Editorial

Educational Action Research serves a diverse and vibrant community who believe that research can and should strive to make a direct difference in the world. We work with multiple networks across the globe. Our aim is to contribute to the community of action research by providing a place where people can publish their work, discuss and debate the nature and ideals of action research, and contribute to the development of this community. It is not at all unusual for us to be the first place action researchers or people working in related disciplines choose to publish their work. We are delighted to fulfil this function and aspire to continue doing so. But, like any journal, we cannot publish everything we receive. To try and help people new to publishing, we have previously shared some thoughts on how best to meet the expectations of our reviewers, editors and the wider community. In addition to the instructions to authors on the journal home page, we have written an editorial on how to avoid being rejected (Townsend and Thomson 2012) and three editors have been interviewed on the scope, interests and process of publication for educational action research. This can be found at: http://www.educationarena.com/expertInterviews/interviewcategory2/reac.asp.

This issue begins with another source of advice to prospective authors. To try to better understand why articles are rejected, we have undertaken a review of rejected articles and of the reviewer comments relating to them. The aim was to try to establish whether there are common mistakes authors make before submitting which make it more likely that their manuscripts will be rejected. From this, we have written a piece which provides advice on how to avoid such mistakes. This is presented in the form of an action research update and appears as the first piece of writing after this editorial.

One of the joys of being a journal concerned with the process, or in some people’s eyes, the methodology of educational action research is that our authors come from what are sometimes quite diverse disciplinary, cultural and national contexts. What can be equally diverse is the position of the writer in relation to the subject of their writing. We are a journal which publishes pieces about action research and related disciplines. For example, we frequently receive articles discussing participatory research. To publish on this topic, authors can be writing about what they have learnt from their own practice so it is their own, individual, work which is the focus. But they can also write about how they have worked collaboratively with others, or helped others to undertake action research. Both action research and participatory research ask big questions of the role of research and the relationships between research knowledge and practice. These are questions about the nature and generation of knowledge which lend themselves to theoretical or conceptual analysis. The use of critical theory, and of Haberman especially, is one such example of how people writing in the journal have used theory to address big questions. As well as accounts of the conduct of action research or participatory research we also welcome articles which want to draw from theory to open up areas of debate, to challenge conventional wisdom, to deepen our understanding of action research and to open up new possibilities in thinking about our work. So long as they address the themes of educational action research, they are welcome.

This issue of Educational Action Research is distinctive because it represents exactly this diversity of positionality (for more on this use of positionality, see Herr and Anderson 2005). This collection of articles spans this continuum, from pieces reflecting on individual practices through collectively conducted action research to theoretical, conceptual contributions. Broadly they sit in two groups. The first is explicitly concerned with participatory research (a close ally of action research). These are articles where the author(s) is trying to generate knowledge and achieve change through approaches which support greater involvement of the people whose experience is represented by this knowledge, and who will be affected by these changes. The second group refers more directly to action research. This nicely illustrates the issue of positionality, just as it illustrates some of the diversity of the forms and subjects of articles submitted to Educational Action Research. Although the title of the journal includes the term ‘action research’, we are interested in other disciplines which address similar issues and many of our authors are interested in and make use of participatory approaches.

The first of the eight articles in this issue, ‘An Educational Framework for Participatory Action Learning and Action Research (PALAR)’ authored by Ortrun Zuber-Skerritt, explicitly addresses issues related to participatory practices and concepts. Before commenting on the article, however, the editors would like to extend our congratulations to Prof. Zuber-Skerritt on being awarded an Officer of the Order of Australia. This is a considerable achievement and was made on the basis of her contribution to tertiary education, action research and action learning. We are sure all readers of Educational Action Research will join with us in offering our congratulations. The article itself provides a framework for developing education which draws from and applies theoretical and methodological resources and which is based on and draws from, as the author points out, 25 years of experience of this work. In this Prof. Zuber-Skerritt is commentating on a wide areas of scholarship to present a novel formulation informed by years of experience. The second article draws from a similar breadth of experience and is authored by Ferrada and Del Pino. These authors are both based in Chile and they present a model of participatory research which draws on the concept of dialogic-kishu kimkelay ta che. Their work, entitled ‘Dialogic-kishu kimkelay ta che educational research: participatory action research’ aims to ‘create a science of the people’ and this article shows how they bring together communities and cultures to achieve this using participatory approaches. They do this by combining ‘dialogic’, in reference to Freire, and the term ‘kishu kimkelay ta che’ from the Mapuche language. This provides a merging of cultures, knowledge and perception.

There are two more articles which have an explicit focus on participatory research. Each differs from the first two in the sense that the authors are writing about a particular project or attempt to use and apply participatory research, rather than drawing on extensive experience to comment across an entire field. The third article in this issue is entitled ‘Participation in health through the construction of encounters: a micropolitical approach’ and is written by five collaborators from Spain and Brazil. These authors, Benet, da Cruz, Santoro-Lamelas, Merhy and Pla, present an argument for participation in health policy design and delivery, drawing upon their own experiences in this area. Their article derives from analysis of narratives of experiences of using health services. The paper which follows, the fourth to discuss participatory research, in this instance specifically participatory action research, has been written by seven authors, namely Rudman, Bailey-Ross, Kendal, Mursic, Lloyd, Ross and Kendal. Like Ferrada and Del Pino, they use participatory methods in science. In their article, entitled ‘Multidisciplinary exhibit design in a Science Centre: a participatory action research approach’, they describe how they use Participatory Action Research in order to enable university researchers and Science Centre professionals to work together to co-design Informal Science Learning exhibits.

The Rudman et al. article provides a useful transition between the first group of articles which explicitly refer to participatory research and the following four which are written by authors who are also action researchers and who write about their own use of action research. These are up-close, sometimes very personal, accounts of attempts to use action research and what can, and indeed was, learnt from them. The first of this group of articles, and the fifth article in this issue, is written by three authors, Solvason, Cliffe and Snowden. The title is ‘Researching in school—creating a meaningful school/university alliance: a reflection’. Given that this article is about action research partnerships, it is appropriate that it is co-authored by people from the different partner organizations involved. The article provides an engaging first-person account of a successful partnership to develop literacy learning in a UK school. But this particular benefit from action research is not the main topic of this article, although it is of course a very important element of the overall story. Rather, the article is concerned with voice, and the thorny question of how different partners, in what is meant to be a collaborative process of action research, are able to have their voices heard. Voice is a popular topic for action researchers and this article builds on a long history of others who have addressed related issues in this journal.

The next article, entitled ‘Enquiry-based learning workshop for deep learning in Middle Eastern classrooms—an action research approach’ is single authored by Indraganti. This article provides an account of how the author used action research to transform their approach to teaching in Qatar University. It describes both how the students benefitted from the pedagogical changes, but also how the author did as well, turning them, in their own words, into a reflecting practitioner. In this piece, Indraganti is recounting a personal tale, and so is positioned both as narrator, and subject.

The next article also offers a first person account of using action research. In a paper entitled ‘Cycles within cycles: instilling structure into a mentoring self-study action research project’, Nyanjom reflects and comments on what can sometimes seem to be a fundamental aspect of action research—the idea that it is cyclical. This, again, is a recurring theme in action research publications (McNiff 1984) and this article questions just how useful it actually is to view action research as such. Many use the metaphor of cycles as a means of describing a process through which action research should progress. These cycles seem to have some benefits, in that they at least imply a sequence to action research, but they are also, as the author points out, constraining. The alternative, Nyanjom argues, is to draw on the concept of mess (Cook 1998). Again, in this article, the author is providing a personal account of what was learnt from doing action research.

The concluding article is entitled ‘Action research on a collegial model of peer observations’. It is single authored by Tezcan-Unal who writes about the use of action research to develop peer observations, employed as a part of professional development practices at Zayed University, Dubai. This article outlines how this action research progressed, how it made use of appreciative inquiry, and what knowledge claims arose from it. While following on from the previous accounts of action research, this is slightly different in that the narrator is recounting a wider project involving a number of people. They are discussing what they learnt from this, but also relating a wider piece of work with implications for knowledge at individual and collective levels.

This issue then concludes with two book reviews, both of sizeable and significant texts. The first of these, written by Wakeman, reviews a book edited by Brown, Sawyer and Norris, entitled Forms of Practitioner Reflexivity; Critical, Conversational, and Arts-Based Approaches. The focus of this volume on reflexivity touches on another common area of interest for action researchers. Indeed as this has in the past been a popular topic for authors, we suspect many readers will be interested in this text on the subject. The second review is written by Martinez-Vargas and concerns The Palgrave International Handbook of Action Research. The editors of this book, Rowell, Bruce, Shosh and Riel, have produced a text which provides a rich source of information for readers about the histories, interpretations and also challenges of action research. Again we anticiapte that this will make a significant contribution to the field of action researtch and so will be of interest to our readers.