned to accept as true. An education system that rewards compliance with official doctrine is not a good preparation for critical inquiry at PhD level. If habits have been established in the student in the past which suppressed doubt and misgiving in the face of the power of the institution (or teachers) and the desire to pass the course, these habits can be very hard to shake even at PhD level. Fear rules and critical inquiry is compromised. Worse still is that in current employment practices in Universities, academics themselves are increasingly rewarded for game-playing (publications, citations, peer review) meaning that they too may find radical critical inquiry a challenge to established habits. The nightmare situation is of a frightened academic supervising a frightened PhD student, with a frightened external examiner. Is this situation the student may even pass, but fear is passed on and knowledge is fundamentally lost within the system.

My personal approach to this has been to hold to a kind of mantra that I should always aim to learn more from my students than I attempt to get them to learn from me. It's a way of saying that it is the relationship between students and teachers which is the most important thing, not any particular items of knowledge. Perhaps by becoming open to being taught by my students, I am modelling what it is to be open to critiquing my own ideas: students seem to learn from that (as I did from the best of my teachers in University). This is the critical behaviour that one would want to see in students - an openness to be challenged, a continual engagement and reassessment of the problems of one's discipline.

The mantra is basically "model criticality". When students have been used to teachers who tell them facts, and that those facts are the things they should regurgitate in order to pass, the idea of a supervisor listening carefully to what they (the students) know can be surprising. Better still if these interactions are captured in forms where the interactions can be replayed. The capture of the intersubjectivity of these kinds of encounters is one of the great benefits of modern technology (much more significant than MOOCs, I think)

This is not to say that having guides in the form of textbooks or interesting methodologies is not important. Supervisors are usually a step ahead (or ought to be) because they have trodden the territory of their students before them. Most books on methodology are pretty dreadful and encourage a kind of 'textbook-rewriting' in the thesis which I have seen too often. There are one or two exceptions, amongst which I think Peter Clough's book ("A student's guide to methodology") is excellent. His mantra is also "be critical". By contrast an uncritical approach to methodology can result in methodology being seen as a crank to turn in order to process data into research findings. I've seen far too many ungrounded "Grounded Theory" implementations which proceed like this which leave so many deep questions unasked (not necessarily a criticism of Grounded Theory per se, but certainly a criticism of its unchallenged application which smacks of research Guru-ism)

Methodology will always be hopelessly dry if it is divorced from the things that matter to the student in their inquiry. I don't think good original work can emerge from a situation where the student isn't passionately committed to their inquiry. The problem of course is that students begin their studies thinking (or perhaps, wishing) they are passionately committed, only to change their mind later on. What results is a "losing of the thread" and with it a loss of determination and will. This is why modelling criticality is so important. The supervisor's advantage is that they might have a bit more staying power and more technique for dealing with difficult topics. The real benefit of this is that they can use it to drill into the roots of the student's own passion and learn more about their students. Powerful questions and careful listening to the students answers by the supervisor can be a fruitful path to an enriching experience for both.

Defending a thesis is a frightening prospect: although students tend to be terrified of writing 80,000 words, it is really the least of their problems (when they worry about the writing rather than the defence, the writing is often not very good!) It is hard to defend things that really don't matter to you. Critical inquiry is about discovering and giving voice to the things that matter. Inevitably this means that the topic, the method, the analysis and the conclusions have an internal coherence and give voice to the student's personal identify. I suspect that only by revealing the workings and origin of our own academic identities can this transformation in others be achieved. 

The Difficulty of Talking about Experience and the turning of Education into an Expectation of Functionality

Experiences can be difficult to talk about. Right now, the experience of imminent unemployment I’m finding extremely difficult to talk about. Experience is recursive: the experience of finding experiences difficult to talk about is also an experience. I find that experience a bit easier to talk about. At deeper levels of recursion things become more abstract: there is an increase in the degree of emotional detachment. So I can write this blog post (which evolves into the beginning of a paper!) because I am able to be analytical, to look at the experience of my experience and my emotions. Emotions get in the way of talking about experiences - and particularly talking about feelings: words get lost in tears and anger.

Among close friends and family thankfully there is rarely a need to articulate precisely how we feel. Human beings are adept at intuiting the experiences of each other even when those experiences are not verbalised. Were it not for this fact, human communication would be devoid of the empathy, compassion, shared understanding and insight that underpins all social relationships, and without which we would no doubt have destroyed ourselves long ago. In fact, I doubt communication would be possible at all. I'm reminded of Karen Armstrong's TED Talk where she gave a moving account of the meeting between King Priam and Achilles when Priam pleaded for the return of his son Hector’s body: the two kings looked into each other’s eyes and wept. Experience communicates: she made the audience cry. (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SJMm4RAwVLo)

Exactly how this happens is a question that underpins debates about educational practice (It is the same question which relates to the way that music communicates, about which I’ve written recently) This debate about communication has political implications which bear upon the way education is organised. And yet, theoretical accounts for the communication of experience are deficient and incomplete. The incompleteness of the theory and the application of half-baked ideas about experience are connected in a complex web of relationships at different levels of the education system which, on the one hand, mandate certain practices as being in the interests of good 'learning experience' whilst overlooking the theoretical struggles which underpin practical recommendations. Gaps between theory and practice have intensified in recent years because of increasing economic pressure within education, and the the particular concern for providing evidence for the "goodness" of learning experiences as a means of institutional comparison, market dynamics and quality control. As education has become 'marketised', so distinctions concerning the encounter with educational processes have become conflated with other aspects of experience - particularly the experience with technologies. At the extreme end of this is an increasing inability to distinguish the experience of a good education from the experience of a good car or a good washing machine. The increasing role of technology in education has made a confused situation worse: increasing metricisation leads to bad decisions and (dare I say it) the closure of educational research departments! Husserl worried about this kind of thing over 100 years ago: he called it the “mathematicisation of nature”.

Here, however, I want to unpick the dimensions of experience in education. The relationships between deep theoretical understanding of experience - which belongs to the domain of phenomenology - and the practical manifestations of theory which have given rise to sociological methods, policies, metrics, targets and technologies within education is highly complex. How is it that 'evidence' came to dominate the policy landscape in education and elsewhere? How is it that "Learning Outcomes" became the principal index of educational coordination and assessment? Why is it that the degree of inspection of student experience continues to increase, whilst the educational processes students are subject to becomes increasingly rigid and bureaucratic? How has our experience of technology affected our experience of education?

Technology and Experience

Educational experience appears only partially like the experience of new washing machine. The expectations one might have of a washing machine do not change as one lives with the machine, although one might develop new expectations as the technology improves. Technology codifies an expectation of function. Whilst there are many aspects of education which codify expectations like this (timetables, lectures, textbooks, assessments, etc), the educational situation is fluid and its outcomes rich and unpredictable. We enter education in the hope that our expectations of ourselves may become clearer or even be transformed in ways which we cannot yet imagine. The leap of faith in education is different from the expectation that one's clothes will emerge from a washing machine clean. However, there is a dimension of technological experience which overlaps with educational experience. This is the experience of those technologies which assist or transform the communicative activities which underpin education.

Whilst the washing machines and cars codify expectations of functionality, money codifies expectations of economic exchange, communication technologies codify (and transform) expectations about the possibilities of communication. The internet is only the latest of these technologies. Human history is replete with key moments in the transformation of the possibility of communication: languages, alphabets, writing, printing, recording, radio, the telephone and the TV each mark stages along the way in the transformation of the expectation of possibilities of communication. At each stage, transformation in the possibilities of communication ushers in the possibility of educational transformation through new forms of communication.

Our most recent example is of course the internet. In the early 1970s, selected politicians, artists and academics were exposed to a new kind of communicative transformation. Their interactions on the early ARPANET network are recorded and reveal the interface between a new codified means of communicating through technology with an awakening of the possibilities for transforming the world through new educational experiences. The original transcripts of their engagements are online. Even in the constrained typescript of the interactions, the sense of excitement is palpable, as can be seen from this encounter between Ronald Reagan (then Governor of California, Belgian poet Marcel Broodthaers, and Palestinian philosopher Edward Said):

RONALD REAGAN: Wouldnt you rather pick up the phone and call.

RONALD REAGAN: All this damned typing.

MARCEL BROODTHAERS: You get faster.

EDWARD SAID: Yes I would but if it were to be cheap and inexpensive.

EDWARD SAID: Free.

RONALD REAGAN: Free. Well who pays for it in the end though.

MARCEL BROODTHAERS: The people of course.

RONALD REAGAN: You mean taxes.

MARCEL BROODTHAERS: I assume you are in a military communication centre like me. Both of you.

EDWARD SAID: But for a young man or woman in Sri Lanka this might help them voice their ideas to people like a university professor from Michigan or an architect from Bahia.

EDWARD SAID: The rich should pay.

Broodthaers and Said saw the potential - particularly for education. It was in education that the transformation of possibilities of communication would have their most powerful effect. Said, however, also saw the dangers: later on they exchange their views about education:

MARCEL BROODTHAERS: Students I think could benefit from this greatly.

EDWARD SAID: Yes I can imagine.

MARCEL BROODTHAERS: Vast networks of students.

EDWARD SAID: Networks. What does that mean really.

MARCEL BROODTHAERS: Youth must be provided with the means to grasp this opportunity.

RONALD REAGAN: Sounds a bit out of control to me.

EDWARD SAID: Sounds suspicious.

MARCEL BROODTHAERS: The young will grasp its potential in a way we couldnt imagine.

RONALD REAGAN: I dont doubt that.

MARCEL BROODTHAERS: You agree with me Ronald.

RONALD REAGAN: Well yes.

EDWARD SAID: And what will it lead to Marcel. Other networks with more power will already have control.

Reagan was a cynic but also saw the potential: for him, the transformation in the possibilities of communication would mean that private enterprise, not state support would deliver control in ‘networks with more power’ and lead the way with the technology. In the end, confirming Said’s fears, he was right.

By the late 1990s, the palpable excitement of early ARPANET became mainstream. The web amplified the voices of those who could set up their own web servers. The richness of the communicative experiences shared online vastly exceeded the expectations of the early ARPANET users. Today we are told that social software and personal technology mean that the freedom to communicate and express oneself online is available to everyone. Each new online development, from Blogs to Youtube, Federated Wikis to the Oculus Rift, Email to Twitter, represent another shift in the expectation of the possibilities of communication. Each new TechCrunch "disruptive" technology basically attempts to offer a transformation in the possibilities of communicating. However, not all possibilities are viable, and yet, rather like education, only the experience of attempting to transform one’s communicative practices with a new tool can reveal if it’s any good or not.

The boundary between the experiences of communication technologies and experiences of education become blurred in a way in which the boundary between the experience of a washing machine and education is not. Education and communication technologies both change our views on the possibilities of communication. Education changes possibilities of communicating by equipping us with new skilled performances; technology changes possibilities of communicating through amplifying certain capabilities such as broadcasting video or text. This transformation of the possibilities of communicating makes the distinction between using technology, living and learning very difficult to distinguish: they appear to be different aspects on the same phenomenon. Meanwhile, institutions of education have developed by providing technologies for communication: Email, Virtual learning environments, E-portfolio systems have joined interactive systems for the library, online resources, timetables, finance, and so on. Alongside this transformation of the institution by technology, there has been a reassessment of the relationship between learning and communicating. At the extreme end of this reassessment has come the constructivist mantra, “Learning IS communicating”, and with it various initiatives for ‘Personal Learning Environments’, ‘E-portfolio’ and "Digital Literacy" as ways of integrating general communication technologies (and general communication) with the acquisition of the skilled performances demanded by the institutional assessment regimes. This has been accompanied by scepticism about the value of formal learning: ascribing the contents of a ‘course’ as a ‘cause’ of learning has been attacked. In the Personal Learning Environment, an alternative description emerged of learning as a process of adaptation to toolkits, whereby the integration of disparate elements of knowledge with the ability to coordinate the experiences of everyday life led to the idea that institutions should focus on facilitating access to personalised toolkits and providing flexible forms of assessment rather than designing formal curricula.

Much of the thinking behind such positions is muddled. Communications technology, and particularly social software presents some aspects of experience which still resemble the washing machine rather than the classroom. In particular, all technologies produce an immediate effect with little risk on the part of the user, whilst at the same time, all technologies (including washing machines) make their experiences available to everyone. Invocations to ‘get involved’ with social software tools, Open Educational Resources or MOOCs usually take the form of “all you need to do is sign-up for an account and try it”. By contrast, whilst there is some immediacy in the experience of a discussion with a leading philosopher as part of a tutorial-driven education in Oxford, this experience is unavailable to most, and it also carries risks (that for example, the philosopher might think you an idiot!). In the same way that one might try-on a new suit, one could try-on the environment for social software, open educational resources, or MOOCs immediately surrounded by many others who cheer on and argue that this is a “new way of learning”. We cannot 'try on' the Oxford philosopher in the same way. Whilst radical voices predicted that increased availability provided by technology would spell the demise of the campus, it appears that the campus is very much alive in this new environment, increasingly expensive, and purveying its technologies (like MOOCs) as a means of marketing itself.

The question behind this is to ask what it means to say, as Roger Brown argues, that education is an 'experience good'. The gap between the availability and immediacy of experience manifests in a gap between formal Higher education and informal technologically-mediated learning. Judgements may be quick with technology, but form slowly in education: after the boring lecture we may determine perhaps many years later that it was in fact brilliant. The experiences of caring, or being cared for, of being nurtured, all of which are fundamental to educational processes are largely excluded in the simple messianic championing of new technologies of communication as a solution to educational problems. At the same time, the worth and value of institutional learning has become reduced to simplistic metrics of codified expectations which one would associate with the washing machine.

The other side of the technological effect on education has been an increasing desire to codify expectations of the functionality of education, thus rendering education as a technology whose functionality may be compared and rational decisions made in the same way that cars or computers may be evaluated. Ironically, the remaking of the institution-as-technology has been driven by technologically-mediated bureaucratic processes and managerial structures which have grounded themselves in methodologies which attempt (or claim) to articulate the experience of education. As Brown points out, quantifying and explaining the value of the experience of higher education has acquired an economic imperative. Institutional learning has become more, not less, popular despite rising fees. Universities will attribute this to their investment in the “student experience” and a greater emphasis on teaching. So what is this "student experience"? Is it an immediate judgement in response to a survey question? Its immediacy means that it cannot capture the 25-year-later re-evaluation. Does it consider the availability of alternative experiences in the way that we might consider different washing machines? Whilst it cannot do this, results from 'experience surveys' produce data from which such comparisons are made - indeed this is why the surveys are conducted, and yet there is no critique of the commensurability of one person's experience with another. The overall effect is to reify judgements grounded in ‘evidence’ upon which policies – either local or national can be formulated. However, "evidence-based policy" is in practice "policy-based evidence". The determination of questions, indeed the methodology of asking and aggregating answers to questions, already carries with it a plan of policy implementation. Whilst characterised as an investigation into the ‘student experience’, nothing new is learnt about experiences, save what can be actioned in a policy agenda which has predetermined triggers established within the measurement methodology.

The driver for evidence-based policy (or policy-based evidence) is the establishment of a ‘market’ in education. Since markets depend on information to support 'consumer choice', the effort to establish reliable information sources for education has led to this plethora of surveys, league tables, and other data including job prospects and salary forecasts which supposedly gives an indication of the ‘quality’ of the experience and outcome learners might expect should they choose an institution. At this point, education becomes like a washing machine: a codification of expectations of functionality. The performance of education can be measured and compared with these codified expectations. Yet the codification of expectations of functionality compromises the possibilities for transforming the expectations of the possibilities of communicating which increase with the development of new skills and learning. This is because the authentic human face-to-face interaction increasingly takes second place to bureaucratic and quasi-legalistic processes of meeting learning outcomes and fulfilling assessments, whilst the 'quality machine' bears down on those who seek to bend (or break) the rules. Inflexibility and fear contribute to the marginalisation of authentic human interaction: the only experiences that count are those that can be immediately articulated and measured as evidence.

So my question is "How has the study of experience, which ought to be enlightening, led to a situation in education which is oppressive and alienating?" In pre-empting an answer to this, I return to my first point: experience is difficult to talk about. Education is a confusing and deeply emotional process. The root of the problem lies in the fact that we have lost the ability and the inclination to sit down with one another and intuit what is going on. Instead, we bury the emotion, by-pass the difficulties of experience, and turn everything into an expectation of functionality.

How can we design learning? A Phenomenological Perspective...

Given that human beings are very diverse, complex and their reactions unpredictable, it is perhaps surprising that the design of learning is generally considered possible, or that we consider good learning designs to have causal bearing upon good learning experiences. Partly, the emphasis on learning design is the result of industrialisation of education where attempts have been made to codify the unique efforts of individual teachers into technological forms which attempt to guarantee educational results independently of the presence of those teachers. At its most basic level, this takes the form of shared educational resources. However, the relationship between the shared educational resource which forms a common coordinating environment for teaching, and the communicative experience of engaging in that environment is poorly understood. There is an assumption of the instrumentality of the educational resource with little inspection of real experience.

Close inspection of real experience of lectures reveals much about the relationship between a common environment and individual inner life. For example, in a boring lecture, students will look at each other; they will have some insight into the inner world of each other. At some moments, the acknowledgement of a wry grin may trigger something more disruptive when they realise they are not alone. Schoolchildren are particularly adept at this: the excitement of the expression of a shared identity in the face of an oppressive force arises from awareness of the inner life of other people; it is the root of political expression. Although from the passage below Alfred Schutz attended better lectures than I have, he grasps something important about the experience of education:

“In listening to a lecturer [...] we seem to participate immediately in the development of his stream of thought. But – and this point is obviously a decisive one – our attitude in doing so is quite different from that we adopt in turning to our own stream of thought by reflection. We catch the other’s thought in its vivid presence and not modo preterito; this is, we are it as a “now” and not as a “just now”. The other’s speech and our listening are experienced as a vivid simultaneity. Now he starts a new sentence, he attaches word to word; we do not know how the sentence will end, and before its end we are uncertain what it means. The next sentence joins the first, paragraph follows paragraph; now he has expressed a thought and passes to another, and the whole is a lecture among other lectures and so on. It depends on  circumstances how far we want to follow the development of his thought. But as long as we do so we participate in the immediate present of the other’s thought.”

This dissection of experience in education is important. Wouldn't it be valuable to perform a similar dissection of our engagement with Facebook or Twitter? There would appear to be significant differences in the degree of interpersonal concern. For Schutz, other people, and the experience of other people in a shared environment is fundamental to our own personhood:

“we could not be persons for others, even not for ourselves, if we could not find with the others a common environment as the counterpart of the intentional interconnectedness of our conscious lives. This common environment is established by comprehension, which in turn, is founded upon the fact that the subjects reciprocally motivate one another in their spiritual activities.” (On phenomenology and social relations, p165)

Extending Husserl’s phenomenology of the “Life world” he articulates the finer details of interpersonal relations, from the consciousness of 'contemporaries' - people who live at the same time as us, but who are remote from us - to consciousness of face-to-face relations. In all cases, he argues:

“It appears that all possible communication presupposes a mutual tuning-in relationship between the communicator and the addressee of the communication. This relationship is established by the reciprocal sharing of the other’s flux of experiences in inner time, by living through a vivid present together, by experiencing this togetherness as a “we”. Only within this experience does the other’s conduct become meaningful to the partner tuned in on him – that is, the other’s body and its movements can be and are interpreted as a field of expression of events within his inner life.” (p 216)

Given this phenomenological complexity, how is it possible for us to design educational experiences? With much effort having been expended in attempts to technologically design learning (mostly unsatisfactorily), together with attempts to industrialise the design of learning experiences driven by the marketisation of education, why is it so much faith is placed in something so deep and problematic? Universities now employ heads of “student experience” whose aim of ensuring good student experiences typically reduced to an aim of producing satisfactory results to student experience surveys (quite a different thing!). Yet there are some circumstances where the design of an experience may indeed produce results which are reliable across a range of different stakeholders. How do we make sense of this?

How might we design learning experiences?

Designing learning is planned action. Schutz quotes Dewey in arguing that: 

“in our daily life we are largely preoccupied with the next step. Men stop and think only when the sequence of doing is interrupted, and the disjunction in the form of a problem forces them to stop and rehearse alternative ways – over, around or through – which their past experience in collision  with this problem suggest.”  

But there is something important in this planned action which is often missed by the champions of learning design. This is the fact that the execution of a plan leaves space and flexibility for the actions of individuals on the ground:

“Like all other anticipations, the rehearsed future action also has gaps which only the performance of the act will fill in. Therefore the actor will only retrospectively see whether his project stood the test or proved a failure…”

All teachers have some idea of the experience of their learners: if not of individual apprehension and ability, they possess knowledge of the organisational and institutional situation that learners find themselves in. It is with this organisational situation that they intervene. The common objects of the classroom situation are not just the physical artefacts like textbooks, interactive whiteboards, chairs and desks, but also the implicit rules, rights and obligations of the educational setting: these are all codified expectations. Designing for learning means intervening in this situation such that the claims a teacher might make about the purpose, scope, context and content of a learning design will be acknowledged (and hopefully supported) by those subject to it. Measurement of the learning experience is a measurement of the extent to which those attending a lesson designed in such a way upholds the propositions put to them by their teacher. Poor learning experiences are, in this sense, mis-communications: the teacher's assertions about scope, purpose, context and content are not upheld by the students.

Teachers make declarations about their subject’s content, about the university procedures for assessment, about the rules of the class and the form of lectures, practical tasks and assignments. Teachers know that common constraints operate on their learners: they all, usually, want to pass the course; they all know that assignments have to be done on time to a satisfactory standard, and so on. Educational convention dictates expectations in learners that (for example) lessons start on time, that they will receive feedback from their work. What is the experience to be subject to these declarations? What is the experience of making them?

“Learning Experience” has become subject to the target-driven culture of education. The irony of the “Learning Experience” target is that it purports to be an index of the phenomenology of learning experience, whilst blinding itself to the phenomenology of targets. The phenomenology of targets, however, is an important element in the pathology of institutions, as increasingly functionalist orientations have arisen in social policy. Methodological approaches for gathering ‘evidence’ about “learning experience” targets (including the National Student Survey) themselves have an experience, whilst the purpose of establishing such targets is to ‘improve’ experiences. Does this mean anything more than an improvement according to the recorded view about experience analysed with an approved methodology?

It is unclear exactly what improvement to the learning experience means. Schutz's emphasis on the common environment provides a clue that those codified aspects of education which are common provide at least a starting point for the coordination of experiences. Lectures that start on time, engaging activities, clear textbooks, transparent marking criteria are all aspects of a common environment: they are codifications of expectation. The mistake we risk making is to assume that learning experiences simply depend on this codification (because it is measurable), rather than seeing such regularities as simply the starting point for authentic educational interactions. However, the pressures of increasing commodification will make that mistake ever more attractive.

"When there is a breakdown in any relationship involving two parties who themselves have responsibilities to others who rely upon them, all efforts should be made to protect the reliant individuals from involvement in the breakdown" #wearedamo

I agree with Jon Elster that Hans Christian Anderson was one of the world's great sociologists. Contained within his stories are archetypes which continually recur. One of the most regular recurrences is of the "Emperor's New Clothes" Anderson, however, didn't write the version of the story that closed along the following lines:

"To the little boy, it was quite obvious that the Emperor was naked. His could hardly contain his excitement! 'The Emperor's got no clothes on!' he shouted, tugging at the coat tails of the courtiers. They looked down on him in horror - of course, they all knew the Emperor had no clothes on, but they were afraid to say anything. The  little boy persisted. The Emperor heard him. Now the Emperor knew full well he was naked. He rather enjoyed the sport of parading naked and making everyone terrified of saying anything about it. The last thing he needed was some pesky kid causing a disruption and drawing attention to the obvious fact. He thought about it briefly and decided that the best thing to do was to get his henchmen to remove the child. Everybody else would be too frightened to do anything or say anything. As the child was being dragged away his cries stirred something in the crowd. They knew that what the child was saying was true. They felt ashamed of their own fear. Indeed, they saw themselves to be as naked as the Emperor. 'Enough!' shouted an adult in the crowd. The henchmen looked around to see who spoke. 'Enough!' came a shout from another part of the crowd. Suddenly, the atmosphere began to change as distant shouts of 'Enough' got louder. With the shout of 'The kid's right - Of course he's naked!', everyone started to laugh. Nevertheless, the child was dragged away, raising the temperature further.

For the Emperor, this was a problem. Fear was melting away. News spread to neighbouring towns: "Come and see the naked emperor!" screamed the headlines. People started to laugh. But the Emperor's close coterie remained loyal, batting away suggestions that the Emperor was at all naked. They released a statement defending the silencing of the little boy in a bid to appease his distraught parents: "When there is a breakdown in any relationship involving two parties who themselves have responsibilities to others who rely upon them, all efforts should be made to protect the reliant individuals from involvement in the breakdown" "What the hell does that mean?" said the crowd. "I think it a bit like their line last year after the notorious scandal about the great 'Screwdriver thief': 'When seagulls follow the trawler, it is because they think sardines will be thrown into the sea.'

The Emperor's task was now clear. How could he put fear back into a situation so that he could once more parade about the town with no clothes on? The Emperor had one more trick up his sleeve: the Establishment! He called upon the town Bishop, the Baker and the Law-Maker, all of whom were close associates. Between them, they conjured up new laws, new prayers and some granary loaves. "Let's give these people something to really chew on!" They said, laughing an evil laugh. The laws made the people work harder; the opiate prayers made them forget their troubles; and the bread filled their mouths so full they couldn't speak any more. Everyone forgot everything. The problem went away. And once more, the Emperor could walk in the town in his birthday suit." 

Alfred Schutz and Music

I found a wonderful introduction to a paper about Schutz and Music with reference to Leonardo's Paragone by Emanuel Winternitz (see "The Role of Music in Leonardo's Paragone"). I've written about Schutz's "Making Music Together" (1975) before (see http://dailyimprovisation.blogspot.co.uk/2014/01/alfred-schutz-on-making-music-together.html) - it is, I think, the finest paper on the experience of music I have ever come across. But more importantly, it serves to highlight the fundamental importance of a musical intelligence in Schutz's social theorising more generally. I didn't know about Schutz's musicianship until reading this. At the moment I am re-writing the chapter of my book on phenomenology (it came out rather garbled the first time), and I find myself making much more use of Schutz: he's such an important figure because he straddles the phenomenological world of Husserl with the sociological world of Weber.

The question I'm dealing with is about the experience of education and the experience of learning. Schutz's interest in face-to-face communication vs remote communication (what he calls "indirect social relationships") and the importance of what he calls 'polythetic understanding' - which is central to his music theory - is also of fundamental significance in learning - and particularly learning technology. Video, for example, provides us with a medium where there remains a polythetic aspect of experience similar to musical experience. I often video my supervision sessions with PhD students, screen-capturing doodles, notes, corrections, etc. I know that this technique is of great value to them because to replay something like this is to replay the flow of time in the relationship. It is a capture of polythetic understanding.

Introduction to The Role of Music in Leonardo's Paragone by Emanuel Winternitz

Alfred Schutz was profoundly musical, and a study such as the present one on Leonardo's Paragone would, no doubt, have led to one of those long, nocturnal discussions which we used to have through forty years in Vienna and then in New York. We first met as students of law at the University of Vienna in 1918, but it was music which really brought us together. We ran into each other on the steps leading to the standing room section high up under the roof of the Vienna Opera House, both of us duly equipped with the score of the "Entführung aus dem Serail"

Schutz had a broad and intense knowledge of German and French literature, and he had his favorites among painters: he could become ecstatic before a Giovanni Bellini "Pieta" or Rembrandt's "Jewish Bride", but his beloved art was music. Even in his student days, his knowledge of the theory and history of music would have done honor to any musicologist. His interests and his tastes were catholic, and reached from Pachelbel and Heinrich Schütz to Alban Berg's "Wozzeck". He knew by heart J.S. Bach's Passions, most of his Cantatas and the Goldberg Variations; he was equally at home with Mozart's Masses and operas and the chamber music of Brahms. One of his special idols was Gluck; he knew every page of the standard treatises by Spitta, Schweizer, Chrysander, Jahn-Albert and Thayer. He played the piano with little technique, but the form and emotional content were magically conjured up by his enthusiasm., We played four-hand music throughout all the years of our friendship, and though we often squabbled over Brahm's triplets or Bruckner's hemioles, his shining face and radiant pleasure and our ensuring arguments belong to my dearest memories. We often discussed the experience provided by music and analysed the nature of flow, succession and time and their relation to Bergsons's duree, and the musical structure as a model of the role and function of memory as creator of form and flux.

Alfred Schutz's concern with the phenomenon of music deeply influenced his philosophy. It will be a task for his philosopher friends to explore the connection and to continue his work.

Living Lines, Tippett's music and the #wearedamo Protest

I find that moments of crisis are often accompanied by a mental soundtrack. I have peculiar musical tastes, I certainly have a crisis at the moment, and my soundtrack is the later music of Michael Tippett. Tippett's music is music of political defiance, of energy, drive, optimism and struggle. There is, it has only recently occurred to me (I have been thinking about this music for over 25 years!), a particular property that creates these qualities: it is a fundamental melodic (usually scalic) line which is punctuated by extraneous elements, twiddles, outlying notes, that give the line life. Tippett's musical line exhibits the same dynamics identified in Terry Deacon's information theory: it has an orthograde tendency in the melody itself (on its own it would lose energy, become dull) - this produces entropy; but working against it is a contragrade tendency, introducing variety, and consequently countering the entropy (feeding information, in fact). Tippett always believed in the connection between music and politics, and I think in this aspect of his language, he makes a connection between the fundamental properties of the human spirit and the content of sound.

I was thinking about this as I chatted to student protesters outside my university who are giving up every lunchtime to wave placards in support of the reinstatement of one of their teachers and his wife who were summarily dismissed with no evidence of wrongdoing (see http://wearedamo.weebly.com/). That's the human spirit! And it is probably the most profound educational act that these students will undertake; the thing they will remember with most passion. Education is, after all, about doing things that matter. You can sign their petition here:  http://www.ucu.org.uk/7465)


But to come back to the music: I think this kind of passion and determination has a line. What is moving and important about these protests is that despite the fact one can feel quite silly waving banners accusing University managers of things which I won't repeat here, the embarrassment is overridden by a sense of common purpose, humanity, conviviality, justice, coordination and determination. It happens spontaneously when people feel strongly enough about things. Tippett would have been there (he went to prison for his beliefs!).

So what do I mean about 'lines'? Here's a typical Tippett accompaniment from his opera "King Priam":

There are two things to say about this. Firstly, one can identify a scalic line nested within outlying notes. In this particular case, there are one or two possibilities, but basically it could be:

The second point is to ask about what the other notes are doing. One of the things they are doing is providing a regular semiquaver rhythm. This is a kind of rhythmic redundancy which creates the expectation of drive and momentum. But above that regular rhythmic redundancy, there is irregularity in the patterns that are surrounding the scalic notes, and this is a particular feature that is very noticeable in much of Tippett's music from the early (and beautiful) concerto for double string orchestra, and the first string quartet, onwards. What is this irregularity doing? It is introducing surprise, or in other words, it is introducing something which counteracts the otherwise formless regularity of the rhythm and the scales. What would the music be like if it only consisted of the red circled notes played in a regular semiquaver rhythm? Boring! Played without a semiquaver rhythm? Even more boring! What is that boringness? It is entropy. What stops it being boring? The injection of irregularity and surprise. 

Maybe I am stretching things too far to say that this is precisely the same dynamic as the dynamics of protest. But there does appear to be an othograde and a contragrade force. The orthograde force in the regularity and redundancy; the contragrade in the surprises. Put together it takes on life, energy, drive.

More importantly, the experience of the music can instil energy and drive in the listener. Tippett's neglected opera "The Ice Break" received a remarkable revival a couple of weeks ago by Birmingham opera in an abandoned warehouse in Birmingham city centre. (see a fantastic review here: http://www.birminghampost.co.uk/whats-on/arts-culture-news/ice-break-birmingham-opera-company-8986388) The opera is about political dissent and the human condition, and features race riots and shootings with the kind of Jungian references that one would expect from Tippett. The audience was part of the crowd: we found ourselves marshalled around by police carrying semi-automatic rifles as someone standing next to you would start to sing, whilst you witness somebody else getting mugged. The experience was thrilling because the injustice - although made up - hits you in the face. The human spirit reacts in the only way it knows how. Tippett had a fascination with the Jacobean Masque partly because the audience in the 17th century became part of the drama, and that 17th century spirit was a core part of Birminham opera's production (it couldn't possibly have worked in Covent Garden!)

In the world of Universities, the lines are obscure: it is difficult to tell where the drama is, who the actors are, who the spectators are. Education is fragmented, disparate and confusing: there are orthograde and contragrade forces at work but there is seldom a chance to get a feel for the dynamic of the whole thing. When circumstances arise where everyone comes together and collectively says "NO!" it is a special moment. It's the identification of a line and the determination of purpose.

The Powerful Conversation of Supervision

I had a great supervision today with a PhD student who is researching home-studio music composition/production. This is a difficult topic (PhDs are not meant to be easy!), because it opens onto a rich territory of largely phenomenological inquiry about the creative process generally, and the musical creative process in particular and the relationship with technology. My own experience of technology in music making (albeit a very different genre) is that technology very often gets in the way: the functionalist determination of pressing buttons, clicking menus and so on somehow obscures what matters in the creative process (I have another PhD student who is looking at precisely this aspect of creativity and the way that artists are exploring ways of subverting the functionalism of technology). Indeed, the functionalist determination of technological usage generally obscures what matters: technology is behind the cancer of functionalism and its related managerialism in institutions and governments.

My student is very bright, reads a lot, thinks even more and listens to music all the time: he is full of ideas. But he complains of a kind of 'stagnation': a feeling of being overwhelmed by the complexity of his thoughts. I know a few PhD supervisors who don't think about things very deeply, but who basically steer students through the 'game' of the PhD: this approach seeks to attenuate complex thought and channel productivity in a narrow functional way. I've always objected to this: I was (and am still) like my PhD student: full of rich and complex ideas. I was lucky to supervised at the University of Bolton by somebody who was equally complex: there was no need to attenuate anything - the conversations were fertile, encouraging, and I simply started to write (most importantly on this blog!). I dread to think what would have happened to me at a lesser University!

There's a cybernetic law for what I am describing: it's called Ashby's law of Requisite Variety. Basically, Ross Ashby realised that a complex system can only be controlled by a system of equal or greater complexity. He built a machine called the 'homeostat' to prove it. Education, unfortunately, is very good at attenuating complexity through force of power ("don't think about it, just do what you're told!") - but this is oppressive: it produces what Heinz von Foerster calls a 'trivial machine'.

In a recent discussion with Loet Leydesdorff, we talked about stagnation. Loet is interested in stagnation in the economy. He argues that moments of stagnation are the most important for growth because it is where the most 'redundant' ideas are produced - that is what might be termed 'hidden options' for development. We discussed the importance of Universities in producing 'hidden options': universities are society's generators of redundancy (that phrase has a peculiar ring to me at the moment!!). But there is an obvious problem: there is plenty of economic stagnation at the moment, whilst the approach of government is to remove redundancy in favour of efficiency. That is, the very source of economic growth - hidden options - are suppressed with an increasingly functionalist programme of bureaucratising society such that the function of every individual is determined in terms of the demands of every other individual, with nothing to waste.

The irony is that the generators of redundancy - the Universities - are suffering precisely this fate. Education is being functionalised; there is simply no space to think, and there are no jobs for thinkers.

Stagnation is important because it is something that builds up over time and seeks some kind of release. How can a surfeit of complex ideas release itself? By Ashby's Law, it must find another surfeit of complex ideas! In a University, this shouldn't be difficult. But of course, if Universities remove their thinkers, and they create timetables where every moment of the day is spoken for in terms of functional delivery, and they exhaust people with bureaucracy, then it can be difficult to make connections. Worse still is that, like bad supervisors, they will instil a mentality which seeks to attenuate (or oppress) complexity of thought. The result will be sickness.

It's nice that my PhD student expressed his relief in talking to me, and we made great progress (thanks to Alfred Schutz - once again, thanks to Loet for that!) But this has made me think about the "relief" and the power of our conversation. As educators, we believe we can change peoples' lives by talking to them. This isn't an unfounded belief: we know it to be true given the right circumstances. Universities ought to provide the right circumstances! But what's in a powerful conversation?

I think it is in this business of a matching complexity of ideas. I find myself asking difficult questions: "What do you mean by 'ownership'? What do you mean by culture?". These expose the variety and complexity of thinking. Some of this complexity I recognise because I've been there myself. I also can make suggestions about what to do because I dealt with it myself (not to say my solution was the best or only one!), but at least I have my own map. And with my map, I also have some resources: theories, arguments, books to read, pieces of music, Schutz, etc.

All of this makes me think about Vygotsky's Zone of Proximal Development. I've never been entirely comfortable with it because it's rather woolly, coming very late in his short career. However, there may be a more technical way of expressing it in terms of interacting redundancies (I'm exploring this at the moment). Part of it though is what I learnt from my music professor Ian Kemp: you know you are teaching well when you learn more from your students than they do from you!