Editorial

In this issue of Educational Action Research, we find articles that report on studies done in every continent except for South America, using a variety of methods and approaches to action research including self-study, collaborative action research, and second-order action research. However, while they differ in these ways, there are strong similarities among them. One is that although there are many possible contexts, settings, and fields of practice in which one can do educational action research, the focus of six of the articles in this issue is on teacher education, either pre-service or in-service. A second similarity is that most of the authors use what Eleni Katsarou described in her article in this issue as a pragmatic approach to action research. To Katsarou, pragmatism includes a focus on contextualized problem-solving that can be evaluated in terms of usefulness, functionality, and practicality; the incorporation of moral and political values; the dialectical production of knowledge; and the need for cooperation among practitioners. We only see evidence of what she calls the multi-paradigmatic character of action research, which is how it draws upon positivism, pragmatism, hermeneutics, critical theory, and postmodernism, in Sheelagh Chadwick’s analysis of the educational situation in Botswana, as well as in the book reviewed in this issue, Professional Learning in Higher Education and Communities, both of which use a critical perspective.

I now provide brief summaries of the remainder of the articles before turning to my thoughts about how the articles related to teacher education fit with one another.

Sarah Quebec Fuentes and Mark Bloom engaged in an action research study that was initiated by a conflict that arose in a course taught by Bloom for pre-service elementary teachers (PSTs) at a university in the United States. When he communicated his dissatisfaction with the students’ work to them on an assignment, they ‘expressed anger, frustration, uncertainty, and discomfort’ (p. 6). To uncover the source of the conflict, Bloom, with the help of Fuentes, engaged in structured reflection on his goals for the course, and engaged the PSTs in a similar reflection on their goals. Using a goal-oriented framework, Fuentes and Bloom found that the conflict was due to the mismatch between his mastery goal orientation and the students’ performance goal orientation. Their findings underscore the importance of uncovering students’ orientation to learning, and to modify them when one is using innovative approaches in teacher education.

Chunmei Yan engaged in 2nd order action research on pre-service English as a Foreign Language (EFL) teachers’ engagement in research in China. The PSTs found it to be an ‘exciting valuable practical learning experience’ and that it was a ‘holistic experience of learning and growth particularly because of the coping with various challenges’ (p. 8). The PSTs became more positive toward research as a way of learning about teaching. Some also said that it changed their attitudes about their individual accountability, the role of collaboration and sharing findings and the benefits of mutual respect. Yan found that the students’ research helped to uncover areas in the program in which students needed more support. He also was convinced of the empowering effects of action research. Finally, he argued that because this was not a research-focused course, it demonstrated how action research can be embedded in other types of courses.

The article by Said Juma, Elina Lehtomäkia and Aimo Naukkarinen reported on collaborative action research (CAR) as a form of continuous professional development among primary school teachers in Zanzibar. Twenty teachers and administrators engaged in CAR to foster the use of inclusive pedagogy in their schools. Each school team identified a problem they felt needed to be addressed to make their teaching more inclusive of students with differences. In one school, it was the need to make the appropriate materials and methods available to all teachers; in the other, it was reducing absenteeism on Fridays. Juma et al. found that the two CAR teams were successful in addressing their problems. While they found positive effects of the teachers’ participation in CAR, including the empowerment of the teachers to improve their practice, they also uncovered many of the challenges others had found when encouraging in-service teacher to engage in AR. These included lack of time, the pull of their usual responsibilities, and the lack of support from their colleagues who were not part of the CAR teams.

Although Ethiopia has made action research an important part of its educational reform policies, AR is rarely practiced in its schools. Mulugeta Yayeh Worku identified several possible reasons for this, including teacher educators’ lack of interest in doing AR, limited resources in schools, and teachers’ lack of training in its methods. To mitigate these obstacles and to improve university-school linkages, Worku collaborated with four primary teachers in a resource-poor school to support their doing of AR. In the collaboration, he helped the teachers to identify problems that they could address, such as lack of student participation in classes and their low performance. He also engaged the teachers in context-based training in AR, including the preparation of a manual in the local language, Amharic. Finally, Worku assisted the teachers in their doing of AR. He found that all the goals of the project were met, including ‘developing practitioners’ action research knowledge, skills, and confidence; enabling practitioners to identify classroom problems and solve them through action research projects; and improving the school–college linkage’ (p. 7).

The educational system in Botswana, like those in many countries in Africa, still feels the effects of European colonization. Sheelagh Chadwick, in this insightful theoretical piece, analyzed the current situation for music education in Botswana from a critical theory perspective to identify what she called educational battlegrounds: ‘the tension between learner-centered approaches mandated by policy and the reality of teacher-centered practices; and the view of the purpose of education as utilitarian rather than kagisano (social harmony) and democracy’ (p. 1). The first is an effect of more than a century of Western educational influences, while the second has emerged more recently as a result of neoliberal forces including the global accountability movement. Chadwick argues drawing upon the successes with action research in Namibia and South Africa for the use of in-service teachers’ action research to transform the teaching and learning of music in Botswana.

In their article Maria Elena González Alfaya, Maria Ángeles Olivares García and Rosario Mérida Serrano report on the use of action research to promote the learning of and use by student teachers and their classroom teachers of a project approach to teaching in early childhood classrooms. They focus on the case of Alfonsi, who along with her classroom teacher instituted project work centered on music education. The impetus for the focus was that several of the children had received musical instruments as holiday presents. By beginning with the children and involving the families in this project approach, Alfonsi’s collaboration with the teacher, the university researcher, and a member of the LEA’s professional development staff transformed how she thought about teaching from ‘a directive and controlling position, characteristic of a transmissive teaching model, toward positions that are closer to the children and more in line with their rhythms and needs’ (p. 16). In addition, she learned how to use evaluation data to improve her practice, and to develop the knowledge and skills needed to implement a project approach to early childhood education.

Many of us in higher education find ourselves being strongly urged to shift some or all of our teaching to an online format. While an online, asynchronous delivery of courses seems to be ideally suited to transmission modes of instruction, there are significant questions about its capability to promote the types of in-depth, critical reflection needed for collaborative action research. To begin to answer these questions, Susan Salter, Tracy Douglas and David Kember compared the quality of exchanges in face-to-face (via videoconferencing) meetings and online, asynchronous discussions using a course management system. They found that the face-to-face discussion was important for generating interest and commitment among the participants, and that it resulted in them raising a wide range of topics for investigation. They also found that the topics discussed in the asynchronous sessions were explored more thoroughly, there was more depth to the discussions, and because the discussion forum was arranged by threads, they were more coherent.

As I noted above, Katsarou raised the issue of the current multi-paradigmatic nature of action research. While there is much in the theoretical literature about action research that suggests that, we do not see so much of that in the articles that make up this issue. In fact, what we find is the use of very similar theoretical perspectives, and for the most part, a focus on the same topic – the learning of how to teach using action research. This focus even crosses educational levels from those who teach the youngest children to those who teach in college or university settings. What seems to be missing, though, is how the knowledge about action research and the knowledge generated through the doing of action research are accumulated in some way to improve teaching and learning beyond the scope of the individual studies.

Ken Zeichner explored the problem of lack of knowledge accumulation in his article about self-studies in teacher education (Zeichner 2007). Although some may differ with me, I have argued elsewhere that self-study is one of the many varieties of action research (Feldman, Paugh, and Mills 2004; Feldman 2017). Therefore, I believe that Zeichner’s argument is relevant to much of the field of educational action research. He found from his participation in a panel organized by the American Educational Research Association (AERA) on synthesizing research on pre-service teacher education, that it was difficult to make connections across studies because of differing ways that concepts were defined, the often limited presentations of the research methods used, and that the researchers frequently did not locate the studies in broader programmatic, institutional, or policy contexts. While the articles in this issue do not suffer from all of these shortcomings that Zeichner found while working on the panel, and in fact they all address at least some of these issues, they do suffer from the final shortcoming that Zeichner found – very few of the studies that the panel examined ‘were situated as part of programs of research on particular issues or problems where researchers consciously build on the work of others and establish chains of inquiry’ (p. 37). He continued that while in the self-studies that the panel reviewed, there was clear evidence that the researchers benefited personally and professionally (Noffke 1997), ‘there has been little attention to how we can begin to accumulate knowledge across these individual studies in a way that will influence policy makers and other teacher education practitioners’ (p. 37). Zeichner argues that one way to do this is to situate the studies so that they build on existing work in the area to make a contribution to the knowledge that we have in that area. Examples in teacher education of these areas, which is what he means by research programs, include comparisons of different pedagogical approaches (Fuentes and Bloom; Salter, Douglas and Kember), preparing teachers for diverse populations (Juma, Lehtomäkia and Naukkarinen), the role of field experiences (Alfaya, García and Serrano), and the role of practitioner research in teacher education (Chadwick; Worku; Yan). As you can see, these areas were addressed in some way by one or more articles in this issue. However, if these studies and others are to make the contribution that Zeichner is asking for, then these authors, and all authors writing about the doing of action research, need to ‘build on each other’s work conceptually, theoretically, and methodologically’ (Zeichner 2007, 40), and to show how their findings add to and build our knowledge and understanding of action research.

None of what Zeichner and I are calling for is possible in our journal without the important work done by our panel of reviewers. It is through their careful reading and re-reading of the manuscripts along with their thoughtful and supportive comments and suggestions to authors that we are able to produce this journal. We have published the list of reviewers for this volume of Educational Action Research in this issue to recognize and thank them for the contributions they have made in making EARJ a high quality journal.

Allan Feldman
On behalf of the Editors