Understanding practitioner research as a form of life: an Eastern interpretation of Exploratory Practice

Abstract

Allwright and colleagues around the world have been developing Exploratory Practice as an approach to practitioner research different from the familiar notion of teacher research. EP offers a set of principles devoted to understanding, in a collaborative mode, the quality of language classroom life. Several underlying points, such as ‘quality of life’, ‘incommunicable understandings’, ‘puzzlement’, and so forth often go beyond the common meanings of the terms. The paper ventures to make a philosophical inquiry into such underlying ideas, combined with ethnographic investigation of an actual case based on a teacher-initiated research project. The inquiry is made in the light of both Western and Eastern philosophical thought, and its outcomes are analysed and presented in the form of stories. I propose that Exploratory Practice is best seen as a venture of experiencing authentic being through critical practices for understanding the quality of classroom life in terms of ‘what is inherently so’ (yin qi gu ran) and by searching for a language of Tao (the nameless). Following the route of ‘being’, ‘understanding’ and ‘naming’, this venture aims at the harmonization of teachers’ professional lives, where teaching is revealing being through words, and ‘then conversely, learning is experiencing what a teacher’s words reveal’ (Thomson, 2001: 259).