Editorial

Editorials that cover disparate articles often pose challenges for the editor but still need to guide interested and regular readers of the journal. Thus I have grouped the articles by whether they focused on students, teachers, or educational systems. In the student group there are four articles, beginning with Nicole Mockler and Susan Groundwater-Smith’s analysis of how students’ roles in action research have been represented in Educational Action Research from the 1990s until the present. The second is Mervi Kaukko’s article about the challenges of including 12 unaccompanied asylum-seeking girls from Somalia, Angola, and the Democratic Republic of Congo in participatory action research with the aim to develop accessible and inviting activities for themselves. The third article in this group (Downes et al.) reports on middle school teachers and their student co-researchers engaged in action research on the use of technology to improve their teaching and learning. In the fourth article Bills, Cook, and Wexler report on their 12-year critical action research project to provide a way for Australian young adults who had left school to re-enter formal schooling. Through conversations with multiple stakeholders, and most importantly the school leavers, they developed and implemented a sustainable model of education to serve these young adults. While the authors position themselves as the action researchers, it is clear from their article that the students were their co-researchers who studied and reported on their lives and those of their peers in community forums and in a magazine that they published.

The second group has a focus on teachers, including the article on in-service teachers’ action research to incorporate music therapy into their teaching of children with autism spectrum disorder (McFerran et al.). The role of critical friend has been explored previously in this journal (see for example, Bennett et al. 1997; Kember et al. 1997; van Swet et al. 2009). Ann-Christine Wennergren adds to this literature by exploring the issues that arise when an outside agency requires teachers to pair up as critical friends in a school-wide effort to build structures to implement the vision of ‘Learning for all based on research and proven experience.’ The final article in this group is a review of research on action research in graduate education (Burnaford and Vaughan). Although the review primarily draws from North American literature, it problematises those aspects of university-based action research that are relevant for all readers of this journal. In particular, they address the ethical issues related to doing action research as coursework, including the role of institutional review boards and human subject research.

Finally, this issue includes a report on the use of dialogue conferences as part of a three-year participatory action research project to improve primary education and agricultural education in Tanzania. In their article Ahmad, Gjøtterud, and Krogh describe the ways in which the dialogue conferences were conceived, implemented, and evaluated, and importantly the contradictions inherent in a design that is brought into a community by outsider researchers.

As can be seen in what I have written, the grouping of the articles as focusing on students, teachers, and education systems flows nicely. However, as I read and re-read the articles, it became apparent to me that there were at least two themes that tied together all of them: the issues of power and trust. In each of the articles there are power dimensions at play. These include between teacher and student, between teacher and administrator, between action researchers and academic researchers, and between outside researchers and community members. For example, Mockler and Groundwater-Smith organise their review along the issues of the following:

1) nature of power and authority as it is exercised in educational settings (in the main schools); 2) the processes that can be employed to authentically engage students as partners in reform; and, 3) the ways in which the ownership of initiatives are best understood.

Not unexpectedly, we see in the articles by Kaukko and by Bills, Cook, and Wexler how the same types of issues arise when the students are both participants and co-researchers. Similar issues of power can be seen in Wennergren’s study of the imposition of action research on teachers, and how the use of dialogue conferences resulted in tension between outsiders and insiders in Tanzanian communities and schools.

I end this introduction to the issue with some thoughts about the role of trust in action research and how it gets played out in these articles. There are at least two ways in which trust is manifested in action research (Feldman 2015): issues related to the trustworthiness of action research (for example, Feldman 2007; Heikkinen, Huttunen, and Syrjälä 2007; Winter 2002); and issues related to the trust among those engaged in action research collaboratively (for example, Baskerville and Goldblatt 2009; Day and Hadfield 2004; Langley 2012). We can see both of these manifestations in the articles in this issue. The first is especially apparent in Burnaford and Vaughan’s review as they deal with the problematic nature of human subject research, and with academics’ questions about the validity and rigour of action research. It is the second, however, that I find most interesting in this issue because it includes not only the trust that action researchers have for one another, but also the trust between action researchers and outside facilitators. In these types of situations I prefer a definition of trust provided by Tschannen-Moran and Hoy: ‘One party's willingness to be vulnerable to another party based on the confidence that the latter party is (a) benevolent, (b) reliable, (c) competent, (d) honest, and (e) open’ (2000, 556). This is a form of relational trust that is dependent upon all parties genuinely listening to each other, to extend themselves beyond the requirements of their formal roles, to be competent what they contribute to the group, and to have personal integrity. It also requires them to be open to the vulnerability that they have in trusting the others, and the vulnerability that the others place themselves in others trusting them. Finally, as Carolyn McLeod (2015) argued in her article on trust in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, relational trust allows us to depend on others when we know that no outside force compels them to be trustworthy.

We can see the importance that relational trust plays in all of the articles in this issue of Educational Action Research. Mockler and Groundwater-Smith remind us that ‘engaging with student voice is both risky and challenging business in this troubling age’. If we are to proceed when there is risk and we are vulnerable, we need to have trust in others that they will be supportive, understanding, or at least open to hear us. Students are almost always in a vulnerable position relative to teachers, administrators, social workers, and others. The unaccompanied girls in Finland were especially so, and if the participatory action research with them was to be successful Kaukko needed to build trust in the girls so that they would trust her attempts to work with them to help themselves. There were multiple levels of relational trust at play when the middle school students collaborated with their teachers on action research about the incorporation of technology into their teachers’ practice, including that the teachers and students had to develop a trusting relationship with the outsiders who were the originators of the overall project and the authors of the article. In many ways the article by Bills, Cook, and Wexler about how they partnered with students, administrators, other teachers, and community members to develop and sustain their re-entry school is a story of how they developed the relational trust among all stakeholders, and used that trust, combined with their belief that they could make a difference, to respond to the moral imperative they felt to offer students a second chance.

Relational trust was also important in the articles about teachers engaged in action research. The music teachers needed to believe that the music therapist was competent, and to trust in her belief, as well as those of the authors of the article, that the incorporation of music therapy into the teachers’ practice would be beneficial for the students with autism. This type of belief is fundamental to relational trust and the power of it is evident in their conclusion that the most useful feature of the action research was relationship building. The importance of relational trust was also evident in Wennergren’s piece about the role of critical friends. As I have already noted, McLeod argued that relational trust develops when no outside force compels participants to be trustworthy. In this case there was an outside force – the local authority that imposed the development plan on the schools and the teachers. Therefore it was up to the university partners to work to develop the trust that would result in successful professional learning communities, critical friendships, and school reform. Ahmad, Gjøtterud, and Krogh had a similar problem when incorporating the use of dialogue conferences in school improvement in Tanzania. As outsiders they needed to develop the trust of the teachers, administrators, and community members with whom they worked. They were aware that by initiating the action research project, their actions were undemocratic. However, they believed – and found – that the dialogue conferences were in themselves a way to create a trusting, democratic relationship among the participants. Finally, as you read through the articles in this issue, I believe you will see how the authors made problematic and addressed the issues that build and damage trust. In doing so we see how the growth of trust enables teachers, academics, administrators, students, and community members to work together to improve the work and lives of all.

Allan Feldman
On behalf of the Editors