In pursuit of counterpoint: an educational journey

In this paper I describe and explain my educational development from 1978, to the present day as the main editor for our living educational theories journal EJOLTS. I develop the idea of counterpoint as a way of describing and explaining the management of educational values in my practice and theorising. I show how my early insights were not sufficiently rationalised to help me improve what I was doing, and how the development of my own living educational theory has enabled me to do that. I write about how the search for wholeness, and the avoidance of what I describe as fragmentation, exist in a dialectical relationship between learning and practice. I reveal how these insights are helping me to explain my educational development and improve learning. I show how evolving my counterpoint of values has helped me to illuminate problems and how, over time, I try to solve those problems through a greater acceptance of challenges from students, as well as collaboration with the people I am working with. I show how my work in China (in which my colleagues and I develop action research approaches with Chinese characteristics) leads me to understand more about, and enhance, my own educational development as well as helping to improve learning for teachers and students, both in Higher education and in schools. It is my growing facility for interweaving my values, philosophy and my actions that I designate as counterpoint.