This is a powerful and engaging article. It made me think about the way my personal life intersects with my teaching, and how important and emotionally draining events can help to re-focus me and challenge my priorities. (Although they can also have the damaging and negative effect of making me want to escape into my “cave”!)

However, I had to read it twice in order to make sense of it. The article states that it will approach the question “how have two key personal life events affected and enhance my commitment and resilience as a teacher?” and on first reading I felt that this question was not answered. On second reading I understood that the process of writing the essay had in itself answered the question, but this was not immediately obvious to me and I think the case might be made more powerfully if it were. On page 4, the paragraph which begins “at a time when there is a policy focus” appears somewhat disconnected from what has come before; it might be helpful to link this section more clearly with the two life events and the reflections which have flowed from them.

Personally I would prefer more structure to the essay, generally. A recurring theme is the tension between measurement, performativity and teacher effectiveness on the one hand and quality of educational experience on the other but I’m not sure we really get the case for the defence or the prosecution exactly, it’s more that there’s a series of issues that are deeply felt, although they don’t quite tie together. Also, the essay does not convince me that the two (measurement and quality) are entirely incompatible. One reason for this is that I do not get a flavour of how your life is affected by higher-level policy making. I understand that you feel marginalised but I do not know how your teaching is affected. What sort of information are you expected to impart? Why is such information absurd and empty? I also have a bit of a problem with the examples from your childhood. Although you feel that it was unimportant whether or not your father bought sufficient roles of wallpaper this is the sort of thing I would not like to get wrong! Perhaps measurement has some place, but its importance is being overstated?

The meaning of the statements, “We teach who we are” and “teaching emerges from our inwardness” is not clear to me that it might be helpful to expand on them. I think I understand, but these quotes brought to mind the main character in Graham Swift’s Waterland: a history teacher who has stopped teaching history and instead, tells his pupils stories from his own life – it is not a healthy way to be. (I’m sure you’re not arguing that it would be healthy but it might be better to sketch out the boundary between giving of yourself as a teacher, and giving of yourself as an adult friend.) Also, the paragraph on top of Page 5 which begins “Ebmeier and Nicklaus …” appears to be a second quote; is this right? If so, would it be helpful to link these two quotes?

In general this is a rich and inspiring essay which deserves to be published to a wide audience. Before it is, it might be helpful to structure the argument a little more clearly for people like me.

Dear Kevin,

Many thanks for inviting me to read your paper. I have enjoyed it enormously, and learnt a great deal. The paper reminds me of when we have worked together, you with your thoughtful, reflective stance as we discussed ideas and spoke about how we were hoping to influence ideas for the future.

Coincidentally I am reading Sebastian Barry’s The Secret Scripture, part of my own wish to deepen my knowledge of Irish literature. I will go on to A Long Long Way, which I understand is also a wonderful piece of writing. When I read Barry, I am reminded of you; and when I read you, I am reminded of Barry: you both choose your words with care, testing and tasting them before placing them carefully on the page, while communicating the deepest of feelings through the writing.

I got this from your present text. My first reaction, on reading it for the first time, was that I could not find my way within and through it with ease. I felt I was balancing on one flat tectonic plate after another, knowing that the plates fitted together, yet not sure what I should do to shift them nearer together and make them fit to form a whole. I knew the connections were there, but I felt them rather than read them. During this first reading time, and from my usual stance of pragmatic reader who likes to know exactly where she is in a text and wants the author to tell her this, I felt somewhat lost and out of kilter. So I left the text for a while, and worked with the ideas at some deep level of myself. I think this is what people like Norris and Polanyi tell us we ought to do: I imagine you have done the same with your authors – Derrida, Barthes, Benjamin – don’t they all need time to be lived with, while we listen to find out what they want us to hear. And when I returned, I immediately saw the connections clearly, and the plates moved together of their own volition; beautiful synthesis that works for me at the level of kinaesthetic more than cognitive appreciation.

I agree when you comment that yours is a sometimes confessional text, and I wondered initially whether it should go into a journal that professes to be about living educational theories; but yes, of course it does. The creation of a living theory of educational practice is generated through systematic action enquiry, regardless of what form the action or the enquiry takes. Your action, as recounted in this paper, is more about thinking and reflecting than about ‘active’ action in the world; and perhaps this is the most important action of all, the action of being still and open to life.

It is the openness to life that comes through; the lovely sentence: ‘What matters is that I stood on a chair with my mother and helped her bake and I got flour on my nose and she laughed.’ You do speak about death, and you have experienced the death of your loved one, yet you speak for life, and for your students and colleagues; you work, not to be stifled by the oppression of bureaucratic missives and technicist forms of instruction but to let the people in our lives speak to us through their own narratives.

At a mundane level I am returning your draft with three small observations, to do with some small aspects, but these are trivia within the rich tapestry of your text. You always teach me much, Kevin, and I know, through the publication of the work, that others will share the delight of learning from you too.