RADICAL TEFL

for Dewey, is not to arrive at 'knowledge' or a general 'truth', but to help one arrive at
workable solutions to the initial problematic situation. It is partly for this reason that
the problematic situation needs to be clearly stated, as otherwise validation cannot be
done: there is nothing to validate a knowledge claim against.
3. 3 Discussion: Validation by the teacher of her own work
If validation is best achieved when carried out against experience (above), then the
teacher, at the validation stage, arguably has two advantages over the observerresearcher.
Firstly, she can integrate a reflective-validation element into a trial-anderror
approach to her teaching in real time (this idea expanded in sec. 4 below),
whereas an observer may need a substantial data-gathering stage, and only when
results have been gathered in can he start to reflect or validate. Secondly, she has
constant feedback from her students on how her interventions are working, allowing
her to re-conceive and redesign those interventions: an observer cannot intervene.
If the teacher only has the aim of developing her own understanding of her own
students' problems, because her problem is local she does not have to concern herself
with other groups of learners (who may be different) as does the observer-researcher
who may need to generalise from what he observes, with all the methodological issues
involved in working from the particular to the general. This makes validation of her
conclusions simpler and arguably more secure than for more formal research.
Further, because of the favourable conditions she has for investigation, just outlined,
the teacher can continually return to the same problem, or re-conceive her problem,
and perhaps approach her problem differently, in a quite spontaneous or intuitive way,
depending on feedback obtained. Especially, and helping to make the process selfcorrecting,
unworkable ideas can be quickly abandoned. Her advantage over a
researching observer is that the three-stage loop moves faster, progress can be faster,
and unfruitful ideas can be dropped, and replaced by others, more quickly. 20
Summary of first three sections Dewey's theory is a claim to describe how
enquiry actually takes place, and his theory treats the architecture of enquiry, and not
psychological or cognitive issues. For Dewey enquiry progresses and develops from
literature within mainstream education on pitfalls in doing classroom research, especially for probing
analysis by Martyn Hammersley, and by the key Scarth & Hammersley [1986]). (On theory and
practice in the classroom, which is the theme of Widdowson [2003: ibid), see the very perceptive first
two papers in Wilfred Carr's (1995) For Education: Towards Critical Educational Inquiry. These two
papers were first published as follows: Carr, W. (1980), The Gap between Theory and Practice,
Journal of Further and Higher Education, 4/1; and: Carr, W. (1986), Theories of Theory and Practice,
Journal of Philosophy of Education, 20/2).
20 This idea, and others from Dewey on enquiry, is also found in the work of Karl Popper. Popper’s main
work on enquiry was published, in German, in the 1920s. Students of methods of enquiry will note how
similar some of Dewey's ideas are to Karl Popper's, especially the ideas that: (1) the growth of
knowledge starts from problems; (2) knowledge claims should be regarded as provisional, and the
importance of scrutiny of knowledge claims; (3) the need to keep separate questions concerning the
'architecture' or logic of enquiry from questions concerning psychology and cognition in enquiry,
[discussed in Appendix A below on p. 30]. See Bryan Magee's Karl Popper, (1973: chs ii, iii & v) for a
summary of Popper's thought on enquiry. On ‘pragmatic’ teacher validation, of her work, according to
whether an idea works, based on a study in the USA, also see Lortie, Schoolteacher, (1975:77-79)
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