Editorial

Every issue of a professional journal is a snapshot in time, a frozen moment within the massive infrastructures of knowledge production and dissemination.¹ This issue of EAR is no different. In this snapshot, nine articles present the work of 17 authors involved in projects in six countries, sharing knowledge produced in a variety of educational practice settings, in keeping with what professional journals do.

What is very different in this issue is how this moment of knowledge production and dissemination fits within a frightening scenario now playing out globally, namely, the COVID-19 pandemic and the associated economic and social strains. Since its discovery in December 2019, the virus has spread to more than 200 countries and killed more than 800,000 people, with the number growing daily.² This pandemic, and the varied societal responses to it, has increased unknowns in key social sectors around the world, including education, healthcare, and human services. Funding, staffing, even the physical presence of students and teachers at educational institutions, have now become hotly debated issues. The pandemic will undoubtedly have an impact on knowledge production and dissemination for many years to come.

All of the articles in the current issue of EAR were completed before COVID-19 made its disastrous appearance on the world stage. They represent a kind of freeze-frame of pre-pandemic educational action research (AR); they also present a unique opportunity for editorial reflection. What does this frozen moment reveal about the state of knowledge generation in educational AR before we plunged into a global public health crisis? And how might pandemic-based and post-pandemic AR differ from the picture we see here?

A snapshot in pre-pandemic time

The nine articles in this issue indicate a healthy state of pre-pandemic theory building, methodological and cultural-setting diversity, and policy-making based on AR. They reveal varied applications of AR across programs in higher education (HE), from teacher training to nursing education, business education, and early childhood education.

Comparing these articles with the five action research variations identified by Somekh and Zeichner (2009) provides a useful framework of continuity for thinking about educational AR from the beginning of the century up to the period before the pandemic. Overall, while four of the present articles fit the variations they identified, five seem to stretch their interpretation of the remodeling of AR theory and practice.

Cebrián’s article, for example, appears to fit Somekh and Zeichner’s categorization of AR tied to political upheaval and transition. Her project examined efforts by a group of university students, staff, and faculty to ‘embed’ sustainability within their university’s policies and infrastructures. Sustainability is a key topic in efforts to address climate change, and although the project reported here was not on the scale suggested by Somekh and Zeichner, it is indicative of the upheavals and transitions to come in relation to climate change.

Likewise, Mu and Hatch’s article on the use of AR to stimulate change in teaching methods in business schools in China could be seen as an example of Somekh and Zeichner’s second variation, namely state-sponsored educational reform. The authors make clear that the development of the case study approach in Chinese business schools is taking place in the context of central government policy changes, and readers will likely recognize that this is not state-sponsored educational reform based on emancipatory, grassroots empowerment values in AR (Brydon-Miller and Damons 2019; Rowell 2019). As Huang, Wang, and Li (2016) report, education changes in China remain a top-down process and ‘decentralization efforts predominantly involve the transfer of work or tasks rather than genuine distribution of authority or power’ (36). Although this project may be seen as working ‘against the grain of “Western” hegemony’ (Somekh and Zeichner (2009), 11), the application of AR may be an example of co-optation by a central government other than a Western government.

By contrast, Heisenberger and Matischek-Jauk’s article fits within Somekh and Zeichner’s variation of university-led AR conducted in partnership with schools or governments in a larger context of educational reform. Much effort associated with this is found in Austria, and their project builds on this record. Locally sponsored and sustained systemic education reform through AR is the fifth Somekh and Zeichner variation, and another article (Hilli) provides a fine example of this variation. In this instance, three rural schools in Finland collaborated in creating a model for virtual teaching in small rural schools.

Somekh and Zeichner made clear that the variations they identified were ‘indicative rather than definitive’ (18) and that other variations would be identified in time. In fact, five of the articles in this issue involve the use of educational AR to generate new pedagogical practices and program emphases within HE settings. For Papadopoulou, the new practice relates to the development of an AR module within an Early Childhood Education (ECE) program at a university in the UK. From the U.S., Wolf presents an example of self-study in teaching AR. Grounded in third space theory, her work is a kind of meditation on aligning one’s practice in teaching AR in HE with AR core values of empowerment, criticality, and engagement. Magee, Bramble, and Stanley also chose AR as the method for implementing and evaluating a Peer Mentoring program established in an Australian university’s nursing program.

Bertling makes a powerful case for arts-based research as a means to extend and sustain practitioner inquiry and participant engagement in research. On the other hand, Capobianco et al. present their ‘experiences as university science and science education instructors who engaged in AR while learning how to develop and implement a new form of curriculum and instructional practice.’ This finely layered exploration captures both the epistemology of scientific knowledge-creation and the power of AR as a process of change-making in education. In comparing these two articles, readers can almost feel the science education instructors at work in a virtual laboratory of educational change, while Bertling transports us into the process of applying artistic creation to research. Taken together, these five articles may represent an additional variation in educational AR, one in which HE reform itself benefits from faculty-initiated AR.

This is a hopeful development and demonstrates that bridging the research-practice gap begins ‘at home’ and supports the potential of twenty-first century AR in seeking solutions to the challenges of teaching and learning practices in HE. In keeping with this, Sweeney’s book review examines the new edition of Lin Norton’s guide to conducting pedagogical research in universities. Providing both a theoretical grounding and a pragmatic framework for university-based AR, Norton brings vast experience to this second edition, and Sweeney finds the book both a useful guide and ‘an empowering tool for those who are seeking guidance on producing quality pedagogical AR.’

A post-pandemic world of action research

Looking ahead, 2020–2022 likely will be the idea gestation, design and project implementation period for a first wave of AR projects linked to the pandemic (e.g. Call-Cummings, Hauber-Özer, Rowell, and Ross, in press) . Given the time needed for peer review and the logistics of publishing, these projects will probably first appear in professional journals beginning in late-2021 through 2023, with the first post-pandemic projects appearing from 2023 to 2025. What might these two waves of projects contribute to the knowledge base of a world then emerging from a pandemic? Somekh and Zeichner assert that AR is a ‘potent methodology for educational reform precisely because its core principles of combining action with research inevitably challenges the routines of the status quo’ (19). The disruption caused by the pandemic means it has become difficult to define the status quo. We hope that pandemic-related and post-pandemic AR will reflect all the potency of AR in responding to varied challenges. However, it may be that the flourishing of pedagogical research in universities will be diminished in the coming period as faculty are placed under ever-greater strain by administrative decision-making associated with efforts to address the pandemic.

Many parts of the world are now experiencing crises in public health, national economy, environmental degradation, and in the case of the US, long-standing and pervasive racial injustice (Glaude 2020). AR is needed in relation to all of these crises, and we may find that an important component of moving forward is to strengthen our capacity for what Ramos (2017) calls Futures Action Research. In his view, the immense challenges of the present call for ‘a whole-scale social reorientation, whereby taking response-ability for our futures at personal, organizational, and planetary scales becomes commonplace’ (839). The scale and scope of this reorientation goes far beyond narrow bands of expertise. AR at all levels and in all countries and cultures has a role in nurturing and sustaining the integration of knowledge democracy with the production and dissemination of the AR needed (Hong and Rowell 2019). For Ramos, this requires epistemologically diverse inquiries into possible futures in a process ‘that leads to actions/experiments that drive further learning and knowledge’ (828). The post-pandemic world may foster massive social change initiatives and bold social experiments, with continuous learning to hold initiator-activists accountable and guide ongoing strengthening of actions, experiments, and new policies, by means of the data and analysis from the cyclical processes of AR and participatory AR. Although the variations in educational AR seen in this issue will continue, the current global crises likely will open up new variations based on new and challenging social reorientations.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. A 2018 source estimates that more than 2 million journal articles are published annually. https://www.universityworldnews.com/post.php?story=20180905095203579

2. This was the figure for ‘confirmed deaths’ as of 23 August 2020. https://ourworldindata.org/covid-deaths