Editorial: (Re)searching for integrity

A central theme informing this issue of Educational Action Research is a concern that is shared by all reflective action researchers – how can I achieve a greater integrity in my practices, in my research and in my dealings with others? This spirit of inquiry, stimulated by a disquiet about the gap between our values and our practice – that is, the disparity between our aspirations and our growing awareness of the consequences of our actions – enables action researchers throughout this collection of papers to question assumptions about action research which can cloud our capacities to act more intelligently, more effectively and more morally within the situations that we find ourselves in. The authors collectively demonstrate how clarifying our sensitivity to the differing perspectives held by other participants in our research endeavours will progress our thinking and our actions. The papers that follow provide excellent examples of action researchers’ self-critical practices that will inspire readers to frame a better class of problem when designing their own research.

This issue begins by commemorating the life and work of Olav Eikeland (1955–2023), an inspirational philosopher, practitioner, and mentor, whose death on 1 September 2023 caused great sadness to many of us. In ‘“Mainstreaming action research”: Olav Eikeland’s legacy for our shared future’, Davydd J. Greenwood, Lars Klemsdal, Johan Elvemo Ravn and Julie Borup Jensen describe what Olav meant to them and urge readers to enter his ‘universe of deep thought and ambitious praxis’ in order to achieve ‘relevant, impactful action’. Olav had a long association with this journal, serving as a member of our international advisory board, as an author, and as a reviewer, and we are honoured to publish this timely and eloquent tribute to him.

Following on from that, the first article, ‘Performance as transformation/transformative: Problematizing performance in PAR’ by Call-Cummings, Dazzo, Beardsley and Blibo, provides that sharp critical edge that is fundamental to good action research. They draw on Freire’s belief that truly liberating education should be essentially problem-posing, leading to ‘a constant unveiling of reality’. The research team are experienced in conducting Participatory Action Research (PAR), but they pause to question a fundamental assumption – does action research really lead to transformation? Through their research, they worked with student participants in a US setting to explore the nature of the transformation which student participants experience. Their article poses the research community a delightfully destabilising question: ‘Does transformation really occur, or do researchers just “see” it?’ To address this question, they conducted a scholarly review of concepts of ‘participation’, ‘transformation’ and ‘performance’, before working with their students to explore whether these youthful co-researchers viewed and experienced ‘transformation’ in the same way as the research organisers anticipated that they might. Their approach, which attempts to achieve a heightened appreciation of the YPAR experience, provides inspiration, insight and direction for future action researchers.

In ‘Building an alternative conceptualization of participation: from shared decision-making to acting and work’, Dedding, Groot, Slager, and Abma continue to question the assumptions underpinning participatory practices. Whilst appreciating the value of common metaphors of participation (such as ‘the participation ladder’), they point to the weakness of models which imply a hierarchy of criteria and which serve the assumption that participation can be designed into a project. The authors argue that such models do not account for the real-world messiness that participants experience, because simplistic diagrammatic models fail to highlight the context and complexity of participation. This article challenges the prescriptive value of such models, drawing on the experiences of the research team’s work in community health in the Netherlands to provide grounded examples of how participation can best be achieved. They show how working through organising activities with participants creates communicative spaces, and how such forums enable participants to provide a context for more relevant research questions to be created. The article argues for a move away from formal consultation towards more visual-arts based methods that prompt participants to articulate their experiences and feed into a more responsive agenda for future activities. This is another very clear example of how participation theory can be tested in practice to generate new theory about participatory practices in context.

From Sweden, Harju’s article, ‘Leading change of practice: a study of challenges and possibilities from the position of preschool management’ also endorses the message of participatory activities being educative at all levels if participants can become involved in working through changes. Harju used Kemmis et al.’s (2014) ‘practice architectures’ as a framework to analyse and design research activities, and to inform how she might encourage managers to intervene and encourage teachers to reimagine educational possibilities in their institutions. She discovered that managers’ active participation in research projects with teachers was stimulated by their noticing positive changes in educators’ practices. When managers became aware of changes in the way that the teachers enthused about their research activities, they began to recognise and respect them more as professionals who shared a joint commitment to changing practice. The managers themselves then became more confident in leading meetings that focused on educational, rather than technical and administrative, concerns. Harju emphasises the importance of a formal action research framework for protecting time for reflexive discussions with managers, as these meetings created the communicative spaces which helped managers refocus beyond everyday system maintenance.

Einboden, Maxwell, Campbell, Rickard and Bramble’s article, ‘Improving the first-year student experience: a critical reflection on co-operative inquiry as the “last loop” in an action research project’ shares the messiness and dilemmas that can arise when researchers encourage participants to explore awkward issues. Their Australian research attempted to illuminate first-year undergraduate experiences that needed improving, and the students’ response highlighted the negative effects of being taught by casual staff who were perceived as having little interest in the students. The research leaders felt compromised as the university was supporting this research (as well as employing both the casual staff and the researchers); however, despite this discomfort, the research team did help the students to present their concerns to the university. The authors reflect on having been able to take major steps in using co-operative inquiry to raise awareness of structural barriers for students, but making only limited progress in helping students address these issues. However, the authors do acknowledge the improvement in the participating students’ sense of educational agency through engaging with this co-operative inquiry process.

On a similar note, Boyle, Petrie, Grootenboer, Rönnerman, and Edwards-Groves produce a frank account of the difficulties of addressing unwelcome findings in ‘Acknowledging, negotiating, and reporting “uncomfortable truths” in action research’. These five established academics from Australia, New Zealand and Sweden provide confessional examples of how they may have sanitised their research by managing to work around unwelcome findings in their accounts of action research. Through acknowledging their complicity in these practices, they provide insights that prove cathartic for the writers, and also inspirational and energising for readers. They acknowledge how researchers’ identities feel threatened by reporting unwelcome findings, and they hope that sharing their experiences might empower future action researchers to be more open in their own accounts. The authors suggest that regarding action research activities as projects – rather than as ongoing processes – discourages researchers from engaging in a necessary ‘reflexivity of discomfort’. This article might well represent the required reading for action researchers preparing the writing-up of theses and reports.

In ‘(Re)Searching from Within: Arriving at a Scholarly Approach to Social Innovation in Higher Education’, Wehbi, Panitch, Courneya, Fraticelli, Idrees, Machado, and Boonstra describe their work as an administrative unit in a Canadian university. The authors have attempted to create a scholarly understanding of their work for social justice which links the university with the community. This paper celebrates the diversity of academic, administrative, student and community voices engaged in their Social Innovation work; it also acts as a vehicle for discovering the team’s academic identities as the administrators engage more confidently within the prevailing academic context. In a similar struggle with researcher identities at the opposite side of the world, New Zealand researchers Austin, Locke and Morse discuss the personal transformations experienced by three academics from health and education as they worked across their professions to establish a common research question. Their paper, ‘The intertwining of health and education: Capturing learning and change while developing a tertiary health education research proposal’ draws upon the researchers’ journals to document the struggles involved in surrendering their differing research allegiances and pedagogical principles, which were well established – and somewhat different – in both health and education disciplines. The authors outline the experience of instability, confusion and loss as new paths to posing research questions evolved and acknowledge that shifts in researchers’ world views are ‘fragile, contingent and strengthened by, if not reliant on, the ongoing interaction between the researchers.’ The examples cited in their paper enable readers to appreciate the emotional hold of differing research paradigms and consequently make a useful contribution to our understanding of the challenges of collaborative research that is also interprofessional.

From Norway, Bjorke, Standal, and Mordal-Moen show the liberating effects of action research in their paper, ‘What we have done now is more student-centred’: An investigation of physical education teachers’ reflections over a one-year participatory action research project’. They argue that teachers need new theoretical perspectives (in this case, experimenting with co-operative learning strategies) to stimulate constructive reflection as a route to change. The authors problematise the taken-for-granted dimensions of ‘reflection’ in their account of supporting physical education teachers to realise their pedagogical values and move towards becoming facilitators of student-centred learning. These researchers emphasise the importance of collaborative support and direction to strengthen teacher resolve when participants are resistant to change.

In a similar vein, Panhwar and Bell’s article ‘Enhancing student engagement in large ESL classes at a Pakistani university’ also demonstrates the importance of collaborative support when meeting resistance from both students and colleagues. This paper offers an excellent example of how action research can be used in the most challenging of circumstances, as they attempt to cope with very large undergraduate classes of sometimes disaffected students attending compulsory English language classes. The authors outline the challenges of needing to constantly revise plans and interventions and to recognise what can and what cannot be changed as the principal researcher attempted co-operative learning activities with classes of over 100 students. This lively account acknowledges the messy limitations of their research, as some participants were more ready for change than others. Importantly, this paper reminds us of the value of action research for teachers – ‘a way of emancipating themselves and their students from the helplessness associated with institutional and cultural constraints.’ In Ethiopia, Agonafir also embraced co-operative learning strategies to help students develop confidence in, and commitment to group assignment work, as reported in ‘Using Cooperative Learning Strategy to Increase Undergraduate Students’ Engagement and Performance’. These two papers from universities in the Global South will inspire confidence in researchers from similarly economically disadvantaged contexts who are attempting to introduce co-operative learning strategies that can be more easily implemented in highly resourced environments. Agonafir’s paper again reminds us that it is the action researcher and not just the students who become educated through the inquiry process.

Finally, from the United Kingdom, Wakelin’s investigation, ‘Personal Tutoring in Higher Education: an action research project on how improve personal tutoring for both staff and students’, explores how questionnaires to students and staff enabled the highlighting of the unspoken awkwardness of personal tutoring and prompted reflections on how tutors might take agency to change. The action research process proved liberating for participants, leading both tutors and students to take greater responsibility for the opportunities presented by these ambiguous learning encounters.

To conclude this issue, Xian Mei provides a helpful review of Sustaining Action Research: a practical guide for institutional improvement by Burns, Edwards and Ellis. She celebrates the strengths of this text by offering readers a range of possible action research approaches rather than a limited toolkit, and she notes that this easy-to-follow guide is also accessible for an international audience.

The articles in this issue offer different starting points in their search for integrity in the research process, and they represent global perspectives on how we might be critically reflective in judging our action research and reflexive about how we report that research. The writers provide exemplars of clear writing for this journal that focuses on the learning to be gained through action research processes, rather than by justifying research success solely against predefined outcomes. Eight of the 11 articles have multiple authors, and this underlines the value of supportive co-researchers in sustaining action research activities through challenging times. Some of these researcher relationships emphasise the crucial nature of collaborative support in providing security to explore, and to report, unwelcome and uncomfortable truths. Perhaps, this is most apparent in Boyle et al.’s paper where five academics have taken moral and intellectual strength from each other to recognise questionable reporting within their own personal accounts. This level of critical reflexivity is what the editors of Educational Action Research are inviting from prospective authors – refreshing papers which challenge our action research assumptions, and which provide readers with liberating alternatives to established action research orthodoxies.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).