Accounting for Ourselves: the problematic of representing action research

Abstract

Educational action research, in its post‐modem context, exemplifies the contradiction of describing what is individual and different (idiographic) and explaining this as patterned and regular (nomothetic). As action researchers we draw upon our subjective, insider knowledge to provide authentic descriptions of how we enact our educational practice and we develop explanations that are located within educational values that we can justify within an understanding of the meaning of education. We can authenticate our descriptions by demonstrating the rigour of our methodologies and we can validate our explanations by convincing others that they make sense within a shared understanding of the meaning of education. Describing and explaining our own practice is what we mean by accounting for ourselves. In this paper we focus on representing action research and suggest that it gives rise to a double dialectic: at the intra‐subjective level where the act of creating a representation challenges our understanding of the practice it represents and at the inter‐subjective level where the sharing of meaning in a representation that is made public enables others to challenge that meaning. We consider the double dialectic of making understanding transparent and transforming it in the process; of giving an account and through this accounting for ourselves.