to care for her 'self, (N1,2,3) without being "driven crazyH.(1Q)'!t40 With this absenting action, Noah's
formal (but not self-) education was materially negated for at least another fifteen years.(N1,%) 341 Even before entering the university, the focus of Noah's epistemic attention was almost solely on ideas and the (un)conventional, self-purposive activity of (re)constructing abstract understandings, from books or radio, though she seldom sourced books from a library.)(N1.2.3) 342 Noah had already developed a restlessness in thinking and a desire to "keep things on the move". (N1) She (N1.2.3) habitually dwelt upon the potential for marginalisation in the human world of ''politics and power",
(N1.2.3)343 identifying with people's oppressions after having learned "through sometimes-bitter experiences ... to think seriously" (N2.4.7S6) about social issues, justice and morality. (N1,2,3) Noah's worldview seemed to include a feeling of personal and social responsibility for knowledge; a social conscience bound inextricably to an epistemic consciousness, (N1.2.3) reflecting that for her, ethics was part of her sphere of rationality. 344 Noah said she had been typically sceptical of the ideologies she was confronted with during adolescence and retained a practice of examining and challenging, rather than accepting them.
As an outcome of the conflict she was confronted with during her previous formal education, Noah approached university study with a fairly well-formed personal 'philosophy' (which she referred to as just that -Ira philosophy"). (N1.2.3) Noah appeared to be already long-practised in the analysis of ideas and the differentiation of phenomenologic from social or systems logic. Her independent life in a world of ideas had set Noah apart from both Luisa and Wyna. Whereas within the context of education, Wyna and Luisa's lives were determined by and dependent upon social
conventionalities, Noah's life was ideologically evaluated on the basis of knowledge she sought
and reconstructed. All told, these three typified actors demonstrated the different ways in which theory and practice divided them in everyday life.
On entering university, whether or not their habituated knowledge-constitutive action was centred
in the institution's ways of knowing was the epistemic-problematic.
All over it seemed that the adults' personal epistemologies arose from childhood experiences of powerlessness particularly in the imbedded compulsion of home-school relations. These same relations (between the everyday and institutional epistemologies) would now be open to challenge '!t4O cf Belenky et al,1986
341 Noah (3) began Teachers College but did not complete the Irllining period
342 One of the problems to become clear Noah's university study was that she(N1.2.3) did not know how to
use a Library indexing system at all. This of basic knowledge have been due to either of two factors: first that the tlme when it was in schools was after she already left. However, such a simple level of technical not, I suspect, have been the primary reason she avoided them. Less superficially, I wondered if lack of indexing knowledge could have promoted her tangential p"rsliJs tru:ough. the �helves which in tum could have become quite intellectually-imtating, causing her to gIVe up usmg hbranes.
343 to the extent of interrupting our research interviews to listen to current affairs news items! (Nl,2,3) Cf Belenky et al.(1986:227-8), rqx>rt the same fact as does Bernstein, B (1990:83) "As a strategy of self-defence by which she aclu.des Mr self tTy wiJhdrawing."
�forations ...
Pt.1I
cn.5 uluca.tUmalfUstory
astkterministic
because these adults had gained power from their self�ucative role, their maturity and theirvoluntaristic status in university. As a mere glimpse at Wyna, Luisa and Noah's fragmentary and partial histories has shown, relations between the self, social and ideal worlds and between the epistemic and discursive practices which we use to decide, to communicate and to share meanings had been woven into some well-differentiated but complex relational webs .To this point it has become clear that Wyna, Luisa and Noah, as three radicalised typifications, had brought to the university very differing knowledge-constitutive habits which showed in their social, epistemic and linguistic conceptualisations.
Noah had habituated the private independence of an onlooker to the publically-Identified and social world of education, all the while maintaining an epistemic-imbeddedness in a world of contesting 'minds'. Noah differentiated her sharing of her social from her ideological discourse and life. The
reflexivity of her ideological discourse arose from coping with conflictual home-school relations and from habituating the intellectual practices of differentiating and selecting, and including and excluding. She had finally excluded fonnal schooling from her real-life at age 15, along with 'the art of oneness'" that is, the single-mindedness of examining only mediated singular points of view. These absenting acts reinforced Noah's silence and self-educative continuance of "armchair philosophising". (N3.2) It also raised the rather odd question of whether the experience of conflict
and marginalisation informal education might indeed be necessary as well as sufficient for forcing self-reflexive practices?34s Was fonnal education, by its act of negation, paradoxically able to detennine a student's self-constituting epistemic practice?
Luisa, on the other hand, was a socially-inclined, 'immersion-dependent' knowledge-actor who put all her efforts into nying to Identify with Education. For Luisa, to come to know was to engage in the work of socially 'seeking out' rather than intellectually 'seeking within'. Knowledge was an externalised entity that Luisa depended upon having socially-constructed or legitimated through it being "worked" upon with family or friends. Luisa was imbedded in a complex world where the social and the ideal were inextricably tangled, and she did not appear able to subjectively
differentiate her 'self from within that mixup. She was as an Other in the world of Others. Without the conscious control or fore grounding of an epistemic 'self, Luisa was denying, excluding and resisting any fonn of knowledge-constitutive engagement with the abstractedness of meaning. Like Noah, Wyna could be selective in differentiating the social from the ideal worlds in education, but - like Luisa - she chose to habituate her epistemology within the social world of practice. Therein she identified with people who were 'the same', excluding those (like her sister) who were socially or epistemically 'different ' including the positivistically-inclined, competitive leanings of her parents.
'£pisumofogical �forations ...
Pt.Il Cli.5
It would only gradually be revealed that Wyna privileged her own socio-educational status in making knowledge-constitutive decisions. She used such methods as publicly foregrounding what
she needed and privately backgrounding (through silences and denials) what she could give. In order to win, she could present a public face of her self as being 'dumb' (ie situated in an
epistemically-excluded position) and 'apparently' 'requiring' help. Therein, I claim, would lay her politic.346
Overall, the central epistemic issue of these three typifications was to be found in the tension between two views of educational purpose. One view (Wyna and Luisa) focussed upon knowledge as a socially grounded Identity, and the other (Noah) focussed upon knowledge as ideologically abstract though socially founded. Moreover the marginalisation of each typification was in the main due to either resisting or preferring the social or the ideological or the discursive. Only in a fluid and broadened epistemic space which included all of these interrelational standpoints would emancipatory education be found. First it would be necessary to locate not only the institutional touchstones each typification sought, but also what occurred in interaction with it.
346 It was the negative relation between Wyna's ability to negotiate such social situations as a research and her resistance to discussing where, how and why she came to know what she knew, that lead me to recognise that knowledge of the hidden curricuhun was quite so powerful and political for some adult students. By �tedly saying that she "couid not rMll!17lber" (Wl,2.,3) or she Hnever
t!Xperit!nced conflict" (Wl.3.4) a facade of was presented which the accidental rmding of
contradictory eVidence would uncover the study. Her activity was a
purposive selective negligence which have excluded my socio-historical
<Jeterminism to her epistemic self. The nature of these voids (which she may thought had
positivistically-ensured the non-Identification of her actual educational mcluded pauses' during the interviews, comments in passin&, momenta!}' remarks and
comments or conversational 'sighs' when she was either out of range of the tal?' recorder or it was switched off (and thus, maybe she thought, no longer transcribable as formal evidence'). Indeed it may been the constancy of pressure to censor for the hour and a half of each interview that caused her to remark
on "how uhaustingH (WS.2) the interviews were. (Wl,2,S) Wyna was indeed, I thinlc. more to be recognised by her negations than by the self-Identifications she gave in her interviews. Such gave rise to many questions, some which to be fruitful avenues of inquiry later. Whilst appeared to
be within her was she not �haps and
(though not Since the exper ence of the home practices of
one parent, did she resISt the of the world of ideas because it was a cause disuruty and
distrust (rather than philosophic Did she conventional wisdoms as a facade
for her epistemic fears? Why did she that (a) it to her teachers rather than her familr who �)
"gave hirH(Wl.3.4) the power or ability to and debate? Why did she objectify this wrong