I feel very privileged to be invited to assist the team of editors of EARJ, and I would like to use this opportunity to welcome any new readers to this journal. I hope that these articles serve both as a support and as a challenge; support in that you enjoy a sense of identification with the researchers’ concerns and interests, and challenge in that you may be stimulated to address some of the emerging issues and approaches within your own professional and social practices. These accessible articles provide fresh perspectives and suggest new forms of expression to assist you in designing more responsive approaches in your own research. I hope that they will inspire you to offer your own accounts from all areas of practice showing how you have helped further our understanding of the broad landscape of action research.
This edition of EARJ presents contributions from 10 countries across 4 continents. Inevitably, many of these contrasting research environments will be very different from the reader’s. However, it may well be that the professional dilemmas which surface in disadvantaged and under-resourced environments are also experienced by action researchers in affluent settings: for example, status barriers between researcher and participants may differ by degree but relative prestige will present barriers in any situation. Hopefully, reflecting on contrasting geographical contexts might enable readers to be more reflexive about their own situations. The safety of distance can enhance personal perspective and help us recognise what we share in common across all societies. The following articles include a number of project leaders’ accounts of their attempts to improve provision in small- and large-scale action research activities in the field of teacher education, and these are accompanied by a literature review of previous studies which used action research to promote teacher education as a route to achieving school improvement.
However, we begin this issue with Ozano and Khatri’s very accessible article from the health sector, which shares the experience of attempting to introduce a Participatory Action Research initiative aimed at improving rural healthcare in Cambodia. In a reflexive account, the authors highlight the assumptions that Westernised researchers may make which fail to address the complexities of working with research assistants and interpreters in other cultures. The account illustrates the fluid and changing nature of research roles, status and relationships for lead researchers, research assistants and local practitioners through the different phases of the research. To facilitate cross-cultural participative research, the mediating research assistant, acting as interpreter, became a ‘cultural navigator’, guiding researchers and participants to fulfil their mutual objectives. Ozano and Khatri demonstrate how despite being prepared for cultural challenges, it was only through the increased contributions of the research assistants that they could appreciate that western concepts of ‘critical reflection’ were likely to be avoided in a culture where any questioning of authority had recently been met with a genocidal response. The researchers needed to be guided by the research assistants’ sensitivities to cultural inhibitions if they were to enable the Community Health Workers to improve local healthcare within the prevailing culture. This account provides an accessible working introduction to ‘positionality’ and ‘reflexivity’, and the importance of working to make the researcher’s subjectivity transparent when attempting Participative Action Research activities. Although this account relates to researchers and participants from starkly contrasting cultures, the dilemmas of self-awareness and positionality will have resonance for researchers everywhere, as many PAR Community Development initiatives are based upon research commissioned by those in power and led by experienced professionals whose research status could distance them from those with most to benefit from participatory research projects.
Gardner’s paper also concerns itself with the positionality of the academic leading a PAR project; how does the reporting of PAR experience ensure that the voices of all participants are honestly represented in academic reports? Gardner’ challenge was to ensure that the voices of three young people and two teachers who had been engaged on a youth ‘voice and vision’ project were fully represented. She adopted the pragmatic compromise of encouraging her co-researchers to contribute to the ‘Findings’ section of project articles, whilst as the University-based lead researcher, she took responsibility for the introduction, literature review, methodology and discussion sections. This provided a mediated introduction to academic writing for inexperienced ‘co-researchers’, and Gardner described the process of co-writing as transformative, providing all writers with new critical understandings of their participatory research findings whilst also strengthening the group’s identities and relationships. This approach might prove a particularly useful stimulus for future participatory action researchers. The participants in this study were very articulate; how might future researchers create mediating strategies to ensure the accounts of the less literate and articulate can be democratically represented? This research embraced a small team of participatory researchers; how might those on the margins of larger teams be given fuller voices in reports? How might reports be different if all participants co-wrote and negotiated the ‘Discussion’, in addition to contributing to the ‘Findings’?
In the third paper, Greathouse employed classroom action research to improve the self-efficacy of 15–16-year-old students on a remedial reading programme. Through adapting the curriculum content, she challenged the deficit model of remedial education to reposition the students as active participants rather than as spectators of the world. Greathouse coins her new approach ‘bibliontology’, as she attempted to progress beyond traditional discussion of social issues in literature by encouraging students to more actively research local social issues (e.g. conservation) and to make personal action plans to engage with a local civic project, thus building the social confidence of remedial readers. Students’ voices endorsed this as a transformative experience, and this intervention appears to have also impacted positively on students’ reading test scores. This account encourages readers to experiment with finding ways to realise their underpinning values in practice, and it also invites future researchers to more fully explore how students’ feedback might modify the teacher’s initial well-intentioned designs. Follow-up research might also help teachers to engage in pragmatic critique of the approaches employed in the intervention by highlighting why some students responded more positively rather than others.
Karagiorgi et al. report on how two Cypriot school principals led a staff participative action research approach to school improvement. The principals encouraged all teachers to focus on school improvement issues which they recognised as being important for fulfilling their educational aims and values. This study outlines the process of teachers designing and evaluating their new practices, and thus creating a new sense of collaborative community development within the schools. The principals’ experience of working with teaching staff enabled them to refocus beyond immediate administrative demands, and to rediscover the underpinning purposes of their professional endeavours, which helped ‘nourish a culture, receptive to school improvement’. However, the article’s authors (from academia and the Ministry of Education) express frustration that, although the study enjoyed catalytic validity (showing change in participants’ perspectives) and democratic validity, there was a lack of process and outcomes validity – empirical evidence of the impact on students’ achievement that could be shared with policy-makers. This is an interesting site of tension for action researchers in a world funded by policy-makers seeking quantitative measures to justify their continued investments. The challenge is to discover how action researchers might negotiate indications of change which preserve the integrity of the educational process.
Wei Liu and Quiang Wang’s ethnographic study of four teachers attempting action research studies provides a fascinating insight into the Chinese system of ‘Teaching Research Groups’ which are established features within each school. The mandatory collaborative approach to teacher development appeared to be unwittingly restrictive at times, with individual experienced teachers needing both support and challenge to venture into disclosing their personal uncertainties of practice. This has resonance far beyond the Chinese context, as the popular rhetoric and pressures to be collaborative might make it difficult for individuals to express individual insecurities. Through his role in observing the teacher research process, Liu was able to support teachers to overcome their inhibitions and each began to implement practical solutions to their teaching challenges. Liu suggests that although the Chinese ‘Teaching Research’ approach reinforces the collective teacher identity, there should be more attention given to teachers’ needs within research teams. The success of teachers’ research in China is currently judged against journal publication; Liu argues that this proves counter-productive, and he suggests that teachers’ practical research should be shared as part of ‘Demonstration Classes’ to colleagues, as this would emphasise the practical dimension of teacher learning. He also suggests that teachers’ narratives of their practice provide a more realistic way of communicating the holistic and relational aspects of teaching in a format that is accessible for teachers as writers and readers.
In ‘Action Research – connecting practice and theory’, Ulvik et al. investigate how setting an action research task as part of student-teachers’ practical experience helps them develop the necessary professional attributes. The authors provide readers with an interesting discussion of how educational theory can and should contribute to student teachers’ professional development, and introduce Kvernbekk’s (Citation2012) helpful distinction between ‘weak’ theory that rests on prejudices and unverified beliefs, and ‘strong’ theory that is tested in practice. They discovered that action research activity created a manageable focus for student-teachers’ reflective learning about professional practice. The more successful outcomes demonstrated how student-teachers used the language of theory to talk about teaching, and how they had gradually incorporated an action research ‘stance’ into their professional attitude: more instrumental students regarded the action research tasks merely as a technical project assignment. Importantly, Ulrik et al. found that action research also empowered student-teachers to have greater confidence in asserting their moral and social values through their teaching. However, in conclusion, the authors are cautious of claiming that a positive enquiry stance to teaching could be sustained through the new teachers’ subsequent careers unless they were employed in a supportive institutional ethos.
Following a similar approach, in New Zealand, Schwenger employed an action research approach as an accessible tool to help vocational teachers to integrate literacy and numeracy developments as part of their subject teaching. These vocational lecturers had been employed for their industrial expertise and were largely unfamiliar with Higher Education research conventions. This institutional initiative provided lecturers with the time and space to review their practice and to realise the possibilities for changing their relationships with learners as they became more reflective about the ends and means of their teaching. This study shows that action research is not just a technical tool, as self-study inevitably provoked reflection on the wider social issues; for example, the vocational teachers realised that it was their learners with ‘second language’ barriers who were less successful and that social issue was largely outside of the vocational teacher’s institutional remit. So although action research may be initiated with a personal professional development focus, systematic reflection upon participants’ needs often forces consideration of the wider cultural structures. This article concludes that institutions need to expect that action research approaches to teacher development are not quick fixes, and individuals will require sustained support from flexible facilitators as they embed changes in their practice.
In the UK, Linaker explored the potential and limitations of using a quality assurance competence framework as a stimulus for personal reflection on teachers’ professional development needs. Working with a small group of three teachers, the author tried to compare the teachers’ perceptions of their professional development needs before and after completing a self-assessment exercise. Linaker studied the use of teachers’ metaphors to provide an indication of whether the teachers’ thinking about their professional practice had been significantly enhanced by the self-assessment grid. Linaker’s small study concluded that such competence checklists made teachers more defensive and competitive and did not appear to stimulate the intended autonomous self-development. Linaker suggests that future research into teachers’ professional self-evaluation should engage teachers as critical participative action researchers rather than as respondents self-assessing against an externally devised, pre-specified grid of competences. Perhaps, such an approach might become more fully participative and also invite the voices of learners to contribute to teachers’ understanding of their professional development?
Akello and Timmerman describe the challenges for teachers attempting to improve provision in severely under-resourced primary schools in Uganda, and the benefits of adopting an inclusive participatory action research to engage teachers’ committed agency to resolving difficulties. They provide a detailed account of difficulties faced by teachers who managing very large classes of pupils whose variety of home mother tongues differed from the official local language which provided a pathway for pupils eventually receiving instruction in English. Teachers were encouraged to use child-centred pedagogy, yet child-centred mantras were found to be inappropriate with ratios of 90–130 pupils per teacher and an absence of resources for individual learners. This participatory action research approach empowered teachers with a greater sense of agency in designing pragmatic approaches to addressing some of the resource limitations. This account forces readers from more privileged environments to engage with the teaching difficulties; both to try to imagine responses, and also to reflect on the realities of whether our own learner-centred aspirations are ever fully realised even in well-resourced schools. An unusual strength of this educational participative action research account is the stakeholder involvement at all levels, which included pupils, teachers, headteachers, tutors and a district inspector.
The final article is James and Augustin’ review of the literature into teacher-led inquiry to consider how teacher education institutions might harness action research approaches to best effect school improvement. They outline the evolution of educational action research and present some key models and approaches that have helped teachers become more empowered to improve their practice. They identify what they consider to be the fundamental issue facing action research; ‘not whether it can work, but whether it is workable in different contexts’. Whereas teacher education centres do initiate useful short-term individual development work, the challenge for those in teacher education appears to be their capacity to influence the institutional ethos in the schools, in order to sustain individual teachers’ progress and embed the school improvement. Their review concludes that for whole-school improvement to develop from teachers’ action research activities, a process of institutional ‘reculturing’ needs to be in place.
Finally, Jack Whitehead provides a review of Dawn Garbett & Alan Ovens’ collection of researchers’ personal accounts of ‘Being Self-Study Researchers in a Digital World’. Whitehead considers the value of the text for educational action researchers and identifies several potentially useful chapters, whilst also offering suggestions for complementary reading that might develop the book’s themes more comprehensively.
All of these papers provide an invitation to readers to build upon the stimulus they provide and to take forward some of these research initiatives; perhaps readers will adapt suggested approaches, find new opportunities to improve participative engagement, and take confidence in tackling local examples of social injustice. Almost all of these authors make use of the verb ‘allow’ in their articles; this word becomes employed to describe how the action research process has enabled research leaders and participants to become freed from the restrictive blinkers which established practices have constructed. Writers explain how the action research process has empowered them to purposefully review and reconstruct new forms of living and association for both researchers and participants. This frequent claim that action research has ‘allowed’ new ways of thinking emphasises how adopting an action research approach generates an intellectual opportunity that is truly educative in creating new forms of personal, professional and social understanding. Perhaps, the most educational action research can be found in those accounts where researchers’ initial emancipatory expectations have been thwarted. Such honest accounts can invigorate future researchers to reflect on their own situational assumptions and to reimagine more responsive approaches as they work towards enabling greater social justice. We look forward to receiving readers’ articles in which they highlight the fresh challenges (and frustrations) from engaging with emancipatory action research which attempts to further enable, embolden and inspire their own and their participants’ agency.
On behalf of the Editors