In the story of my educational journey I will try to present the living standards of judgment and logic as I ask myself the question, ‘How can I live the most worthwhile form of life?’ In contributing to this first issue of EJOLTS I want to offer readers an original contribution to the conversation started by Donald Schön (1985) about the need for a new epistemology.
In my doctoral thesis (Laidlaw, 1996) I originated the idea of living and developmental standards of judgment in the generation of living theories. As my research evolved in China (2001–2006) I came to understand that action research with Chinese characteristics involved the kind of receptive and responsive standards of judgment used by Rayner to distinguish his work on inclusionality (Rayner 2003 – see later). In explaining my educational influences as my living educational theory I am also aware of needing a living logic – i.e. one that can develop as my insights develop – to distinguish the sense I am making of my existence. I am thinking of living logic in the way I developed in a paper I wrote (Laidlaw, 2004a) for the Bath Action Research Group at Bath University. In short I describe and explain my logic as stemming from a belief that:
My life has a purpose. It's for something. I chose education as the principle articulation of my life's focus a long time ago... I see myself as acting in the name of education and being in the loving service of humanity…The distillation of the above in language is fairness and in the form of my sense-making in mind and thought is logic and in motivation and actions is love. (p. 3)
I go on to say that this living logic develops through experience with others over time in my practice. It is not static and isn’t used as a theory from which I extrapolate my practice. It is living in the sense that my practice develops my theory, which develops my practice and so on. My logic is developing through my melding of theory and practice into praxis.
In this paper for EJOLTS I wish to account for my own educational development which is a description and explanation of how I have tried to live my values more fully in my educational practice. If, in our rubric at EJOLTS we say: ‘We are particularly interested in publishing explanations that connect aflow of life-affirming energy with living values such as love, freedom, justice, compassion, courage, care and democratic evaluation’,then it is important that we show how we are accounting for thesevalues in our actions.
When I agreed to work in EJOLTS, I did so because I felt this could be a journal in which people could share their desire to learn, one in which we could enable better processes for learning as well as facilitate democratic processes, values of freedom, love and equality together. I wanted to help build a learning community.