Exploring voices, exploring appropriate education. A practitioners’ discourse'

My thesis describes an exploratory process into a practitioners’ discourse on appropriate education. Chapter one: Appropriate Education is about the Dutch educational policy called Passend onderwijs. The chapter positions the appropriate education in national and international educational and ethical Discourses with a capital ‘D’ and discourses with a lower-case ‘d’. Chapter Two: My Exploring Voices starts with the autobiographical description of my extended educational career, leading initially to an exploration of appropriate education from a phenomenological approach. The chapter then describes my researcher’s shift from phenomenology to the narrative turn. Following reflective sculptor activities, the leading question became how to do justice to, and present the variety between and within, the practitioners’ voices. As a consequence the situational (Guillemin & Gilman, 2004), relational (Ellis, 2007) and perfomative ethics (Holman Jones, 2005) started to play a major role additional to prevailing procedural qualitative researchers’ ethics (Baarda, Goede & Teunissen, 2009; Clandinin, 2007; Cohen, Manion & Morrisson, 2000; Evers, 2007; Maso & Smaling, 1998). Alongside these auto-ethnographic-driven ethical considerations, from Bakhtin (1981) I tapped the idea of using a dialogue as a way of presenting the varieties within and between voices. Bakhtin (1984b) taught me as an author to renounce my essential surplus of knowledge. Boje challenged me as author to construct a polylogue as an antinarrative to keep the polylogue out of the prison of required unity of coherence. The plot of my thesis is my substantiated justification of constructing a plotless polylogue as to do justice to the variety within and between practitioners’ voices I heard talking about appropriate education. Chapter Three: Exploring Voices Exploring Appropriate Education describes the methodological steps towards the construction of a polylogue and writing its text. It is about the collecting process of information: about the destructive process of the collected information into stories to resource the polylogue; about the temporarily emplotment (Boje, 2001) as a tool to grasp the number of stories and the subsequent fragmentation of the plots and their constituent stories; about creating five characters and distributing the fragmented plots amongst the five created characters; about constructing, enacting and recording a scenario; about the process of writing and polishing a polylogue text; and about weaving a play. Chapter Four: Voices Exploring Appropriate Education contains the polylogue described as a play. The characters are: Anne, administrator; Cees, volunteer and researcher; Joan, special educational needs coordinator at a primary school; Paul, special primary education school director; Rob, a janitor; and Rosemary, primary school teacher school. A glossary is added for the practitioners’ Dutch slang that I decided to leave untranslated in the English medium polylogue to emphasize the Dutch character of the appropriate education policy and its discourse. Chapter Five: Post Voices begins with my reflective review of the exploratory process from the perspective of Vygostky. I first reflect on my explorer’s role from the traditional Dutch Vygotskian approach concluding my prelude education voice resounded in my exploring voice. Reflecting on voices exploring appropriate education from Vygotsky’s socio-historical voice I conclude, referring to Lyotard (1998), that my small story on an appropriate education discourse adds an intrinsic and ongoing incoherence to the Dutch appropriate education Discourse (Gee, 2005). Reflecting on the zones of proximal appropriate education developments I conclude that the presentness (Morson, 1994) to the current appropriate education discourse is lacking. My final words are on my acceptance and the consequences of this omission.