Product reviews for Living Contradiction

What I like most about Living Contradiction is its collaborative nature and its honesty.

Sean Warren and Stephen Bigger exemplify a collaborative educational relationship. Bigger, as a doctoral supervisor, has enabled Warren to make explicit and evolve his embodied knowledge as a professional educator whilst sharing, without imposition, his own insights. The book also  shows how Bigger shared his understandings of critical theory, encouraging Warren to see that autobiographical writings could produce a valid and academically legitimate contribution to educational knowledge in the generation of a living educational theory. This contribution, whilst grounded in the embodied knowledge of the educator, engages with and integrates insights from the most advanced social theories of our time.

The honesty is in Warren's educational journey: from his steadfast adherence to institutional standards and expectations, to his recognition that he was losing some'­thing of himself in the process, and then to consolidating his creative and critical responses to these contradictions in living his values as fully as he can. I believe that Warren's inspirational honesty and responses will captivate your imagination and that his journey will resonate with your own experiences of the imposition of institutional power relations.

I believe that Living Contradiction will be of great value on initial and continuing professional development programmes in education, and to all professionals in a wide range of workplace contexts who are facing their own contradictions in living their values as fully as they can.