Revealing what is ‘tacit/rationally-invisible/in the background’: an online coaching pedagogy for developing improved leadership practice through ‘presencing empathetic responsiveness’

Abstract

This thesis reports on a self study into educational learning, energized and guided by the question ‘how do I improve my practice?’, as I coach mature students on a distance learning Masters in Leadership Studies at Exeter University.

My ‘living’ educational inquiry captures and articulates the development of online pedagogic practices which stimulate a ‘virtual’ culture of inquiry. These regular ‘dialogically structured’ web-based interactions help students successfully negotiate learning barriers posed by the online medium, allowing them to notice and exploit the variety of opportunities for learning and development available in their everyday lives, and the many different forms of knowing embedded in these. Through developing richer epistemologies and more resourceful ontologies, students increase their receptiveness and responsiveness to challenges in the situations they study and work in. Through detailed analysis of textual and audio-visual data, I offer glimpses of such learning and development, and the coaching associated with this, in fleeting moments of educational influencing which spark ‘primitive reactions’, in development episodes where ‘indwelling’ transforms these into new ‘language-games’, and in reflexive biographies which trace the longer term development of new ontological skills involved in ‘knowing how to go on’.

At the heart of the online coaching pedagogy is an original ‘inclusional’ coaching process I call presencing empathetic responsiveness which I use to encourage students to contextualise and presence their learning under conditions of epistemological and ontological uncertainty. This ‘ontological’ form of coaching enables students to become agents in the production of their own lives despite the masking and insidious effects of disciplinary power, so they can learn to contribute effectively in a world characterised by ‘supercomplexity’.

The originality of the thesis lies in the synthesis of and creative linking between the development of this situated learning, the methodological inventiveness of the pedagogy, key ideas on communication and learning from the literature, and the embodied values that have enabled me to become a better educator.

Date of Award	31 Oct 2012
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	University of Bath
Supervisor	Andrew Whitehead (Supervisor)