Cristiane Cerdera

Understanding ‘understanding’ in Exploratory Practice

Cristiane Cerdera holds a doctorate in Linguistics from the

Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro and teaches EFL in a

federal school in the same city. She has worked as an English

teacher in schools and universities for 20 years. Her main research

interests include Exploratory Practice, ESP and themes related to

Wittgenstein’s philosophy and Education.

Abstract

This work will present and discuss the notion of ‘understanding’ in Exploratory

Practice in the light of concepts of philosophy of language. Attention will be drawn to

the way the notion is used in EP articles and papers and the possible consequences to

foreign language pedagogy.

Paper

UNDERSTANDING ‘UNDERSTANDING’ IN EXPLORATORY PRACTICE: AN

ALTERNATIVE VIEW1

“We regard understanding as the essential thing, and signs as something inessential”

(Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Grammar)

ABSTRACT:

This research paper investigates the notion of understanding in the texts of

Exploratory Practice. According to Dick Allwright, Exploratory Practice is “an approach

to practitioner research that is devoted to understanding the quality of language

classroom life”. Practitioners regard understanding as the most relevant notion in the

theoretical rationale of Exploratory Practice. However, while reading the seminal

articles devoted to the topic, it has been noticed that, despite the attempts to shift

from a traditional view of understanding, Exploratory Practice does not elaborate an

alternative concept to ground theoretically this new pedagogical approach. This work

attempts to contribute to fill this gap, based on the assumption that there is

substantial affinity between the principles of Exploratory Practice and the philosophy

of Ludwig Wittgenstein.

11

Cristiane Pereira Cerdera. Anglo-Germanic Languages Department, Colégio Pedro II/RJ.

Keywords: Exploratory Practice, understanding, Wittgenstein

RESUMEN:

Esta investigación estudia el concepto de entendimiento en textos de Práctica

Exploratoria. De acuerdo con Dick Allwright, la práctica exploratoria es una modalidad

de investigación profesional que estudia la comprensión de la calidad de vida dentro

de la clase de lengua extranjera. Los profesionales consideran el entendimiento como

la idea central en el aparato teórico de la Práctica Exploratoria. Sin embargo, al

leer los artículos básico dedicados al tema, nos damos cuenta de que, a pesar de los

intentos de renunciar a una visión tradicional del concepto, la práctica exploratoria no

elabora una visión alternativa de entendimiento que pueda justificar ese abordaje

pedagógico. Este trabajo intenta contribuir a llenar este vacío, basado en la suposición

de que existe una afinidad sustancial entre los principios de la Práctica Exploratória y

la filosofía de Ludwig Wittgenstein.

Palabras clave: Práctica Exploratória, entendimiento, Wittgenstein

1. Introduction

Exploratory Practice is a pedagogical perspective in which teachers and

students work collaboratively in order to understand life inside and outside

classrooms. For EP practitioners’ (i.e. teachers and students together) the focus of

their investigation is ‘puzzling situations’, which might be anything that raises the

group’s interest. This is a perspective that contrasts, for example, with Action

Research, since, differently from the latter, EP does not necessarily propose solutions

to ‘problems’, but offers a sustainable way to understand life within the teaching

practice (Allwright & Miller, 1998). According to Allwright (2003, p.114), Exploratory

Practice can be regarded as a set of principles and also as a continuous process of

local and global thought.

2. Working by principles

As a pedagogic investigative tool, EP assumes a constructivist perspective on

the approach of the puzzles to be researched. Such a position diverges considerably

from a positivist paradigm, which is guided by the idea of efficiency and problem-

solving. Conversely, in Exploratory Practice, practitioners face the challenge of

reconstructing the understanding of each situation, according to the general

principles of this pedagogical approach. It is important to notice that those principles

should not be taken as a set of ‘ready-made’ fixed rules, but as a set of ideas derived

from practical experience. Thus, the principles that have been elaborated by

practitioners so far, can be summarized as follows:

Principle 1: put ‘quality of life’ first.

Principle 2: work primarily to understand language classroom life.

Principle 3: involve everybody

Principle 4: work to bring people together

Principle 5: work also for mutual development

Principle 6: integrate the work for understanding into classroom practice.

Principle 7: make the work a continuous enterprise

One of the consequences of adopting the principles of EP in classrooms is that

teachers might feel encouraged to think about the role of students in acquiring their

own knowledge. They might also feel encouraged to reflect upon students’ capacity of

being in charge of taking decisions, enhancing their agency potential. Taking the

notion of ‘agency’ as a ‘who-does-what’ issue, Allwright and Hanks (2009) state that

agency can be considered a point of view through which those who most need the

understandings generated in classroom (i.e. the students) should be the agents of

developing those understandings. Furthermore, one must not forget that “Learners

are not passive recipients of teacher talk under the sway of institutional authority but

are social individuals with agency, who shape and are shaped by divergent discourses

of learning.” (Tseng & Ivanič, 2006, p. 136)

3. Why Wittgenstein and Exploratory Practice?

Ludwig Wittgenstein’s work is traditionally divided into two phases; in the first

one, called the ‘early’ Wittgenstein, there is a more ‘essentialist’ orientation; whereas

in the second, known as the ‘late’ Wittgenstein, we can see an emphasis on issues

related to language meaning and on the pursuit of a ‘method’ which is, at the same

time, pedagogical and therapeutic. Through this ‘method’, Wittgenstein intended to

shed light on ‘conceptual confusions’ created by our ordinary language. According to

Burbules and Peters (2001), the elements in the wittgensteinian text are

characteristic of a way of writing about philosophy that is more oriented

to triggering a shift in thought than in demonstrating a proof; more to

showing than to saying; more to pointing than to leading (note the

frequent references in Wittgenstein’s later work to signposts, wandering

through a city, being lost, needing a guide, finding one’s way about, and

knowing how to go on). This is a conception of teaching, and teaching

through writing (…)

The main work of this phase, the Philosophical Investigations, is considered one of

the most important contemporary philosophical works and has a strong pedagogical

orientation2, an aspect that is made clear in the structure of the work itself, with its

‘aporetic’ and dialogic nature (Burbules & Peters, 2001).

The philosophy of the late Wittgenstein elaborates a sharp criticism towards

the traditional themes of Western philosophy and poses great emphasis on language

as an essentially human institution, intertwined with our non-linguistic practices. His

work also approaches traditional elements of philosophical studies in a totally new

perspective, rearranging them in a way that includes

The idea that language can only be understood from the perspective of

language-in-use; the denial of a private inner realm of phenomena; the

emphasis on the body as the objetification of the human soul; the

replacing of the division between matter and mind with a division

between the living and the non-living (...); the appeal to a pre-epistemic

relation to other human subjects which is rooted in our immediate

responsiveness to them (…) (McGinn, 1997)

One of the fundamental aspects that highlight the difference between both

the wittgensteinian philosophy and Exploratory Practice and more traditional

philosophical and pedagogical approaches is the practice of raising and asking

2 Savickey (1998) claims that “The Philosophical Investigations is an inherently pedagogical work.

Wittgenstein claims throughouthis later writings to be teaching a method and this method is both

philosophical and pedagogical.According to Moore and Fann he remarked to the effect that it did not

matter whether his results were true or not, what mattered was that a method had been found (…)”

questions, trying to understand them, without aiming at an answer or a change in

behavior, for example. That fact might lead us to a convergence between these two

perspectives, which is manifest, mainly, in the way both deal with the concept under

investigation here – the notion of understanding.

4. The notion of understanding in Exploratory Practice: a dialogue with the

wittgensteinian philosophy

One of the central aspects of understanding Wittgenstein brings to light is that

we never understand more than we are able to explain. Our common sense, possibly

fed by centuries of philosophical tradition, paints a distinct scenario ‘inside’ our

minds. Grounded in the belief that language has an ‘innefable’ dimension, we

continuously use expressions in our daily language such as ‘It is impossible to explain’

or ‘It is beyond my words and understanding’. Nevertheless, Wittgenstein states that

it is exactly the opposite:

“But then doesn’t our understanding reach beyond all examples?” – A very

curious expression, and a quite natural one! – But is that all? Isn’t there a

deeper explanation; or at least, mustn’t the understanding of the

explanation be deeper? – Well, have I myself a deeper understanding?

Have I got than I give in the explanation? – But then, whence the feeling

that I have more? Is it like the case where I interpret what is not limited as

a length that reaches beyond every length? (Wittgenstein, PI § 209)

“But do you really explain to the other person what you yourself

understand? Don’t you leave to him to guess the essential thing? You give

him examples – but he has to guess their drift to guess your intention” –

Every explanation which I can give myself I give to him too. – “He guesses

what I mean” would amount to : “various interpretations of my

explanation come to his mind and he picks one of them.” So in this case he

could ask; and I could and would answer him. (Wittgenstein, PI § 210)

The way Exploratory Practice approaches the notion of understanding seems

to be rather contradictory. On the one hand, understanding cannot be dissociated

from mental change; but, on the other hand, according to practitioners,

understandings are concrete and observable. We notice a convergence with the

traditional mentalist view in this respect, as can be seen in the quotes below:

Our main problem seems to arise from the irony that we believe the profoundest understandings to be somehow beyond words. (…) First, the words we find may serve to conceal, rather than successfully communicate, the true extent of our understandings. Worse, having found words, we may believe we have also found understanding, and so the effort to communicate might inhibit any further effort to understand. (Allwright, 2003, p. 121)

Practitioners need deep ‘human’ understandings of their immediate situation, understandings that may even be ‘too deep for words’. (Allwright & Hanks, 2009, p. 147)

Such understandings are non-reductionist because they reflect our acceptance of all the complexity we live with and through every day, and ‘deep’ to the extent that we are able to make some sort of sense of that complexity. But such understandings are going to be extremely difficult, at times, impossible, to express in words. (Allwright & Hanks, 2009, p. 148)

It is particularly elucidative the words of Allwright (2009), drawing a parallel

between the understandings developed in classroom interaction and the Taoism:

I suggest there is a third possibility (well-recognised in Taoism) that

deserves our urgent and earnest attention here – the possibility of aiming

downwards (…) towards understandings that are perhaps ‘too deep for

words’. This possibility recognises the potential value of trying to

articulate our developing understandings. It does indeed seem typically to

help people to try to work out their understandings in words, on paper (as

I am doing here) or in collective discussion (my personal preference). But

this new position, looking downwards, emphasises the limits of attempts

to articulate understandings. Instead it draws attention to the possibility

that people, throughout life, develop understandings that are much too

subtle for them, or anyone else, to articulate adequately. This is especially

clear, perhaps, in the experience of the many gifted teachers who are

unable to say anything useful about what it is that makes them successful.

They have understandings that they can, and do, live successfully, but

which they cannot articulate. Developing such lived understandings can be

the proper aim of practitioner research, I believe. Indeed, unless we

incorporate such a position into our conception of research, we risk

allowing ourselves to take seriously only those understandings that can be

made fully explicit. Unfortunately, these are few and far between, and

likely to be relatively trivial for all immediate practical, and practitioner,

purposes, especially when compared to the subtle understandings we can

actually live. (Allwright, 2009, p. 23)

Conversely, under Wittgenstein’s point of view, understanding cannot be

considered a mental process, an experience, a state, event, or anything that could

possibly happen in the hearer’s mind:

In the sense in which there are processes (including mental processes)

which are characteristic of understanding, understanding is not a mental

process. (Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, § 154)

On the contrary, the philosopher points out that understanding is an ability, an

abiding condition (“Understanding a sentence means understanding a language”

Wittgenstein, PI § 199), which is manifest in three different ways:

The way we use language: “The application is still a criterion of understanding”

(Wittgenstein, PI, § 146)

The way we react when other people use language;

The way we explain the meaning of a word, when people ask us to do so.

Thus, understanding is a correlate of explanation, action and meaning (“meaning is

the correlate of understanding and understanding the correlate of explanation” Baker

& Hacker,1980, p. 30). Wittgenstein challenges the traditional view by saying that:

The whole point of communication lies in this: someone else grasps the

sense of my words – which is something mental: he as it were takes it into

his own mind. If he then does something further with it as well, that is no

part of the immediate purpose of language. (Wittgenstein, PI, § 363)

According to Wittgenstein, the only criteria we have to ascribe understanding is our

praxis, that is, what we do after hearing someone’s words:

“he understands” would mean: “if you ask him for the rules, he will tell

you them”; in the other case “if you require him to apply the rule, he will

carry out your order”. (Wittgenstein, Philosophical Grammar, p. 84)

What’s the sign of someone’s understanding a game? Must he be able to

recite the rules? Isn’t also a criterion that he can play the game, i.e. that

he does in fact play it, even if he’s baffled when asked for the rules? Is it

only by being told the rules that the game is learnt and not simply by

watching it being played? (Wittgenstein, PG, p. 62)

A convergence between the wittgensteinian notion of understanding as an

abiding condition and the notion of understanding in Exploratory Practice, among

other aspects, can also be noticed in EP writings. EP regards understandings as local

and provisional, that is, understanding a situation in classroom is akin to

understanding life. Therefore, a criterion to ascribe understanding in classroom is

continuity, which makes the act of understanding a never ending enterprise:

Continuity is important because understandings are never fixed and final.

Any work for understanding must therefore be a continuous enterprise.

(Allwright, 2009, p. 27)

If the work for understanding is fully integrated it then becomes possible to think of it as something that can be continuous – a normal part of classroom practice. And this fits very well with the perception that we cannot expect to reach understanding of something and then assume that that understanding is going to be valid for the rest of our lives. Life, especially life in the classroom perhaps, is volatile, and constantly puzzling. So our last principle is that work for understanding should be continuous, not ‘projectised’. (Allwright, 2003d, p. 21)

Life is continuous and dynamic. Our understandings are therefore always

going to be provisional, at best, and valid only briefly, if at all. Our work for

understanding, therefore, needs to be a continuous enterprise. (Allwright

& Hanks, 2009, p. 153)

5. Final considerations

Besides all the aspects presented, it also important to say that the use of the

notion of understanding in EP is governed by rules, according to what Wittgenstein

emphasizes about language in general. For him, language is a regulated activity, just

like a game, but it does not mean these rules are immutable: “And is there not also

the case where we play and—make up the rules as we go along? And there is even

one where we alter them—as we go along.” (PI, § 83).

In EP, practitioners use the term ‘understand’ to describe actions aimed at

reflection, in order to shed light upon multiple aspects of life. Most importantly,

drawing a parallel with Wittgenstein’s words, when he says that understanding is akin

to action, an idea that pervades EP activities is that “Exploratory Practice is action for

understanding” (Allwright & Hanks, 2009).

Finally, it is possible to say that the guiding principles of EP are compatible

with a Wittgensteinian-oriented characterization of understanding as a concept that,

among other factors: (a) is taken as an abiding condition and not as a mental

occurrence; (b) is determined by regulated and public actions shared by members of

the exploratory community; and (c) is considered as an occasion ultimately favorable

to denaturalization of well established cultural practices.

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