Who does action research and what responsibilities do they have to others?

One of the many complexities which action researchers are conscious of, and even embrace, one which is sometimes taken for granted by others, is that of who is involved in research. This is not just a question of participation as a different way of saying ‘passive involvement’. Rather it is one of active engagement. This is about relationships between different people, and also relationships between people, actions, and knowledge. For many action researchers this is not solely a technical question, but rather a moral and ethical concern. This raises ideas familiar to many action researchers including positionality, collaboration, collegiality, facilitation, and critical friendship (Herr and Anderson 2005; Townsend 2014; Swaffield 2008). Much of what draws people to action research is the desire to work as a part of a community, often because they are dissatisfied with the norms of research which position people as objects of study (Gibson 1986). This issue of Educational Action Research addresses many of these issues of people and positionality. In so doing, it is appropriate that it follows issue 27.1, the first part of a double special issue on knowledge democracy (Rowell and Feldman 2019). This issue, 27.2, although perhaps less explicitly, shares many of the concerns which the special issue on Kowledge Democracy, and the conference from which it arose, sought to address.

Although the word ‘educational’ appears in the title of the journal, Educational Action Research accepts contributions from, and wishes to be of relevance to, researchers in multiple disciplines. This issue of 10 articles and two book reviews includes authors from 12 countries working in a range of sectors. It also brings together pieces with differing forms of relationships between people in action research. In the first article, ‘Scale-referenced, summative peer assessment in undergraduate interpreter training: self-reflection from an action researcher’, Sang-Bin Lee is both the author and the action researcher. Writing in the first person, Lee provides an account of how he developed assessment practices in his university through successive action research cycles. This shows the benefit to be gained from such reflective inquiry, which embeds research in practice, in this instance, educational practices. The second article poses the question of participation through the concept of student voice, a common interest of action researchers and a topic much discussed in this journal. The authors, Halliday, Kern, Garrett and Turnbull, present a study of a participatory approach to developing positive education in a single case study school. In their article entitled “The student voice in wellbeing: a case study of participatory action research in positive education” the authors argue, and present supporting evidence, that involvement in such a pupil voice initiative has direct benefits for the pupils who take part.

In these first two articles we transition from an account of personal involvement in action research to an account of involving others. The third and fourth articles in this issue look at this question of involvement as being one of ‘inclusion’. In ‘Collaborative action research: facilitating inclusion in schools’, Messiou presents data from a project which involved eight schools across three countries. This study employed collaborative action research to develop inclusive school practices. By emphasising collaborative action research Messiou draws attention to the importance of involvement in the process of action research. Furthermore, the focus on developing inclusion in schools shows how action research can enable greater involvement in education. The fourth article also explicitly refers to inclusion, in this instance the inclusion of families in schools. In their article, ‘Can schools become an inclusive space shared by all families? Learnings and debates from an action research project in Catalonia’, Beneyto, Castillo, Collet-Sabé and Tort report on an action research study undertaken with teachers from seven schools. Their aim was to see how schooling could be made more inclusive, especially in the challenging contexts in which these schools were based, and again, their account emphasises multiple levels of participation.

The next article, much like that by Missou, is concerned with collaborative action research, this time within the context of teacher professional development. In ‘Collaborative inquiry as an authentic form of professional development for preschool practitioners’, Black, who is based in the USA, explains how collaborative action research projects enabled participating preschool teachers to become actively involved in the development of practice, and indeed, in deciding on quality criteria for practice. The sixth article also addresses themes of teacher development. In ‘The Change Room promotes teachers’ agency to change their practice’ Thorgeirsdottir makes use of the change cycle drawn from Engeström (1999) to develop an intervention in a school in Iceland which enables teachers to become active agents of change. Here the concept of agency is used to show how participation in action research can both facilitate change and allow teachers to drive that change.

However, whilst action research promotes more collaborative, collegial and participatory practices between people, these relationships are not always easy to develop or sustain. The seventh article in this collection shows just how difficult this can be. In ‘Challenges of knowledge production and knowledge use among researchers and policymakers’, Twalo shows how knowledge and power are intimately connected and how the interplay between them can complicate attempts to develop change through action research. This raises questions of morality and ethics in action research, concepts which are also addressed in the eighth article in this issue, ‘Ethics of care in participatory health research: Mutual responsibility in collaboration with co-researchers’. Here Groot, Vink, Haveman, Huberts, Schout and Abma explain how the concept of ethics of care can transcend the varied requirements of the differing contexts in which participatory health research is applied. This provides a framework for undertaking participatory health research which could have implications for all applications of action research. Brydon-Miller and Coghlan also address the issue of ethics in the ninth article. In ‘First-, second- and third-person values-based ethics in educational action research: personal resonance, mutual regard and social responsibility’, the authors engage in a discussion based around two questions: (a) what is the process of valuing in the structure of human knowing? and (b) how might individual values become collective values in the context of educational action research? This is exemplified in reflective activities called ‘structured ethical reflections’.

While the first nine articles in this issue all report on applications of action research or on initiatives which raise questions for action research, the final article, authored by Blackberry, Kearney and Glen and entitled ‘Developing an interpretive learning framework for understanding action research projects’, presents an approach to studying action research. This approach is rooted in interpretive methodology and is a response to judgements about the quality of action research which are limited to the extent to which it is able to contribute to existing improvement aspirations. As the article explains, adopting this interpretive approach enables the authors to place more emphasis on the benefits of action research to the action researchers themselves.

This issue concludes with two book reviews. In the first of these, Mirhosseini and Noori provide a review of a methods text entitled ‘Doing qualitative research: the craft of naturalistic inquiry (2nd ed.)’ by Beuving and de Vries. In the second, Compton-Lilly reviews ‘Practitioner research in early childhood: international issues and perspectives’ edited by Newman and Woodrow. Both books are believed to be of interest to action researchers.