Action research with/against impact

Governments in many parts of the world are increasingly concerned with demonstrating the results of their research investments. Not only are research funding schemes being steered strongly towards government-determined agendas, but there is also considerable pressure placed on universities and researchers to show how their research results have traction beyond the academy. Similar rhetoric about the purposes and value of research appears in multiple locations; notions of accountability and utility are made central to the research endeavour.

The notion of research with ‘impact’ has gained considerable currency in the United Kingdom, where most of the editorial team of Educational Action Research is based. It is also common in the USA where other members of our editorial team live and work. ‘Impact’ is not only common parlance, but is now integral to the way in which the quality of university research is judged. In the last Research Excellence Framework, a massive peer-review exercise on which funding for the subsequent five years is based, a full 25% of the total ‘score’ was derived from ‘impact’. Universities had to provide ‘evidence’, in narrative form, of how the research conducted by their academic staff had had an influence on policy, media and public understanding, and/or various publics. Government funding for higher education research was subsequently distributed on the basis of this audit exercise.

Action researchers might be forgiven for thinking that, in this context, their moment in the sun had finally arrived. The idea that research might make a difference is integral to our field. However, this is not the case. The press for more ‘useful’ research has been accompanied by the elevation of particular research approaches. The gold standard for research is the randomised controlled trial, a procedure which follows an experimental model often used in medicine and laboratories. There is also in the United Kingdom a new emphasis on longitudinal research, and on statistical approaches which assess the relative influence of various correlates on a designated measurable outcome.

These research traditions all assume a separation of research from the change that they bring about. First there is the research, and then the findings are applied. These research traditions also generally posit a researcher who remains detached from the research process; the research is directed towards something or somebody else. In some of these research traditions, there is adherence to the idea that any form of researcher influence, or any change during the process of research, corrupts the results.

While action researchers may have no particular objections to these kinds of research traditions, the same is not true in reverse. Action research is most often positioned at the bottom of the contemporary methodological hierarchy. This is not simply because it produces research and change at the same time, rather than as sequential events. Nor is it just because researcher subjectivity, enlisted via processes of reflection, is integral to our practice. It is primarily because the goal of action research and change is often seen as slight – our sites are the self, various forms of professional practice, the experiences and understandings of small groups of people. The research that is most valued as being ‘impact’-full occurs at scale. Impacting on one person, a small group or a single institution is seen as insignificant.

The impact agenda thus creates a considerable challenge for action researchers. On the one hand, our practice, by definition, does produce change – change that we can and do ‘evidence’. On the other hand, the change is rarely scale-able. One cannot simply take the results of one piece of action research and apply them elsewhere. What is transferable is the practice of action research itself – cycles of reflection and action.

However, the impact agenda does create an opportunity for us to argue for understanding change differently and to place the various results of our action research projects into a wider arena. Some of the papers in this issue illustrate the possibilities for showing the benefits of action research. The first paper by Daniel Roberts addresses a problem that plagues those concerned with ‘development’ in the majority of the world – how to improve the quality of teaching and learning in primary schools. It is not sufficient to get children to school, it is also crucial that their educational experience is worthwhile and of benefit. Roberts’ paper shows the crucial importance of building shared ownership of the goal of pedagogical change and how grass-roots action research accomplishes significant shifts in teaching and learning. Policies are literally re-written at the local level rather than being remote directives. This paper shows the potential for scaleable process.

The next paper, written by an adult–youth collective from Canada, shows how action research can produce information that is crucial at the local level. Concerned about the issue of high school completion, the collective – brought together through an alternative education programme – investigated the issues that pushed young people out of school. They also explored the kinds of strategies that would help them stay at school until graduation. On one level, the results of this research are unsurprising. There is a vast body of international research about school exclusion, alternative education and the systemic marginalisation and discrimination against particular young people.¹ The congruence in this body of research suggests that the ongoing production of young people leaving high school prematurely can arguably be seen, not as arising from lack of knowledge about high school completion, but rather from inaction about what is already known. This collective paper demonstrates that in order to produce change, knowledge production has to occur at the local level – again and again. It is the ownership of the issues, and the specific local inflections, both derived though local action research, that are crucial in producing shifts in actual processes. The example in this paper raises serious questions about the idea of impact achieved at scale.

The remainder of the papers in this issue provide additional support for the view that action research enlists the minds, hearts and actions of people and that this drives sustainable change. While there is no doubt that big systemic change can be achieved by the manipulation of strategic policy levers, there is also, we argue, a place for small-scale projects which address not only local concerns but also intractable issues. Action research, and its close relatives practitioner research and participatory research, are particularly powerful in such contexts and situations. Action research generates hope, energy, optimism, enthusiasm and new ideas.

Action research does achieve what some would call ‘impact’ but in ways different from those currently in political favour. Perhaps part of the lack of regard for the work undertaken by the action research community stems from the fact that our research projects are never combined as meta-studies. While action research never features in ‘evidence’-based reviews in experimental models of research, there are other ways of conducting a meta-study – the narrative review² and the meta-ethnography (Noblit and Hare 1988), for example. Our community may be better regarded in the discursive struggles over what counts as impact if we are able to develop more systematic ways of looking at our aggregated work around particular topics of concern. This journal, for instance, has published a significant body of work around professional practice for social justice.

The impact agenda is unlikely to go away in a hurry and all signs are that it will increase in importance. As a community, action researchers have a clear choice about whether to see this as a threat or as also, and at the same time, a chance to channel our concerns and our experiences in new – and perhaps more activist – directions.

Pat Thomson
On behalf of the Editors

Notes

1. See https://alternativeducationresearch.files.wordpress.com/2014/10/literature-review-final-15-10-14.pdf.

2. See the guide to their conduct: http://www.huidziekten.nl/diversen/opleiding/CATDatabase/guidetowritingreviews.pdf.