La ingeniería de caminos en la dictadura de Primo de

In Section 3.2 of Chapter 3 I described the field of research in military TEL, which has almost exclusively focused on studies of top-down implementation of change and which has neglected agentic social activity. The related scalable efficiencies of cost and time were pragmatically the focus of this field of literature, which has prioritised behaviourist military training. Yet this project demonstrated that the indiscriminate application of military training’s behaviourist pedagogies may hinder military learning, unless participants are empowered to change to their own activity. The dearth of research in military learning, as discrete from training, may be associated with: political drivers to import predictions rather than researching authentic contexts; military HE being so niche as to not deserve situated empirical research; or defence’s vague and under-theorised definitions of TEL. These drivers relate to my ability to make modest claims of originality for the intervention’s situated, problematic, participant-led approach. Contributions to the field are summarised in two sub-sections below: agency in military TEL; and a Marxist epistemology for change.

7.2.1 Contributing to research on agency in military TEL

In foregrounding the potential for participant agency in military TEL, my findings offer the field a study which counters the traditions of enculturation and behaviourism which appear to dominate the literature. In contrast, this intervention’s results have empowered

participants of military TEL to undertake the agentic promotion, legitimisation and

authorship of challenges to their own social conditions. Engendering and normalizing multi- voiced and troublesome negotiations importantly related to participants’ conflicting agentic motives, whose connections with volitional action are described by Sannino (2015a: 10) and Haapasaari & Kerosuo (2015: 46) as necessary for successful interventions. The explicit normalisation of volitional action through task stimuli seemed to relate to the intervention’s success in engendering agency for participants of military TEL. An example can be found in Sub-section 6.2.4, where social practices were legitimately resisted through task stimuli. This finding was believed to be a point of original contribution; agency would normally indicate misbehaviour and dissent in military work and learning, rather than association with development (see e.g. Kirke, 2010: 359; Huhtinen, 2013: 76).

My results share characteristics with a small number of studies in the field of military TEL. In the review I have acknowledged rare calls from other authors who also challenge the

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shares its most striking commonalities: rejecting the status quo of behaviourist training; seeking development through diverse epistemic critique; and viewing research-interventions in authentic settings as fundamental for development. I share with Cornell-d’Echert (2012: 17) the concern that contemporary military learners must break free of institutional

processes which assume they are “neither expected nor required to think” (p. 18). Like Dietz and Schroeder (2012: 29) I recognise that research of military learning must seek epistemic critique from beyond their organisational boundaries. In common with Zacharakis and van der Werff (2012: 89), historicity and cultural mediation inform my project’s results.

My results differ with the majority of studies in this field, which have retrospectively studied top-down implementations of artefacts, seeking to harness scalable cost and time

efficiencies for military TEL. In rare studies where there has been bottom-up consultation (e.g. Bollard et al., 2015; Juhary, 2007) authors examined acceptance of predetermined change; in contrast, my results have benefitted from participants designing and enacting change. An example is their bottom-up commitment to create and curate mirror data in Sub-section 6.6.3, which could not have been achieved without the normalisation of bottom- up initiatives. A further lucrative outcome of my results, distancing them from most of the field, was the participants’ bottom-up and problematic recognition that they had been undertaking boundary-crossing TEL despite rules, artefacts and division of labour. As a result the agentic interference of “life activity” described by Sannino (2015a: 2) and Thorne (2015: 63) included participants’ prior investments of time and effort, initially generating defensive behaviours. Emotional attachment to activity upheld resistance to its sustained intellectual analyses, whilst direct experiences yielded agentic criticism, a positive conflicting state to begin the intervention. This vindicates framing resistance and critique as necessary and positive (Sannino, 2010: 839) which is also claimed to be an original contribution in this field.

7.2.2 Contributing to research on an epistemology of change in military TEL My findings offer this field of literature, on change in military TEL, a situated empirical project which is directly related to the emancipation borne of a Marxist epistemology for change. Researching political power and its historicity in have proven lucrative to my results, empowering participants to take ownership of the process of changing social conditions. Notably, my project has counteracted the widespread conflation of military TEL with the solitary consumption of digital media. To explain, there appears to be a prevalent conception that military TEL is the individual rehearsal of pre-ordained, top-down and implemented digital content. In contrast my project has empowered military learners to

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define and design, for themselves, ways of coping with increasingly contingent social conditions. In contesting the historically embedded vertical acquisition of knowledge in military TEL, these results justify a Marxist epistemology. This is the first such study in UK defence, perhaps due to military strategists associating Marx with despotic political regimes rather than development (a related analysis is in Lima, Ostermann, & Rezende, 2014: 594).

There are examples of empowerment and emancipation in defence-related learning, although they avoid claims of Marxist influences. The unpalatability of a Marxist

epistemology may relate to the preclusion of participants in studies of military learning (see for example Fletcher, 2009: 72; Kerry, 2016: 29; Durlach, 2012: 331). In empowering participants, my closest cognate studies are those in the high-reliability organisations of commercial defence such as Blackler et al. (2003: 131) and Duffield and Whitty (2014: 311). Commonalities with Blackler et al. (2003) include our shared empowerment of participants: to question and redefine activity; to change conceptions of expertise; and to influence cultural mediation (p. 141). In common with Duffield and Whitty’s (2014) study, both of our projects have empowered operational members of organisations to expose and aggravate problematic circumstances, rather than continue with failed practice since “owning up to failure may cause shame” (p. 313). In extolling the benefits of a Marxist epistemology, I apparently share common ground with only one other western military pedagogue; Falk (2008: 8). Falk describes how Marx and Engels have bestowed principles with which

participants may critique the “ideal types” of military learners (p. 13), yet does not go further to operationalise productive research, and this intervention seems to be the first with both a Marxist epistemology and empirical contributions to the field.

In their most striking contrast with the majority of studies in this field, my results have foregrounded TEL’s problematic social conditions. The results have directly benefitted from Marxist principles such as aggravating contradictions, socially questioning practice, and taking control of artefacts, all of which have empowered participants to realise their active roles in TEL’s change. Conceiving of artefacts as active carriers of social knowledge, shaped through time by participants, could have added value to other studies in this field. Yet such principles would have required authors to reconsider their top-down models of

implementation, notions which may have been rejected by military clients. Drivers for Hickox et al. (1998: 608), for example, included examining and overcoming dissatisfaction with the top-down implementation of web-based testing in a military school. Learner resistance was met with hardware upgrades, deemed to be “the most critical need” (p. 604),

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apparently identified without agentic input from learners. A Marxist epistemology in military TEL may thus demand an insider-researcher, to navigate the cultural sensitivity of military schools, a luxury which I have had and which others may not. Benefits of a Marxist epistemology for countering normative political expectations included participants’ overt resistance and criticism; these are usually forbidden in military social interactions (Kirke, 2013: 17) despite their recognised value to well-being (Blunden, 2012a: 297).