How do I contribute to the education of myself and others through ...

Sequence 1 Values in Educationin advance. For instance, I can refer to the example of the influence that finding outmy father had lung cancer in 2005 and the way in which this has influenced mypractice and the educator and person that I am. Whilst I could have known at thestart of my research that I would come up against adversity and planned toacknowledge this I could not possibly have known that I would come up against thisparticular adversity. I use this example to demonstrate my responsiveness and theway in which I am acknowledging the importance played in my work of the relationswith others and the value that I place upon these relationships.I am arguing that I am taking the ideas of Thayer-Bacon on relational epistemologyfurther with my exemplification of her ideas through demonstrating them within mypractice, thus synthesising her ideas with living educational theory (Whitehead, 1989)to demonstrate how living relational epistemology works for me and my practicethrough demonstrating my own original living standard of judgement of living myselfthrough others. My thesis attempts to account for how I have come to believe certainthings within my practice and life. Thayor-Bacon comments in relation to herepistemology:‘…I am trying to offer one that is more open and inclusive as it attempts to beself-conscious, reflective, adjustable and adaptable as people gain further inunderstanding. My hope is that a theory of knowledge that begins with anunderstanding that theories are ideas – stories which are socially constructedand, therefore, fallible and subject to change – should be one that is lessopen to ideological abuse.’ (Thayer-Bacon, 1995)For me this acknowledges that living theory appreciates change and movementwithin education and that human beings are capable of responding to circumstancesaround them. I believe that through this thesis I am able to reflect the importance thatnarratives play within my own living educational theory and how I believe that storiescan contribute to our understanding of educational research.I further, through my thesis, want to embody my own desire to expand what weunderstand epistemology to mean (Thayer-Bacon, 1995) through including differentelements and ways of knowing what I know. I aim to represent this and communicatethis to the reader through my presentation of a multi-media text that attempts tocapture the nature of the educational relationships that I have had over time thathave contributed towards making me the educator that I am. By multi-media I meanthrough video and use of images set alongside a narrative account.28