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Ivor F. GoodsonLife Politics

Ivor F. Goodson

S e n s e P u b l i s h e r s

Ivor F. GoodsonUniversity of Brighton, UK

S e n s e P u b l i s h e r s DIVS

Life Politics

Life Politics

Conversations about Culture and Education Ivor F. Goodson University of Brighton, UK

SENSE PUBLISHERS ROTTERDAM/BOSTON/TAIPEI

A C.I.P. record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: 978-94-6091-538-3 (paperback) ISBN: 978-94-6091-539-0 (hardback) ISBN: 978-94-6091-540-6 (e-book) Published by: Sense Publishers, P.O. Box 21858, 3001 AW Rotterdam, The Netherlands www.sensepublishers.com Printed on acid-free paper All Rights Reserved © 2011 Sense Publishers No part of this work may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming, recording or otherwise, without written permission from the Publisher, with the exception of any material supplied specifically for the purpose of being entered and executed on a computer system, for exclusive use by the purchaser of the work.

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DEDICATION

To Mary Louise My life partner of forty years. Through thick and thin, rich and poor. With thanks and much love, Ive

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction .............................................................................................................. ix 1. A Conversation with Ragna Adlandsvik ............................................................... 1 2. Talking Lives: A Conversation About Life History with Pat Sikes - Using the

Content of a Conversation between Ivor Goodson and Barry Troyna ................ 15 3. Mediation is the Message: Interview with Ivor Goodson

by Daniel Feldman and Mariano Palamidessi. Published (in Spanish) in Revista del Instituto de Ciencias de la Educación, Año IX, No 17. Buenos Aires, December 2000 ............................................................................ 31

4. Interviews with Raimundo Martins and Irene Tourinho in Barcelona................ 43 5. Interview with Jerry Brunetti ............................................................................... 75 6. Interview with José Pacheco: 9th November 2007, Braga, Portugal ................ 101 7. Developing Life and Work Histories of Teachers: Lecture and

Conversation at Tokyo Gakugei University, 11 January 2010 ......................... 117 Publications by Ivor F Goodson – A Summary ..................................................... 131

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INTRODUCTION

I have chosen the name ‘Life Politics’ for this collection of interviews and commentaries. The title ‘Life Politics’ covers a number of different meanings. Per-haps most important is the way that the interviews cover a range of cultural contexts and intellectual milieux. Part of the life politics represented in this book is built around the belief that if we are to act as public intellectuals in the current globalised world we need to travel. We may believe in Gramsci’s notion of organic intellectuals but in the current world we need to be ‘travelling organic intellectuals’. Of course the term public intellectual is itself (besides sounding somewhat pious!) subject to considerable contestation at the moment. As the public sphere comes under attack the very relevance of applied research and public intellectual discussion is itself challenged. One of the most salient features of the current period is the way that for the first time for many centuries complete narrative control seems to be in the hands of corporate elites. So much so that a complete failure of the economic system that they represent in terms of the latest economic meltdown can be presented as a crisis of public sector and public service. As a result the failures of bankers and economists are re-presented as a problem of over-spending on public services. Nonetheless the commitment to public service and applied research remains part of the enduring life politics of a significant number of people. In this sense this book is merely representative of the moral career chosen by certain people in the current economic conjuncture. I see no reason for that form of life politics to be abandoned merely because for the moment narrative control has passed to global elites and for the moment we appear to live more under corporate rule rather than representative democracy. I have some confidence that the pendulum will swing back and that this is not the culminating phase of the ‘end of history’.

At a more practical and everyday level the book represents life politics as it is played out in conversational and institutional activity. Again the question of the moral career comes to the fore but here it is expressed as a series of opinions, arguments, anecdotes, dreams, and visions. This gives much more realistic personal flesh and personal aspiration to the notion of life politics.

As I have said the conversations and interviews cover a range of different cultural contexts. The first interview took place on the small Norwegian island of Eo. This is the home of the noted Norwegian educationalist, Ragna Adlandsvik. Ragna grew up on a small farmstead on the island of Eo and as can be seen in the substance of the interview has remained loyal and in close touch to her roots. Whilst this may sound a romantic and idealised notion as readers will see in the interview, it is one that moves her to moral engagement and moral commitment of a much wider sort than just roots revivalism. She and I share strong ties to our own originating tribe and both believe this is an important moral imperative in the way that we conduct our life politics. But lest this all sounds too purposeful, puritanical and pious it should be said that most of the interviews, but this one in particular, were enormously enjoyable existential events. The interview actually took place in a potato shed in the garden of the farmstead on the island. Typically Ragna had refurbished the potato shed

INTRODUCTION

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and set it up with two nice chairs and a blitz of candles all around the porato shed. So there we sat in semi darkness talking about the issues that are covered in the inter-view. When the interview finished we went inside for a splendid meal that had been prepared by her brother Paul and as I remember the major constituent of the meal was indeed potatoes!

Chapter two was compiled by Pat Sikes and as a generous co-author and colla-borator over many years I would like to thank her herein for allowing me to use this. The substance of the article is a conversation between myself and Barry Troyna, the noted anti-racist professor who died prematurely not long after the conversations carried herein. The context of the interview was that Barry had been invited over to take part in the REMTEL project (Racial, Ethno-cultural Minority Teachers’ Lives). The project was funded by the Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada and Barry was much exercised by the way in which life history work confronts or colludes with racist commentaries. The interviews and conversations we had were often highly engaged and heated and immensely enjoyable. But at the heart of them was a shared belief about egalitarian social orders and the need to root out racist and other prejudicial practices. I believe the conversation says important things about life history as a potentially emancipatory practice and about the way in which life history methods should proceed to fulfil the objective of listening to the voice of others.

The third conversation took place in Buenos Aires in the late summer of 1999. This was a particularly harrowing period for Argentinean society as the economy was in severe financial straits. In due course there was a sovereign default on debt rather than accept the programmatic demands of the International Monetary Fund. Two socio-logists involved in the three-way conversation were Daniel Feldman and Mariano Palamidessi. These were both leading critical theorists in the country and Daniel had been in prison during the period of the military junta. The conversation took place in a hotel room in the backstreets of Buenos Aires and was followed by a very interesting trip to the Boca area of Buenos Aires which led to a series long conversations and ruminations about the future prospects for Argentinean society.

The set of interviews in chapter four comprise six different interviews in six different settings. Ranging from a long talk on the train up from Barcelona to Portbou and interviews in apartments and bars around the city of Barcelona. Our conversa-tions grew from the course on narrativity and narrative capital that I was teaching at the University of Barcelona in the six months from January to June of 2005. Raimundo and Irene were visiting professors to the university at the same time and attended my course and contributed a great deal to the discussions. As a result our conver-sations carried on quite naturally from the formal situation to the informal where we could explore our joint interests in democracy and civic society and critical theory in a more open manner.

The long conversation with Jerry Brunetti in chapter five took place at the end of 2004. Jerry was a visiting professor at Brighton and had been instrumental in setting up the Special Interest Group on Teachers’ Lives at the American Educational Research Association. The focus of the conversation is therefore primarily on the relationship of narrative and life history work to understanding the teacher’s life

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and work. This was a central interest for both of us and the conversations carried in this chapter were part of a much broader set of conversations carried on whilst Jerry stayed in Sussex. I was later able to follow up these conversations in a visit to San Francisco, which is close to Jerry’s university base, in 2006.

The connection to education and teaching is also pursued in the conversations with José Pacheco which took place in the baroque Portuguese city of Braga in 2007. José runs one of the most important research centres in Portugal and is interested in employing curriculum history and life history methods to examine and elucidate the complexities of Portuguese education. He has translated a number of my books into Portuguese and has a sophisticated understanding of the complexities and conundrums of these theoretical discourses as they impinge on the world of schooling. The conversation tries to situate my work in these areas in a broader context, not only Portuguese, but also global. Having first met at the Brazilian educa-tional research conference in Caixambu he and I now manage to have at least two meetings each year normally arranged to coincide with the advisory committee meetings of his research centre in Braga.

The final chapter employs a slightly different format. It begins with the lecture that I gave on a recent visit to Japan in 2010 which addresses the issue of the way that educational discourses are undergoing change in Japan. This is followed by a question and answer session with the audience. I always enjoy this format but particularly in Japan where the questions often have a precision and conciseness that sometimes is missing in more disputatious cultures. Whilst I welcome conversations in both genres the probing questions that one encounters in Japan and indeed China are a source of considerable challenge and leave one thinking hard about these issues long after the event is over. My visits to Japan have been rich and rewarding and a stream of Japanese visitors have reciprocated by coming to spend time at the Universities I work at in England. This has provided an interesting and challenging set of dialogues over time. As with all confrontations with different cultures the way that this challenges one’s basic assumptions is profoundly helpful if not at times disturbing.

In a more general sense, to return to my original point, this is for me the major rationale but also great excitement of travelling and exchanging ideas on the global circuit. By challenging our more insular national assumptions it is possible to interro-gate new ‘world movements’ of educational and social change and set them in the broader global context in which they now originate and circulate. In a globalised world this comparative dimension is critical if we are to develop concepts and theories which interrogate and challenge some of the orthodoxies emerging from the new world order.

Ivor Goodson 24 November 2010

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CHAPTER 1

A CONVERSATION WITH RAGNA ADLANDSVIK

RAGNA: You have been a school teacher for seven years. Why did you choose to become a teacher?

IVOR: Maybe I should go back a bit. I trained as a historian. I took my PhD. on immigrants in Victorian England, and then I got a job as a history lecturer at what became the University of Kingston. And I did that for two years. And then, in 1968, there were a series of social upheavals. What really happened was that in England they began to change the schooling system, from a selective system - with grammar school and others - to a comprehensive system which aimed to teach children of all classes and abilities together.

And I, who came from a working class community, was very interested in teaching working class children and less interested in teaching middle class university students history, so I decided I would abandon the university career to become a teacher.

So I trained at the Institute of Education, London University, and went off, in 1970, I think, to teach in a comprehensive school in the Midlands of England.

So I stopped being a lecturer, became a teacher and spent the next six or seven years in that school and another school where I became head of humanities. And then I decided I would take a year out to do some work on environmental education - which I was teaching, and that began the second university period in my life. I became a teacher because I wanted to teach my own group, the children of my own group, some of the things I thought I knew. I have to say I still look upon this as one of the most wonderful periods in my life. It was in a small village and I met my wife there. She was a nurse in the village. Yes, it was a fantastic time in my life. I loved teaching those kids. I loved them.

RAGNA: You were a teacher and she was a nurse - were you important people in the village?

IVOR: Yes, quite, I think. Both of us were very committed to public service, in a sense that we would never - Mary would never nurse in a private - you know, and I would never teach in a private school. Both of us tried to give what talent we had to the people, and particularly the people that at the moment did not know how to get a decent education, or a decent health in Mary’s case. So we were engaged in the same social project when we met and have stayed the same way all the way through. We both came from working class and we kept our loyalty, through a long journey together, to the same groups. That doesn’t mean that I exclude others. I am interested in education for all, how you develop pedagogy for all children. It remains my main interest: How you include rather than exclude children. And I am still interested in inclusive ways of being a social man. As a person I like to include everybody

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in a dialogue. That is the way I have been since I was a child, I think. That is the way my parents were.

RAGNA: How did you come into your curriculum studies, and is that still an important part of your work, or is it past?

IVOR: Well, how did I come into it? I had been teaching in this comprehensive school at a time when they were trying to move away from the traditional subjects because traditional subjects were excluding too many children. A lot of children were disaffected and were dropping out of traditional subjects. A number of us saw that you needed to invent new areas of knowledge to include more children. Some of those areas were subjects that I started: community studies, urban studies, environ-mental studies, parents’ studies and so on. And I got very interested in that because the children got very engaged. All the children got very engaged. So I started to try to develop examinations in it, and was told this was not a proper subject. Since it was a subject which seemed to educate everybody and that was not a proper subject, and proper subjects were things that did not educate everybody, I became interested in the question of ‘what is a proper subject?’ So I got interested in the history of where subjects came from and why subjects that seemed to engage a lot of children were thought to be not proper subjects and that led me to do that one year study in where environmental studies came from, and that let me into curriculum studies.

Am I still interested in curriculum studies? Yes, I am, but I am less optimistic about the inclusive possibilities at this moment in time. A lot of the forces in the world mean that the public sector is clearly threatened. And what is really threatened is including everybody in education. I am not sure any more if we can solve the problem of public service for all children through the curriculum. It has to be a broader project to regain inclusiveness. There has to be a war to regain inclusiveness. When the powers want children included, it is a curriculum solution. When they don’t want the children included, it is more than a curriculum solution. That means the start of a new structure in education. In a way I have drawn my focus from curriculum into wider issues on how schooling is delivered and how teachers operate.

RAGNA: In an article you speak about the importance of the teachers. You maintain that the teachers have been neglected in the educational process. The teachers’ opinions have not been heard. Norwegian teachers will love you for this! They have got a school reform without having asked for it, and in the core curriculum they are told how to behave, how to feel, and which national canon to use. They are also told how to evaluate the knowledge, how to document it etc.

IVOR: I think the way you describe the Norwegian situation is very much how I see it. I think teachers are being pushed away from the power to define education and schooling and curriculum which is in a way part what I was saying earlier, and I am agreeing with your diagnosis. I think what is going on with the core curriculum in Norway is a search for symbolic control by the bureaucracies in Norwegian education. They want to be seen to control, and that means that the teachers should not be seen to control education, but they face the paradox that still - whatever you do - the teacher delivers education or does not deliver education and the only way

A CONVERSATION WITH RAGNA ADLANDSVIK

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that defining the curriculum can affect that, is to decide to co-operate or decide not to co-operate because they feel disenfranchised. So the powers that define the curri-culum in Norway face a central paradox at the moment that I don’t think they will be able to solve, which is: The more they push the symbolic control, and the more they push the teacher out of control, the less actual success there will be in delivering education, because teachers will feel demoralized, disenfranchised, disempowered and generally dismayed. That is the paradox that bureaucracies always face when they push for too much control. Too much control equals less good education. And particularly - to go back to my point - less good inclusive education.

RAGNA: Education and politics are closely connected, aren’t they? In all questions of education there is always an element of power involved. Important questions will always be: whose knowledge, knowledge for whom, and for what purpose... Are these questions important for you?

IVOR: Yes, they are very important, but particularly the disenfranchised groups in society, those who know least about the way power manipulates knowledge, and it has always been my intention to act as a public intellectual. And part of that task is to stand on behalf of those who do not speak, in favour of them, and to try and develop cognitive maps of power for those groups, so it is a difficult task to represent groups who in some ways don’t know how it operates and in some ways get a worse deal. You have to decide early in life whose side you’re on. And given my own history, it has always remained obvious to me that I would remain on the side of the group I came from. And I have never thought there would have been another way to live my life in terms of my original loyalties. That doesn’t mean that I am bigoted about more privileged groups - I am happy to interact with other groups, but my questions always are when these new initiatives come in: How will they work with the groups of people who are my people, my tribe? What does it mean for my tribe? I guess I love the people I came from. I have never met better people. So, I should speak for them.

RAGNA: I think they are very much the same people I came from. I was the first person in my family who got an academic education.

IVOR: Do you see it in the same way in terms of loyalties?

RAGNA: Yes, I really do. But not everybody does.

IVOR: What happens to the others?

RAGNA: I don’t know. They seem to have forgotten their background.

IVOR: Was that ever a possibility to you?

RAGNA: No, never. It would never be a possibility to forget my background I think about my grandmothers every day.

IVOR: Yeah me too.

RAGNA: Every day, every day - these strong grandmothers living close to the ocean.

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IVOR: Do you speak to them?

RAGNA: Yes, I speak to them.

IVOR: Yes, I speak to mine.

RAGNA: You do?

IVOR: All the time. In any big decision, I speak to them. I speak to my grand-parents and my parents and some of my uncles and aunties if it is a big decision. I say: what would you do, uncle George, auntie Ada? Yes, I do! They were all socialists. They were very good people, never seen better.

RAGNA: And now I turn to something else. ‘Education is a normative enterprise,’ Elliot W. Eisner says. Do you agree?

IVOR: Yes, in a way. But that is the end of a political process. To render education normative is a great achievement of power. In fact of course education is socially constructed and highly socially contested and highly socially manipulated. But to present it as normative is a substantial achievement of power of course. Since sub-ordinate groups seem to think this is how it should be. But it is not as it should be. It is not given either. It is simply made that way for social and political purposes. So - Elliot is right, but he is also wrong (laughing).

RAGNA: That was an interesting answer. I think I agree with you.

IVOR: Don’t tell Elliot! (laughing even more)

RAGNA: According to what I have read you have had a research project on computer use in schools. In which way will the computer revolution change schools?

IVOR: That is a very difficult one. I...when I got to Canada I have to say I am not very good technologically. I have always been instinctively

RAGNA: (interrupting) Then there are two of us!

IVOR: Yes, we were neither very good, there may be something in that... When I got to Canada, I was given a million dollars to study the introduction of

computers in the schools. It was very intriguing for somebody who was techno-logically illiterate to do that. So I built a team of researchers around me. All of them were very good on the computer. But I, the director of the project, was not. And it was very interesting, the sort of questions that I started to come up with... which... in a way you are socialized into computer use. So you see what I call a cultural inevitability. Computers are everywhere. Computers must be used. Computers are obviously central in the school. I began to ask questions like this: Is there any evidence that computers help with learning? Is it obvious that we should have computers in school - even though they are very important parts of society?

But so is the refrigerator, and the car, and the television. We don’t argue that they should go into the classroom. So why computers? It is not more obvious. So I went to ask some leading member of the ministry: Why do you think computers would help with learning? And he gave me a very interesting answer: Oh well,

A CONVERSATION WITH RAGNA ADLANDSVIK

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with computers “you can talk to each other.” And I thought... There was a long silence before somebody said: “We already do that.”

This seems to me the most pathetic answer, and it was an answer from somebody who just had no idea somehow to actually argue for computers because in fact there is very little evidence that computers specifically help the learning process. They help resource it, indisputably, but to learn from computers as opposed to learn from teachers seems to me not self-evident. So then I asked the question: How many extra teachers could you buy for the computers that are put in every classroom? And of course the answer was that you could have three teachers for every one you have got at the moment. My own suspicion is that might be a much better way to go, since teachers are traditionally quite useful for learning. Computers have no tried record. So instinctively I am uncertain as to how central computers should be in the learning process. I think they have to be around in schools. They are vitally important in schools. They are not in my view central agents for learning and teaching. They might be important tools.

RAGNA: That is really interesting. They are important for giving information.

IVOR: They are tools. No more, no less.

RAGNA: What kind of social consequences do you think computers can have?

IVOR: Well, they could go either way, I think. I mean the optimistic view is that they will democratize information. The less optimistic view is that they will stratify information. Privileged groups will have that information and less privileged groups won’t, which is already the case. Most poor families do not have computers, most rich families do.

Bill Gates has a great deal of control over what goes into computers. The poor have no control. So already it is very stratified. My nightmare scenario is that these small industrial groups will control the software ideologically, and control what gets on to the net and that is an absolute disaster for learning if that happens. I am not sure at the moment, but I am sure that the computer should not be the central agency for learning and teaching. It should be a tool and a resource. No more, no less.

RAGNA: And now I turn to something else, to your work on story - ‘the turn to narrative’. Is man a story - telling animal?

IVOR: I think human beings are extremely central story - tellers. They story their lives, every minute of the day. When you say you talk to your grandmother, you are talking with your grandmother and grandfather about the story of your life, of how to live your life. We are compulsive storytellers; we do it all the time.

RAGNA: (interrupting) My grandmother was an extremely good story-teller. I have never met her. She died a long time before I was born, but she was a great story-teller. She told the story of her life to my oldest sister, who is 23 years older than me, and Agnes, that is her name, listened to the grandmother, wrote it down - what she was told - when she grew older, and 40–50 years later Agnes published it as a book, as a novel, a true, documentary novel, about our grandmother’s life.

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IVOR: Did you have lots of brothers and sisters?

RAGNA: Yes, there were nine of us.

IVOR: Is that oldest sister still alive?

RAGNA: Yes, she is, and she is still a great story-teller.

IVOR: I think you put your finger on something that is very important, and that we have not spoken of.

I came from a family that could not read and write, traditionally. Neither of my grandparents could, and my father had a lot of trouble with that. But my grandfather was a fantastic storyteller. He could make it all live. Not only a story-teller, but a compelling joke-teller. The stories were often humorous, but often important too. And I went back to my village two years ago, and I was sitting in the pub, talking to a really old man, and he said: “You’re Jim Goodson’s son, aren’t you?” And I said: “No, I am Fred Goodson’s son.” And he said: “But did you ever know your grand-father, Jimmy Goodson?” (James). I said: “No, I didn’t.” “He was a fantastic story - teller!”

This was a man who could not read or write, who had thirteen children, who never had a permanent job, and yet he told stories that everybody in the village spoke about. He was the village story-teller, and he could not write.

Now, what is interesting for me is always when you move from the story, the oral - to the written, what you lose. Because in a way, that is what my family has lost. And I was now the keeper of the saga, the saga-teller, the story-teller. Always keep that pedagogic jaw of the story, even when you write. So I most like to talk, and most like to tell stories in my own research. I least like, actually, to write. At the moment I do write a lot, but I least trust that. What I do trust, is the word, the delivered - what we are doing now, talking to each other. Eye contact, word - that is what I love.

RAGNA: For some years now we have seen the turn of narrative in educational research and in school E.g. in the subject Norwegian the story has become central. The pupils should learn to tell stories, and to listen to the teacher’s stories. So it is not only in research - There is a turn to narrative also in school. How do you explain that in our time, just now. Why this turn to narrative? What is it about our time?

IVOR: That is a very good question. Well, part of it I think is explained by what we have been saying earlier. The computer, and the written word, and we must always remember that computers are entirely targets of the written word, are beginning to demolish our saga-telling, the story-telling side of the animal. We realize, as story telling animals, that part of our nature is being attacked. In fact it is often the most important part of our nature, in teaching, or in the general transmission of community memory, stories are what carry them. And remember what you said about your grand-mother: You could not have known of your grandmother were it not for the stories. But also you wouldn’t know if it weren’t written down. So it is not... The real question is: That’s why the interest in the story. But the more interesting question in a way is: Once you start to write down the story, you put it into the computer program.

A CONVERSATION WITH RAGNA ADLANDSVIK

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How much of it will you lose in the process? So, and specifically with regards to the teacher stories and stories about education: Is it really an attempt to colonize people’s story or history? And break it away from the context where it stands and... So, I am ambivalent about stories. As we both said, we are both from storytelling families. We love the story. But the way stories are used and colonized by people whom I might not trust so much, and divorced from the histories of their commu-nities, divorced from history and teachers, divorced from history and classrooms, then I am wanting to, as you know, argue that it should be the life story, but also the life history, the community story, but also the community history. And if it is only stories without histories, I think it is not a very helpful instrument. And a lot of the stuff in education is stories without history, and that is not something I would put my name to for support.

RAGNA: That is what I find in one of the articles you have written - you quote somebody who characterizes it like this: ‘The song of the individual teacher is part of a larger song’. It is wonderfully expr...

IVOR: It is indeed. It is wonderful.

RAGNA: Poetic! The song of the individual teacher is part of a larger song...

IVOR: Yes. But a lot of those songs get disconnected from the larger song. And that disconnection is part of the way power works. It divides the song from the wider song, story from the wider history, and stories of that sort work for power, not against power. It is deeply manipulating.

RAGNA: And that is now clear to me, how important it is for me to explain that this is your opinion. I don’t think everybody here has got that point in your research.

IVOR: No, you are right to say that again in a Norwegian audience. Because that is what I am saying. You are right: People don’t sometimes hear me saying that.

RAGNA: I have just discussed that with some colleagues. There was this question - the use of narrative. What can you really learn from the story? There was a bit of scepticism. A colleague - she was not actually criticising - wondered if it was really democratic, this storytelling. Isn’t it a bit authoritarian, she wondered then I explained to her what we have been talking about now, and she said: ‘Oh, is that what he means?’

IVOR: Yes, the story could be a very good device for reconnecting us with our own social history. If it is just a free floating story, colonized by an academic ...then it is of little use. But if it is a story grounded in a social memory, of communities, about our people, about our tribes, then it is part of the project you and I talked about earlier: Recovering our own memory, of keeping a alive our loyalties, of inscribing our own histories on this earth - then it is a very democratic matter. But that is story plus history, that is not free floating stories, that is not just narrative.

RAGNA: You have pointed on the danger if anecdote replaces cultural analysis.

IVOR: Yes.

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RAGNA: And I think you have made that very clear.

IVOR: Well, it sounds I have not made it clear enough!

RAGNA: A Norwegian professor, Gunn Imsen, characterizes your approach as extremely post-modern - ‘small stories without the larger one, - and at the same time she seems to hold the opinion that this methodology is about to become old-fashioned. Could you comment on Gunn Imsen’s critique?

IVOR: Well, first of all she has got a contradiction there, hasn’t she? She is accusing me of being post-modern, but also out of date. But actually I like her work very much and I like her approach, and in general I like her genre. She is a very eloquent commentator on education. So to have a dialogue with her, even at the distance, is useful. So I take any comment from her seriously, which is not something I would say about anybody. But I do take her comment seriously, and I think there is a question whether the message about stories has got through, that I am really talking about a new fusion between stories and history. My hope is that the message gets through that this is about story plus history. And that that comes out of a long tradition of life history work that was first set up in Chicago in the 1920s, 1930’s, and I have written a lot about that period. And what I am trying to say is that we need to re-invent and re-position and re-habilitate the life history tradition according to the current post-modern conditions in which we live. And I think that is a wholly new kind of project that needs to be worked through. That needs a great deal of time to find its way into educational discourse and social discourse, but I think it is extremely important, given what we talked about of why story telling is important, and life needs to be connected with social memory, and how that speaks to groups, parti-cularly those that are disenfranchised, and literally dismissed. I am convinced that is a central social and intellectual project of great importance, and I am certain that there is a great deal of thought in it. And I think that is a way I want to go on living my own intellectual project.

RAGNA: I would like to ask you a question about educational research and the writing process. How do you work? How important is the rhetorical dimension in educational research?

IVOR: What do you mean by rhetorical dimension?

RAGNA: Language.

IVOR: As to the mechanics of writing I write always with a pen and a pencil and paper. So I don’t use a computer. I can type, and I typed in my past, but I write always with the tactile thing in my hand, just to set up my mind, and often I scribble notes. And I write most days. And I write intensively for periods of time. I just get into a writing phase, and sometimes I write for hours and hours and hours. And I often process a lot of it before I begin to write. Sometimes my wife can laugh at me, but I can wake up in the morning with a whole kind of branched program of an article sitting there, and all I have to do, is write it down, so to speak. I have always been like that since I was a child. I like, I like, to write. I find it hard, but I like to write... Language is something I love, I love words, and I love books, love books

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with a passion - as you do - I know. So language, and the manipulation of language, the display of language, has always been a joy, and intense joy to me, and I think that goes back to a family that was actually thought to be educationally disadvantaged and educationally incapable, but who could use language with the most fantastic facility. I teach lot of black students in the university where I am teaching in the States, in America, and they are thought by some fools to be educationally sub-normal. But their use of language can be so eloquent! So there is an odd disjunction there, between their oral capacity and the capacity to write it down. So the love of language is very much a part of me, of my life. It is mostly all language I love. But of course I like that sort of medieval role of the ‘scribe’, who writes down things. I think it is in a way what you described your sister was doing. It is very much what I see myself doing. Every community, but particularly disadvantaged communities need a ‘scribe’, somebody to write down the social memory and carry it on. The problem of the oral story telling communities, as you can see it in regions with Indians, the whole thing can be lost. And I never want that to happen to my own tribe. I want my tribe’s history to be written down, and I want the flame carried on, the memory kept alive. And I think in a very small way, and I mean very small, that is what I do. So language is important.

RAGNA: And what about poetic language? Should there be a place for that in educational research?

IVOR: Yes. Oh! Above all, in educational research there should be a place.

RAGNA: (interrupting) Oh, I like to hear that!

IVOR: Above all. I think in educational research we create very arid, scientistic, uninteresting discourses. And that is why I like Eisner. I like Eisner’s work and Van Manen’s work. Bring back the poetic, the joy, which should be crucially part of education above all. It should be audacious, exciting, lively, vivid, vital, and all those things will make it emancipating. And above all in education. We get it the opposite way.

RAGNA: This is music in my ears.

And the game of writing should be music in the ears of those who hear it.

RAGNA: That is education.

IVOR: That is education.

RAGNA: When you are an educator or a pedagogue, you want to influence people, you want them to hear, so you must have a tool for that, and that is in the word.

IVOR: Yes, in the poetry of the word. Yes, I think there is an aesthetic..., an art. I see it all as art work. In fact, I tend to see teaching more as an art work than a science. And there are two ways we can see this enterprise:

One is: This is a scientific enterprise. Education is a discipline, a scientific dis-cipline. We teach people that discipline.

Another way to see this is that you are in the business of poetics, of art, drama. We try to lead people into an art, which is pedagogy, which is teaching. I take the

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latter view. We are mainly in the art business. We are teaching people to sing, to really engage with an audience in a way that artists do. This is art. Not a science. I believe that.

RAGNA: I believe that too. I think, like Elliot Eisner and Max Van Manen, that we need texts with the ability to move us. We need to be moved, to be touched.

IVOR: Yes, yes. And what Van Manen calls ‘thoughtfulness’ needs to be there, the aesthetics and the connoisseurship - all that has to be there. But that is all positing it as an art form. These different writers, and I hope I am part of that, speak to the art forms.

RAGNA: And all kinds of art are dialogic in a way. Art invites us to answer. It doesn’t have the whole truth. Art asks questions, and is waiting for an answer.

IVOR: I think you are mentioning two of the criteria of good education. One is: it invites us, namely it is inclusive, not exclusive.

But the other side of it is that knowledge and education should be tentative, because to be inclusive, you have to be tentative. If you already have the answer, as a pedagogue, or teacher, or writer, if you have the final solution, that is exclusive. Then you are the exclusive expert. I would want to be the inclusive, slightly tentative pedagogue. Tentativeness is the way I see knowledge. Knowledge is conditional, contextual. It works differently for you, as it does for me, in different situations. So it is a negotiated product, a tentative product, it is a very fragile, but loving product. It is not a scientific box. It is something that moves around, it is tentative, it is engaged, but in a fragile way, but can move mountains if it is engaged. And that is how I see knowledge: inclusive and tentative, not exclusive and final.

RAGNA: And that is a place where art and education meet. They ask questions, but they don’t have the answer, that is for the other to find out.

IVOR: Always for the other to find out. Everybody has a different kind of answer. If you could find the right question, you are more than halfway done. The answer is something that is negotiated. In the end the learner has to find... That is always difficult to understand, because it sounds like educational licence, which means that the learner always knows best. I am not saying that at all. And I am saying that there is a massive role of the pedagogue to influence, to question and to set up of the process. But at the end of the day it is always a personal thing, it is a personal decision whether you learn or not. You have the final arbitration of whether you choose to engage to learn, or you choose to switch off. And I am saying that exclusive, final products, sort of lecturing, more than anything switches off the learner. So if teachers think they have the absolute compete final answer, there is no grade to switch off. And there is no grade to switch off in the conversation between you and I, for me to sit here and tell you all the answers and you to listen. You would be out of the room in no time. But if we have a conversation, and an equal one, and if it is dialogic, then we are both engaged, we are both contributive.

RAGNA: And what we have been talking about now: language and the use of stories, is very close to the phenomenological perspective, which we find in Max van Manen’s work. How close are you to that perspective?

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IVOR: I am very sympathetic to it. In that sense: close and supportive. I think there is another dimension in it which is - the one we talked about - which is really connecting it, in a very systematic and grounded way, to the history of the community, to the memory of the community. And that moves a little sort of beyond. It seems to me they are all parts of the same artistic approach, so I think we are all in the same enterprise. Just, I would go for a different mix, I would add in history in it. But, generally - the answer is: close.

IVOR: Interesting.

RAGNA: Yes, that is interesting.

We often climb into our little boxes and defend...

RAGNA: (interrupts) And then there has to come a little amateur from Norway...

IVOR: (laughing, loud and long) Not so amateur, I think.

RAGNA: Yes.

IVOR: Very professional I think.

RAGNA: No, an amateur. But now I turn to the question of your relation to Norway. Now, Ivor: You are an international capacity. They ask for you in New York, Hong Kong, Malaysia...How could you possibly find anything of interest of in an outpost like ours, where ‘there are flowers, but no soil’?

IVOR: (laughing)

RAGNA: So, apart from the midnight sun - do you find any special qualities in the Norwegian society, and perhaps in the research community here, and in school? What on earth brings you to Norway?

IVOR: Lots of things, but mostly the enduring values in civic life and public places which are part of Norwegian everyday life. So I come to Norway to be revived in my belief in community, in inclusiveness, in egalitarian politics, engaged community cultures. All the things that are still part of Norwegian life. Very similar to my own community that I grew up in England. The same values. And so I come here to engage, to revive my belief in human conditions and human possibilities. I find this in Scandinavia generally, but mostly in Norway. So I come, selfishly really, to be revived in some of my root beliefs about human life. It has to be a live community, it has to be about treating all people equally, and it has to be above all about how having a long social memory. I think there is a strong connection actually, without being a romantic, between Norwegian groups and the group I came from. I think that obviously goes back to the war, and to many other things. We have a very similar sense of humour, sense of engagement, sense of... we have very strong habits. We are strong in a historical sense. We fight against oppression, as nations. We have done, traditionally. Bergen has been bombed, so has Trondheim, South Wales, and so have some of the cities in England. We always fight against tyrannical forces. And I am being a bit romantic, but I think there is a strong connection between Norway and England. There are few places where you can tease people, like you can in England,

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but Norway is one place. And teasing is part of breaking down social hierarchies and breaking down pompousness.

RAGNA: Yes!

IVOR: And I believe that you should always do that: break down social hierarchies and pompousness, and Norway is a good place to do that. (laughing, long).

RAGNA: Oh, that is nice to hear. That brings me to another question: You have written, or said - I have in any case written it down - I think you said it last time you were here: ‘I try to create egalitarian moments as often as I can in my life’. You try that, Ivor, and I can assure you that you have succeeded in this project: ‘to create egalitarian moments as often as I can in my life.’ It is wonderfully said. But that you really do it, that is what makes us ask you to come back, and you will always be welcome here. And we feel that you are our neighbour, living next door, you are just one of us. Professionally you are not, you are far above us, but you are so egalitarian in your way of behaving and thinking. And that is a marvellous thing to experience.

IVOR: I don’t think I am deliberate in this, I have always been like that, my community never did.

RAGNA: And you have never left your community?

IVOR: No.

RAGNA: You are still part of it?

IVOR: Yes, I am.

RAGNA: That is what really impresses me.

IVOR: I think that is why I want to come back to England from America. It is about returning to your own tribe again, without too much pomposity, I suppose. I mean none of us are very pompous when we see it in relation to what we have been talking about. I can be pompous, but I try not to be, and that is important. It is not so much: Are you good? It is: Do you try to be good? And what is your conception of good? My conception of good is: Always treat everybody as equal as you can. People are created equal. And I believe that. It is just a base belief. It is an obvious truth that that everybody is the same inside. So treat people the same way. If you do that, it has a small effect against a stratified world.

RAGNA: In an article on the use of narrative, you (and Rob Walker) ask: Are the researchers we are, the people we are?

IVOR: Yes. I think above all it is the other way round: The people we are, is the researchers we are, the teachers we are. And I am always loaded to the people... It is relationships with people and the way other people behave which is always my clue as to what kind of social interaction or what kind of business I can do with others. I am not very interested, ever, in what formal positions people have. I think you already know that. I couldn’t care whether anybody...

RAGNA: (interrupts) Otherwise I wouldn’t use my time talking to you!

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IVOR: (with a noisy laughter) Oh my god!

RAGNA: I hate snobs!

IVOR: Yes.

RAGNA: You find them everywhere.

IVOR: Yes.

RAGNA: And those who know least, they often.

IVOR: Yes. And often the ones who know least are in the most important positions.

RAGNA: Yes.

IVOR: It is a kind of spiral hierarchy. If somebody views other people in terms of what they are, what kind of values they represent, and if they deal with other people in a non-egalitarian way, an authoritarian way, then I - in that sense I am exclusive. I do select, because life is too busy, too short, to waste time on authoritarian types of people that hold onto titles... I don’t mind if somebody has a high title if they are human beings, but I find it somewhat dysfunctional. Yes, I think the people, the person you are, is what matters to me, not the title you hold or the position you occupy... It is the person behind I continuously see in you. That is how we remain human, I think.

RAGNA: ‘I have a dream,’ Martin Luther King said. What is your dream or vision for the future? And now I speak professionally.

IVOR: I suppose my professional dream is inseparable to my personal dream.

RAGNA: That makes sense.

IVOR: I mean it is the old dream, of a world where people are more included, where people are treated equally for what they are, for what they represent. And where, you know, it is a cliché, but - where human love and affection dominates over human hate and disaffection. That may sound romantic, but sometimes you see moments when that vision is realized, for example, that is what just happened in Northern Ireland. It quite simply is a victory of compassion and forgiveness over bigotry and hate. Moments like that happen rarely in life, but they happen. Every-body says that in the world there will always be bigotry and war. But you have to fight against it. Often love and forgiveness breaks out. Well, my vision is that it would break out more, and it will break out more if we treat everybody in an equal way. So, we are likely to be in more harmony and happiness if we treat everybody equally and we try to help those that are having more difficulties rather than giving more to those who already have abundance. That for me is a long way to go. I am more interested in giving more to those who have least. And that is a way for building a more compassionate, equal, loving, harmonious community. So my vision is the same as it always was, it is the vision of the happy community where I came from.

RAGNA: And what you have said now is very much the same as old Comenius said: A world where people can live together, with different backgrounds. Bring people together, and let them make a better world together.

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IVOR: That is important when we see distraction, disaffection and global pollution.

RAGNA: And then we have these tendencies that we were talking about in the seminar with Lars Lovie, this individualistic, and... Oh! So we have to fight a lot.

IVOR: Yes. I think one of the messages you find in these paradoxes is: You don’t get a world of love and equality except by fighting.

RAGNA: Yes!?

IVOR: It doesn’t have to be military power. To get peace, you don’t always have to behave obediently. You have to contest the world to create harmonious moments. And you must be politically engaged to create egalitarian, harmonious moments. That is one of the paradoxes, and then my question is: How hard do we need to fight? And that is the problem Ghandi had, and all the peaceful protests had: you really have to contest reality. But at the moment we can contest a lot of things without it being a military... but we do have to contest. We have to fight hard for the harmo-nious, compassionate society. And that is somewhat paradoxical, but to me it is still perfectly, easily, coexistent.

Yes, you fight hard for a harmonious world, and you should. You should do it with every breath in your body as long as you live.

RAGNA: And teachers and educators should do that more than anybody. Now, are there any questions you would like me to ask, and that haven’t been asked?

IVOR: No, I think you have covered the whole text very well, as I expected you to.

RAGNA: Have I?

IVOR: Yes, you have.

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CHAPTER 2

TALKING LIVES: A CONVERSATION ABOUT LIFE HISTORY

Pat Sikes - Using the Content of a Conversation between Ivor Goodson and Barry Troyna

In the Spring of 1994, Ivor Goodson invited Barry Troyna to London, Ontario to contribute to a study entitled ‘Racial/Ethno cultural Minority Teachers’ Lives’, focusing on the career experiences of ethnic minority teachers in Canada and funded by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council which I was directing. As part of this contribution Barry agreed to conduct some life history interviews and scrutinise some of the material already collected by the research team, of which Ivor was co-director. Throughout the last 20 or so years Ivor has been a leading advocate for the use of life history methods to study aspects of education and, particularly, teachers’ lives and careers. Not only has he done a considerable amount of such work himself but he has also been very encouraging and supportive of other people using biographical approaches (e.g. Goodson, 1988; Goodson, 1992). Barry Troyna, on the other hand, is best known for his work dealing with aspects of racism and education (e.g. Troyna, 1993), although he too has used life history and is sympathetically disposed to it as a research method and as a strategy for personal and professional development (Sikes & Troyna, 1991).

Ivor asked Barry to Canada largely because Barry had recently given a paper at the bi-annual ISATT conference in Gothenburg (1993) in which he criticised the way in which, in his view, certain sociologists, myself included, had ‘de-racialised’ what he termed the everyday world of teachers. By this he meant that writers had ignored or underplayed the significance of racism in the way they had interpreted and presented sociological understandings of teachers’ career experiences and the teaching profession. The paper also questioned the efficacy of the challenge to de-racialised studies posed by research which, like Ivor’s present project, has con-centrated exclusively on ethnic minority teachers. Such studies, Barry argues in the revised, published version of the paper, tend to ‘articulate with the discourse of multiculturalism and, as a consequence (involve) implicit legitimation of ethnocentric conceptions of ‘the norm’’ (Troyna, 1994a, p. 325). In proposing this he is following the African-American sociologist, Joyce Ladner who, 20 years ago, wrote that, studies which have as their focal point the alleged deviant attitudes and behaviours of Blacks are grounded within racist assumptions and principles that only render Blacks open to further exploitation. The challenge to social scientists for a redefinition of the basic problem has been raised in terms of the ‘colonial analogy’. It has been argued that the relationship between the researcher and his subjects, by definition, resembles

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that of the oppressor and the oppressed, because it is the oppressor who defines the problem, the nature of the research, and, to some extent, the quality of the interaction between him and his subjects. This inability to understand and research the funda-mental problem, neo-colonialism, prevents most social researchers from being able accurately to observe and analyse Black life and culture and the impact racism and oppression have upon Blacks. Their inability to understand the nature and effects of neo-colonialism in the same manner as Black people is rooted in the inherent bias of the social sciences’ (Ladner, 1971, p. vii).

It was Ivor’s contention that his project was set up in such a way as to, as far as possible, minimise neo-colonialist problems of power and that, rather, his approach was more likely to result in some form of helpful collaboration with the ethnic minority teachers who were involved. He wanted Barry to experience this for himself and also to act as a ‘critical friend’ in assessing the extent to which the methodology was achieving what was claimed. For his part, Barry’s position is that all research is potentially exploitative and that, in any event, claims for the ‘empowering’ or emanci-patory properties of any research, within whatever paradigm and regardless of the methods used, are at best grandiose and naive, at worst, disingenuous and deceitful (Troyna, 1994b).

After spending some time on the project and conducting a couple of life history interviews with ethnic minority teachers in London, Ontario, Barry held an ‘interview conversation’ with Ivor. Their discussion focused on fundamental dilemmas which, in these post-modern days, are constantly faced by researchers concerned with eliciting accounts of lived experience; that is, is it possible to do research with ‘vulnerable’ often disenfranchised groups (e.g. Black people, women, children, teachers, lesbians, gays) without being guilty of ‘othering’ or of affirming, even exacerbating differential power relations?

The discussion was recorded and a transcript made. Partly because I am an enthu-siastic supporter of life history methodology, partly also because of my familiarity with both Ivor’s and Barry’s writing, I was asked to collaborate in the construction of a contextual commentary and it is this which is the substance of this paper. Before moving on to a critical encounter with the transcript it is worth considering why those who use life history see it as being a uniquely valuable and, indeed, privileged method for studying teachers’ lives.

In 1981, in what has since become a much cited article, Ivor wrote ‘in under-standing something so intensely personal as teaching it is critical we know about the person the teacher is’ (1981, p. 69). While this might now sound a common place, self-evident statement of the obvious, it sounded much more radical then (although there are, of course, still those will have no truck with such allegedly soft, ‘un-scientific’, subjective thinking). Life history provided and continues to provide a way of getting to know more about the person of the teacher.

In comparison with other research methods the chief values of the approach lie in its capacity to: a) explicitly recognise that lives are not hermetically compart-mentalised. What happens in one area of our lives affects other areas too. For example, an ethnic minority person’s various experiences of racism in society have both practical and psychic implications for their experiences and perceptions of being

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a teacher in that society; b) to acknowledge the crucial relationship between indivi-duals’ experiences and perceptions and historical and social circumstances; c) to provide evidence to show how individuals experience, create and make sense of the rules and roles of the social worlds they live in; and, d) to provide opportunities for personal and professional development.

Thus life history can help to locate lives within the historical and social contexts in which they are lived, providing, of course, that the researcher and/or the life-story teller are aware of the necessary information. Its potential to do this offers a strategy for making theoretical links between the self and society. As Goodson puts it, life history enables us to ‘gain insights into individuals’ coming to terms with impe-ratives in the social structure’ (1980, p. 74). In the present project it is the giving of ‘voice’ to the ‘marginalised’ and ‘vulnerable’ individual, and the collaborative process by which they come to an enhanced understanding of their life within the social structure, which are seen as the main purposes of the enterprise. The first part of Barry’s and Ivor’s conversation was concerned with the nature of this collaborative process and the part played in it by the researcher:

BARRY: We spoke a bit about the interview itself.... and you reckon that you choose to be fairly passive, fairly recessive. Two questions arising from that. Firstly, can you give me a justification for starters, and the second question is, is that the routine start? Are there any situations in which you would change that?

IVOR: Taking that in reverse order, I guess there would always be situations where I would change being a reflexive researcher (ha, ha). But in terms of being passive, that’s the question of my analysis of the stages that one goes through in an interview for life history; so whilst I would start passive, I would think one would get more and more active as the process went through. So we talked a bit last week about these three stages which are not discreet, but which I believe exist, which begin with a more passive attempt to elicit what I call the raw narration of the life story from the life story teller which of course isn’t raw but which is a script coming from them without much prompting. So, in that sense, the interview is passive in that first period where they’re eliciting that prime narration, the first narration, a kind of script to the life, but then there would be some more stages which I describe as collaboration and location where you would ask a series of questions about that first narration of the life story which seemed to locate it, challenge it and interrogate it and position it, sociologically and historically.

BARRY: So it would become progressively focused?

IVOR: Yeah, progressively focused and progressively more interactive I think to be honest with you. Progressively, I would prefer to say, collaborative.

BARRY: What happens if your respondent... didn’t want the interactive relationship that you request?

IVOR: You mean all you get is just their first telling of their life script? Well, all you’ve got is their first telling of the life script.

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BARRY: Does this undermine the whole enterprise for you?

IVOR: Not necessarily but I mean, obviously, you have to deal with that as it is which is something where you haven’t had any chance to seriously interact or question or locate as I call it, and so it would be of limited use and it would be particularly of limited use for me because I see the collaboration around that initial life story as a crucial piece of collaborative research and investigation and what works. That seems to me that the very important stage for me in trying to get some sort of collaborative ‘trade’ going with the life story teller other-wise, I mean, they end up with exactly the knowledge of their life that they first had and their understanding hasn’t been broadened in some sense as mine hasn’t either. So the collaboration around that first telling of the life story script is a crucial trading point for research, understanding, investigation, theory building, whatever that collaborative pact that we develop with the life story teller is.

Barry takes Ivor up on the implications of what he has said for the nature of the power relationship between the researcher and the life storyteller. Taken at first glance it seems as if Ivor is adopting some sort of superior role vis à vis the storyteller in that he can help them to understand their life. Such a position appears to be at odds with his contention that the project avoided or minimised ‘neo-colonialism’. Ivor’s response again put the emphasis on collaboration:

BARRY: Why would they want (their) understanding of their lives to be enhanced by you?

IVOR: I’m not saying it would be enhanced by me. I think it would be enhanced collaboratively: a simple distinction. Why would they want me to be part of their enhanced understanding, to rephrase you? Well, because I think it’s often useful for some people, sometimes, to have another person or another presence while they work through and, in fact, another position, if you will, somebody standing there in an alternative position involving them in a con-versation about their life. Some people would want that conversation, some wouldn’t, so I think the question of why would people want enhanced under-standing is obviously a key question. Some people do and some people don’t. My business has tended to be to try to help people broaden their understanding of themselves, but that’s just my purpose, but I would want to work with people who had that as a belief that they wanted to pursue, that they want to come to understand their life, their life history, better. I would imagine that I wouldn’t be working collaboratively with people who didn’t because, clearly, they wouldn’t collaborate, I wouldn’t want to. That would be fine, I have no problem with that.

Although Glesne & Peshkin reckon,

In most instances... the researcher maintains a dominant role that reflects his or her definition of the inquiry purposes. As long as the purposes are his or her own, the researcher sustains a power imbalance that may or may not get redressed. (1992, p. 82)

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My view, and Barry’s, is less hesitant on this matter. We share the contention that researchers remain in a super ordinate position at all stages of the research process (see Frankenberg, 1993, for instance). The degree and significance of the power imbalance varies and depends upon the relative social and structural positions of interviewer and interviewee (see Neal, 1995; Walford, 1994) and upon the theme of the research. Concern centres on what the researcher does with the information given by the informant, on the means by which the information is elicited, and what the informant is told about the research and what it will involve for them. With regard to this last point, Ivor explains why he does not initially go into detail about what collaboration involves:

BARRY: So at the initial stage of the life history enterprise, you would explain in detail what is required of these people? What their commitment should be? What your role is?

IVOR: Yeah, I don’t know whether I would is the truth... laying out in detail what the collaboration is about is actually jumping the gun. Because... many people might not want to go to stage two. So if you, and they have the right not to, so if you from the beginning define this as something which is about enhancing their understanding or working with them towards understanding, which is the way I prefer to put it, you’re kind of pre-judging immediately the kind of person that you are seeking and the kind of collaboration you are seeking. Obviously, there are as many positions on this as there are people. And I think it is perfectly legitimate to say, as some people have, actually, ‘look, I’ve told you my life story, that’s enough, I don’t want to know any more’, that doesn’t invalidate that particular rendition that you’ve got, it is a life story which you have not been able to collaborate around, but it is still a life story.

Ivor is emphasising that much hinges on the respondent’s willingness to become involved. He cannot do what he wants without their agreement to collaborate with him. Put this way there does appear to be some redressing of the way in which the relationship between researcher and researched is usually perceived. And of course, the nature of this relationship is critical.

Much has been written about relationships in research interviews. Feminist and black researchers have been particularly concerned to explore the dynamics between the two parties and to develop methods which are less hierarchical than those where only the researcher asks the questions (Hill Collins, 1989; Reinharz, 1992, for instance). In the case of this project, interviewer, interviewee relationships are clearly of significance because the interviewees are ‘vulnerable’ ethnic minority members and the interviewers are white and are associated with a high status insti-tution, a university. And yet, following this line of argument means eventually ending up being constrained by a simplistic, reductionist logic; namely that only women can interview women, only ethnic minority members can interview members of the same ethnic minority group, and so on. This demand for symmetry has the potential to deny other, arguably more important structural and individual differences between group members (Allen, 1994, for instance). It also seems to deny the researcher’s

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responsibility to be reflexive and actively to research, rather than make assumptions and take things for granted. Also, and, in my view, of paramount significance, is that it fails to acknowledge the importance of the personal relationship which develops between any two people. It is extremely difficult to conduct interviews with someone who, for whatever reason, you dislike, regardless of whether or not you share key characteristics. That Ivor also shares this view is reflected in his response to Barry’s question as to why his respondents should trust him, and what benefits they derive from the collaboration.

IVOR: I don’t think I can answer that theoretically. You see, I think the question about who collaborates with whom and why they do it is... a deeply personal one. Often to do with eye contact, body language, chemistry, back-ground, a million things which are quite impossible to legislate or predict so there is no answer in a vacuum to what you say. All that I can say is that some people at some times have trusted me, and I don’t quite know why. I can certainly list a number of things that the shadowy researcher, as you described me, might bring to this trade, this collaborative action, which would be a whole range of different kinds of thoughts and insights about life stories over time and about school histories and curriculum histories. There is a range of infor-mation that I would bring to the collaboration which might be different from the range of information that the life story teller would bring and would, I think, make for a nice fusion, a nice collaboration. As to why people might or might not trust the shadowy researcher, that is just inevitably a matter of personal negotiation around the issue of when you first start talking to somebody about whether they would like to do life story work with you.

Some researchers have written about the techniques they use to expedite the develop-ment of relationships which are likely to be productive in terms of the data they result in. Oakley’s (1981) paper on ‘reciprocity’ was highly influential in this context. Others, however, have questioned the ethics of such manipulation (e.g. Measor & Sikes, 1992). Barry asked Ivor if he would deliberately use any strategies of this kind.

IVOR: Yes, I think I would. I mean, one of the things that I deeply believe in as part of the collaborative conversation that follows the initial kind of un-mediated narration of the life story, is a lot of exchange around the life story, the researcher and the life story of the life story teller. So I would nearly always in my conversation, in that conversation, in the collaborative second stage, bring in quite a bit of information about my own biography. Now, whether I would, as I have done sometime, also give them a sort of potted written account, some-times I do that and sometimes I don’t but the judgement about that is a very personal one. Sometimes people... before they even tell you their life story, would like to hear a little bit about who you are and what you are doing and what your value position is. And sometimes I’ve said, ‘have a look at this, it is a potted biography’, or, ‘have a look at this, it’s something I’ve written’. So I would sometimes give them text or sometimes I would introduce it in that sort of conversational collaborative stage, either at the beginning before they tell their life story, or more likely, in more detail in that second collaborative period.

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And again, I mean, I don’t think I’d want to divide everyone of these into different stages, where you always start with narration and then you move to collaboration and location. I think sometimes you just get into a terrific conversation from day one. But often it works in the way I described.

What Ivor is emphasising here is the essentially personal and individualistic nature of the methodology. Just as some people don’t make very good life storytellers, so some are not likely to be very good as life historians. The role demands being able to get on easily with people, but more than this, it calls for the sort of person that people want to talk to. It is very difficult to specify the characteristics that are needed because so much comes down to what Ivor calls intensely ‘idiosyncratic personal dynamics’; but a genuine interest in people’s stories, the ability to listen beyond what is actually being said and to ask pertinent questions, and the willingness to share one’s own experiences, are all necessary. Life history is a methodology for nosy people who are intrigued by the minutiae of others’ lives. It’s for people who read novels like A Suitable Boy, War and Peace, and The Magic Mountain, rather than aficionados of detective and adventure tales.

Put this way life history is not a conventionally ‘scientific’ methodology, at least not according to positivist criteria. It cannot easily, if at all, be made ‘reliable’ because so much hinges on the particular relationship which develops between the two parties. Nor can ‘validity’ be assured because, once again, what is told and the way in which it is told, is, to some extent, dependent on that relationship. The concepts of ‘validity’ and ‘reliability’, so important in the canon of positivism, are not appropriate in assessing this methodology. This is not to say, however, that the method is without rigour, or that there are not techniques which can be used to situate life stories within their social context and, thereby, imbue them with wider meaning than they possess when left to stand alone. It is with respect to this that Ivor, like Bertaux (1981), makes the distinction between life story and life history.

IVOR: The crucial distinction to grasp for me, is the distinction between life story and life history. The life story as I understand it is the version of events that you render to me over time. Your partial, selective story. It is a story and we all have one. Often the story we tell ourselves. ... One of the most common questions in seminars is, how do you get people to tell their life story? My answer to that is, how do you stop them, they nearly all do. One of the reasons it sounds so rapid when you switch on the tape-recorder is that most of us have already got a script that we’ve rehearsed endlessly with ourselves. In other words, we are storying animals and we constantly story our lives and when someone asks us for a story (Ivor snaps his fingers) it’s there, we’ve got it.... The question now is what you get when you get that. That’s the story anyhow and there might be a different number of life stories and we would tell different stories at different times in our life. The life history would seek to position and locate that story by bringing in other data, other insights, other theories, other questions which have not been raised in the initial rendition of the story. So it would, you know, to use Denzin’s phrase, it’s not a phrase I like much, but it captures it a bit, triangulate. You would bring other sources and you

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would get other documents, other historical factors, maybe even other testi-monies which would position and question and you would collaborate around the original life story in the light of those life history documents. So you would move from story to life history by, in my case, that crucial intermediary colla-borative act which brings in other data and other questions to try and locate the quotes of the life story and make it, render it, life history.

Another issue related to the centrality of the personal relationship between interviewer and interviewee concerns how researchers learn to use the methodology. Barry raised this point:

BARRY: I have a problem... It is a problem with this whole issue of reflexivity... which is, how would you describe this process? You put a great deal of emphasis on one’s own personal resources, being intuitive, ‘duck and dive’ when necessary, the development of certain tactics which are appropriate here, but not there, and so on. How does this coalesce around the methodology; how can you package this as a methodology which others can learn from? It seems there’s a whole array of different and individualised tactics.

Ivor’s response is that it is indeed difficult to socialise young, inexperienced researchers and that, in direct reply to Barry’s question

IVOR: Rather than doing what I think implicitly most people want us to do which is, as you say, your phrase, ‘how do we package your methodology?’, I think that there are some methodologies which are frankly un-packageable because... personal dynamics are themselves un-packageable.

There are dangers attached to such an idiosyncratic approach. An inexperienced, or even an unlucky, experienced, researcher can find themselves out of their depth. In some respects the life history interview situation does resemble the approach used by Rogerian counsellors and interviewees do sometimes use it for therapeutic purposes. At other times, life stories just become painful. As Lynda Measor and I wrote elsewhere,

‘There are problems of the ‘intimate’ and ‘painful’ areas in life histories that may be full of purport and intellectual interest for the issue under discussion, but raise traumas for the individual. Self-reflection is a fashionable and useful tool, but there are things in perhaps every life that the individual prefers to forget, and emotionally it may be necessary for them to do so.... A life history does deal with intimate material, and carries a high ethical load as a result’ (1992, pp. 222–223).

Barry’s view was that the dangers are, perhaps, heightened in Ivor’s project because of the differential social and structural power possessed by the researcher and the ethnic minority teachers. He also raised the possibility that, by focusing on the teachers rather than endemic racism, the research might, in some way, actually exacerbate the problems ethnic minority teachers face. Ivor’s reply brought the dis-cussion on to research as ‘empowerment’, a notion that Barry has strong feelings about.

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IVOR: But what’s the logical conclusion for that if you are asking difficult questions of people? Not to ask them? Not to speak to them about it? What’s your alternative? Silence?

BARRY: Well, one of the arguments which goes on in race relations research is, the focus shouldn’t be on the black community, the focus should be on racism. How would you respond to that?

IVOR: No, I think it is a legitimate question, but you can see what I’m saying and it comes back to whether... we exacerbate questions by talking to people and questioning people about things, or whether we help create the flow of dialogue around perilous and problematic issues, and I think a lot of that cannot be prejudged. I think it depends on the way it’s done. I don’t inevitably always think that asking difficult questions of people, even if they are, as in some case, as is quite rightly the case here, in subordinate positions, that inevitably these invoke some form of colonising or genome or whatever you want to call it. It depends on the form of the collaboration, the form of the trust, to use your phrase, and the form of the trade... it would be wrong, I think, to say across the board.... if you ask difficult questions of people who are differentially located in the power structure (it) inevitably exacerbates their situation. I don’t think it does inevitably exacerbate. It might, on the other hand, it might actually help and enhance their understanding of their situation..... So it all depends on the nature of the conversation and the dialogue and the form it takes. It might exacerbate or it might enhance.

BARRY: I guess I’m dubious that it could ever enhance and I’m dubious because I don’t believe in the empowering properties of research. I think it’s a grandiose and disingenuous conception of social and educational research which has been perpetuated from, reproduced mainly for the benefit of, the social and educational researchers.

IVOR: I’ll buy that.... which is why we are now talking about the form of research which certainly has properties behind the - which is certainly attempted to engage in more everyday life kind of conversational forms of research... You may well be right that any form of interaction across such power divides inevitably exacerbates. I would be reluctant to accept that. I think that even if, if we for a moment could conceive of less grandiose forms of research, and I would hope that in some ways this might be one route to that, I would be reluctant to think that conversations across power divides could not enhance understanding because that would mean simply that groups can’t talk to each other in any meaningful ways.

BARRY: Understandings of what? Understandings that they are members of oppressed groups?

IVOR: Well no. Let’s push it a bit more. What about if, for example, let’s take teachers and let’s for a moment think of them as an oppressed group, which certainly some people would argue they are and certainly they have some properties of an oppressed group. Let’s for a minute imagine that the kind

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of conversations around life history, around studying the teacher’s life and work, led teachers to have much more vivid and cognitive maps of the groups of people that influence them, of the groups of people that oppressed them, and the groups of the sort of strategies that might work against those oppressive practices. And if those cognitive maps of resisting oppression or of under-standing how oppressions are administered came out of the conversation that we are talking about, I would think that might enhance teachers’ understanding of the world in which they live and work. I would think that would be a good thing.

BARRY: It’s a liberal humanist position to adopt isn’t it? They are all dressed up, to use Meatloaf ’s phrase, they are all dressed up with no place to go. OK. So now they know that the world is an oppressive place in which they live and there are certain things that have gone on in their life which have accentuated their vulnerability. What would you do about it?

IVOR: Mine might be a little humanist, yours sounds unduly determinist in the sense that.... to pursue the argument that when people have a better under-standing of how they might politically and actively work for a better world, is meaningless. Is to cut up almost any possibility in action. Is that what you are doing?

BARRY: No. What I’m saying is that the life history methodology, with it’s highly individualised focus, doesn’t actually prepare the ground very well for collective action.

Barry makes tough demands on researchers and research by implying that outcomes should lead to social change (Troyna, 1994c). Traditionally one of the chief values attributed to life history, its ‘supreme’ value in Herbert Blumer’s opinion, is its ability to take seriously ‘the subjective factor in social life’ (Blumer, 1979, p. 81). ‘Giving voice’ through life history to marginalised peoples is clearly not in itself going to result in structural changes but there are few methodologies which have this effect (but see Fay, 1987; Harvey, 1990). What life history does do is make accounts of experience accessible to others and raise the awareness of the life storytellers when these things would not have happened without the research.

And accounts of experience are important factors in the process of social change. Rosa Park’s story, for example, constitutes a form of life story which most of its hearers could historicise and contextualise and who knows how many people were politically mobilised by hearing it. It is, however, true that a focus on individuals can mean that the power of social constructions and imperatives to influence lives is neglected. It can isolate individuals by appearing to privilege their experiences, thus preventing them from joining with others in some form of collective action. And it can also lead to erroneous assumptions that either everyone else belonging to the same group shares the same experiences, or that the individuals concerned are completely idiosyncratic ‘one offs’.

Whilst maintaining that ‘one-on-one’ work is of value, Ivor does, however, have a strategy to minimise some of the effects of individualised life history. This involves

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groups of two or three teachers working collaboratively together on their life stories and life histories. Barry found this a more attractive proposition.

The corollary of the question, what of value do respondents get out of life history work is, what do researchers get from it? This question applies, of course, to all types of research, but it may have added poignancy here.

BARRY: The reality is that Professor Ivor Goodson will go to New Orleans and Kings College, London, and here, there and everywhere to talk about this research. That’s the reality. There is an inevitability about that that may be over determined. How would you respond to the claim, therefore, that, that to use perhaps an indelicate phrase of Patti Lather, you are simply involved in ‘rape research’?

IVOR: I think it’s, again, I don’t think you can give total admissions or definitive restrictive answers to what might or might not be there. It’s obviously quite conceivable that this could be presented as ‘rape research’ in a sense that, yes, I have these conversations and then I go off to other arenas and talk to different audiences, in different ways about these things. But it begs the question of what I do in these other audiences and other places. If I thought that I gave addresses which presented the people I’ve talked to in an unwitting and unwilling light, then yes, that would obviously be a prime case of rape ‘research’, but it begs the question very much, of what I talk about. As a matter of fact, I never talked about anyone’s life history in the places that you’ve just talked about. So I never talk about those personal histories in a personal way in those places. I do talk about the methodological and ethical issues that they raise and the possibility that this may be ‘rape research’, but then that’s something that I should talk about and it’s important to talk about in those hallowed halls of the academy. But, I mean, all I’m saying is that it begs the question of how one talks about this research in other places. One might talk about it in a way that does confirm the allegation of ‘rape research’, or one might talk about it in ways that raise issues which in some sense resonate with the concerns of the prior collaborative life history work. So it may or may not be exploitative.

BARRY: But the rhetoric still remains, doesn’t it, in so far as you talk in terms of the three stages of narration, collaboration, location and hope that with the subject you will achieve those goals. You can go through those stages and achieve it. That’s the ambition, that’s the aspiration and it may or may not happen. What will happen is that ultimately you have responsibility, the research team has the responsibility for selecting, filtering and representing that person’s life in the academy, either personally through being invited to talk in New Orleans, or through the written word of an article in the Journal of Education Policy or whatever. So there is no doubt whatsoever that you will benefit as a researcher from this activity. There is some doubt that the life history teller will benefit. That’s more dubious.

IVOR: Absolutely true.

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BARRY: OK, if you accept that, is it morally reprehensible to engage black people in this project, given your own hegemonic position as a white, male, Professor?

IVOR: For a white project on black people?

BARRY: Yeah, that’s right, I don’t want to develop a hierarchy of oppression... Well, maybe I would focus on black people because it is well documented that this has been, this relationship of the colonised is well documented in the literature.

IVOR: But what you are asking is a question that seems to me to move beyond blackness.

BARRY: Yeah.

IVOR: This is a question about researchers, privileged researchers in this case, dealing with groups at other levels of their hierarchy, normally subordinate positions. I don’t know. I don’t know how you resolve that... I’ve just done a summer school where I was doing life history work with principals and administrators who are, I think you’d admit, a less oppressed group than some of the groups of teachers we’ve been talking about. By researching upwards you turn some of these issues on their heads, but that isn’t the way out of the problem. I mean the issue is if you are researching or conversing with, or how-ever you want to present the relationship, oppressed groups, you are implicated in the differential power structures of society. But frankly I can’t see any way that you could suspend that. You can either try and deal with it and seek not to exacerbate it and to confront and to find strategies that resist it in your work as far as you can, but you are still, since you are located in a power structure, you are still implicated. And you are as well as them.

This part of the conversation touches on the issue of whose story is the research really about? The life story teller has their story that they tell, and others that they don’t tell, and the researcher has the story that they tell when writing up the research which, in itself, is a part of their wider life story. What happens when the storyteller’s story doesn’t fit in with that of the researcher? Ivor’s project focuses on ethnic minority teachers so he clearly has a story that he wants to tell in which experiences relating to ‘race’ and racism are expected to play a part. What happens if the teachers themselves do not recount such experiences?

BARRY: OK, so if from this project you had two or three appointments with life history tellers and the issue of ethnicity, racism did not emerge, would that not prove troublesome to you?

IVOR: I think it would not worry me at all if it didn’t emerge in the, what I call, early stages of narration of the script. It would worry me enormously if in the interactive collaboration and the discussion it wasn’t raised because I would expect to raise it... One of my questions in that next phase would be, ‘OK, you’ve told me your life story but I don’t have any sense of you

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as a black man and that is what I see in front of me, why is that?’ So yeah, I would pose it in that form, but the important point to grasp is, I would be posing that question in a very different way to the way we talked about using it yesterday. Where you go in and say, ‘OK, you’re a black man, tell me about it’. One way you’d obviously get that, the other way, you’ve got a longer run at the issue and I much prefer my strategy to yours.

BARRY: But the issue didn’t come up with Walter (one of the life storytellers in Ivor’s project)

IG: It didn’t with Walter yet... but that’s not over yet.

BARRY: But that’s 300 pages (of transcript)!

IVOR: Yes that’s 300 pages but what we’ve still got to do.... is go back and raise a lot of other issues about location..... Walter and I need a conversation about that before we push at some new questions.

For Kathleen Casey’s self-confessed ‘activist’ women teachers, ‘being a black teacher means ‘‘raising the race’’; accepting personal responsibility for one’s people, and, especially, for the education of all black children’ (1993, p. 152). Talking about their ‘race’ and their experiences of racism was part of the life story they chose to tell Kathleen. This was not the case for Walter and Ivor, or at least, the issue did not appear to have arisen. On one level, perhaps, life historians have to accept that people tell the story that they, for whatever reason, want to tell to the person who is listening. If this does not involve their ‘blackness’ then that has to be accepted as part of the methodology. They can be asked, and the reasons why they may not wish to talk about this may be illuminating, but it is up to them and then to the researcher’s interpretation which they may or may not agree with.

But it also depends, to some degree, on what questions are asked. In the present case, the pertinent question is, is it possible to talk about ‘race’ and racism without emphasising ‘otherness’? Barry asked this:

BARRY: How would you respond to the observation that what this project is doing is strengthening the sense of otherness? A tendency that characterises race relations research, where de-contextualising black people from the normal conceptualisation of the teacher identifying the others as odd, different or deviant while naturalising whites in that role. How would you respond to that?

IVOR: I think I would respond with a counter to you which is to say that by going out and pushing from the beginning to blackness and other issues, you’re doing that.

BARRY: I’m responding to a research agenda in a tactical way. The research agenda has been set by you and your colleagues and that research agenda differentiates black teachers from others.

IVOR: Yeah, but you see, in some ways you want it both ways there. Which is that you’re saying that you want us to get at this sense of otherness and that it hasn’t come out yet, and then you are turning around and telling me that

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I’m strengthening their sense of otherness. You can’t have it both ways. The truth is, I think, we’ve tried in ways that are not always successful, I would accept that, to try and deal with the question of otherness, which is undoubtedly there with any of them, whether that be a racial other or another, other we’ve tried to deal with that in ways that give a reasonable degree of voice to the beginning, to the person, to phrase that particular question as they will them-selves. Now that doesn’t get me off the hook of otherness but it allows the otherness to be dealt with by them, rather than from day one by you when you go straight in and say, “OK, tell me...” No, I don’t think either of those solves the problem of how we’ve researched otherness. They are just two different ways of going at it, I think. And I wouldn’t, I think, claim priority for this method but I think it’s at least a sustainable way of approaching a considerable problem in our society.

The problem does seem to be intractable. Prohibiting, even discouraging white people from doing research which focuses on black experiences is not a solution because even black researchers have to have research populations. Ferrarotti called for ‘socio-logy as participation’ in which, ‘knowledge does not have ‘the other’ as its object, instead it should have the inextricable and absolutely reciprocal interaction between the observer and the observed’ (1981, p. 20). Laudable as this is, it is unrealisable because it demands that ‘subjects’ be as committed to the research as its initiator. It also demands that they share a common understanding of the relevant discourses - of research and whatever specialist area the research concerns. Such demands are unlikely always to be met. Indeed, researchers who have built in respondent participation in their project have often been disappointed with the low level of interest expressed in anything other than being a respondent (e.g. Acker, et al, 1983; Kelly et al, 1994). Explicit recognition of the difficulties in and through processes of reflexivity seems to be the most propitious way of confronting this dilemma if we are not to be disenfranchised entirely from carrying out research on sensitive and controversial issues.

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