On Spontaneity

Over the next weeks, I am going to blog about what I am reading in a seminar on “inquiry in educational leadership and policy analysis.” As part of this seminar, I am regularly writing 250 word reactions. Entries below will testify to my need for a few more words than that.

Here’s a set of readings.

Harter, S. (2006). What is your burning question? The challenge of framing a problem. In C. F. Conrad and R. C. Serlin (Eds.), The SAGE handbook on research in education: Engaging ideas and enriching inquiry (pp. 331-348). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.

Ortega v Gasset, J. (1969). On Studying. Some Lessons in Metaphysics. W.W. Norton

Grogan, M. (2004). Keeping a Critical, Postmodern Eye on Educational Leadership in the United States: In Appreciation of Bill Foster. Educational Administration Quarterly 40(2) 222-239.

At the center here for me is a question about the authority to pose questions. Do we ask the “burning questions” that launch meaningful inquiry or do they ask us? How do we implicate ourselves in the practices of education and at the same time distance ourselves from those so that we can ask authentic questions?

Ortega (1932/1969) and Grogan (2004) outline the dilemma but from quite different traditions of thinking about authority. Ortega, in good Modernist form, argued that only an individual’s immediate need avoids falseness in the process of study. Like his contemporaries, Ortega is trying to find space in Modern experience for the intuitive and spontaneous without abandoning the light of Marx and Freud and Darwin. Intuition is bound up, for Ortega, in doing rather than in some abstract (being). Grogan, adopting a “postmodern view” (p. 223), draws on Foucault to argue that needs are always already (to use a 1980s, pomo adverb) largely defined by the discourses those humans use to articulate their needs. She invites “writers and researchers” (p., 234) to take on local, ethical problems by looking at discourses and building counter narratives. She avoids specifics, tries not to get bogged down in how one resists a dominant discourse or how thoroughly integrated the discourse of educational leadership is (and so how difficult to resist).

Nonplused by the postmodern, Harter’s (2006) looks at what she has made. Her needs have arisen in reading philosophers (who turn out to be “worthy of revival at the level of empirical investigation,” p. 336—cannot resist including that phrase), attending to reality, historical theory, clinical practice, acknowledging uncertainty; finally developing a narrative that makes sense of the problem. Looking back at a career in science, she concludes that this often “top-down” “enterprise” (p. 346) is increasingly an activity that finds topics through “curiosity and exploration” (p. 347). She knows of what she speaks.

As I decide how to be a “scientist” (in addition to and never instead of a “humanist”), I wish I could find Harter’s steady pursuit of “truth” (in quotes here for Foucault) more compelling. She began studying self-esteem about the same time that Foucault began lecturing at the College de France. Foucault was questioning, among other things, the ability of scientists to be scientific. Late in his career, notably in a 1977 interview touching on “Truth and Power,” Foucault (1980) argues that intellectuals (his phrase for scientist in this setting) are in service (he notes an important distinction between those intellectuals who actively serve a hegemonic system and those “organic” intellectuals who arise from and remain connected to the proletariat). An intellectual’s contributions are further constrained by the position of her life and work (i.e., her field and political and economic relations) and also her position in relationship to “the politics of truth” (i.e., the ways her work deal with systems or “ordered procedures for the production, regulation, distribution, circulation and operation of statements,” p. 133). Sitting in the position of the professor (a topic Foucault and his contemporary Derrida wrote about extensively), she is after the “genuine” and “rewarding” (p. 331) with a remarkable disinterest in thinking about how those categories are produced. I came to the role of intellectual myself during the culture wars and the excesses of deconstruction; I cannot muster the faith she holds.

Grogan (2004) provides, at least initially, a more compelling path: she notes that the enterprise is collaborative (as does Harter) and that we have to find or problems in narratives about narrowness of understanding that obfuscates oppression. Almost in spite of herself, she too resolves the problem of agency, the difficulty of asking. Her “writers and researchers” partner with those who will do the work, will “encourage ‘oppositional imaginations’” (p. 234), but they do so by leading and writing and intervening. Foucault never worked out very completely how a human being might actually do the work of resistance; he was quite sure that writing and advising no longer (in 1977) could detach truth from current forms of hegemony. Grogan is unbothered by this uncertainty and, like Harter and Ortega, believes in the individual’s ability to resist.

So where to come down? I often return to the poems of T.S. Eliot or the philosophy of Hannah Arendt to make sense of the human condition, so I will throw in with Ortega. Posing a burning question is facing down a contradiction in the problem space that Grogan defines but then doing the work of metaphysics, seeking with and for others a “basic orientation” in a lifeworld that is finally disorienting. The questions of science (and poetry) grow out of doing and (being) in the world. These questions are ever contingent but that contingency is open to history, to the dimensions of time a space. The activity that comes to the surface for me here is waiting. Isaiah and Jeremiah mediated on the human need to wait. J. Alfred Prufrock and also the narrator in the Four Quartets try to engage in the act of waiting without falling into despair or losing faith in the possibility of ceasing to wait.

How do we provide spaces for waiting for the folk who do higher education and higher education policy? What is and might and, perhaps, ought to be their focus as they wait?