Celebrating the problematics in action research

The range of articles in this edition fulfils the aspiration of this journal to invite writers and readers to engage in good conversations about action research. The quality of the papers can be seen in the number which offer stimulating disruptions for readers by challenging some of the popular assumptions that can be held about action research. Writers tackle the gaps between their research plans and their research experiences, showing how positive intentions to improve participation need to be constantly modified as they gain heightened awareness of the complexities of shifting practice. Other papers show the variable benefits of adapting action research approaches to address national education policy changes or question the claimed outcomes from building practitioner research into student teacher programmes. There is a healthy challenge from a Deleuze-inspired paper to the limitations of grounded data approaches. A classroom-based research project examines the practical paradox of using teacher authority to help learners become more self-disciplined, while other papers highlight how movements towards more active, integrated and holistic teaching environments need to be adapted to make incremental and provisional progress. Each paper provides evidence of critical development towards the goal of achieving more socially just practices, as practitioners and participants develop a greater sense of agency to help themselves and others.

For example, Stuart’s article, ‘Problematic participation: reflections on the process and outcomes of participatory action research into educational inequalities’ highlights a range of power differentials that are often implicit when academics attempt ‘participatory’ research. Her account examines an international project that aimed to engage Higher Education students in working with groups of schoolchildren to examine their educational experiences. Stuart acknowledges the complex power relationships between academics, their HE students, and the schoolchildren with whom the HE students were researching, and concludes that structural differences cannot easily be erased, but barriers can be reduced if these differences can be acknowledged and articulated. She describes how participating groups were encouraged to devise social activities which enabled the researchers ‘to name and semi-manage the power dynamics present’. This paper is filled with valuable reflective insights from a research team struggling to reduce inequalities, and highlights the tensions of the team in appreciating that they were conducting research with co-researchers and on young people, and Stuart concludes that their work may be considered ‘participatory practice’ rather than ‘participatory research’. This openly reflexive account acts as a meditation on how action research methodology needs to be continually revised and reimagined when attempting to realise our ambitions in the fluid world of research relationships.

Continuing the focus on the problematics of participatory engagement, Oosterhoff and Nanda’s paper ‘Participatory action research on alcoholism and bonded labour in times of prohibition in India’ provides a fascinating analysis of attempts to engage marginalised groups in participatory action research (PAR). This community development project attempted to transform stigmatising approaches to alcohol consumption in marginalised communities into community-owned, evidence-informed, non-violent harm reduction approaches. The paper highlights a variety of sites of participatory tension which arose whilst trying to improve the life chances of communities where alcohol consumption is a highly stigmatised ‘public secret’, and the authors describe the complex ethical dilemmas in activating disadvantaged groups who might become at risk because of their participation, demonstrating a touching compassion for the stigmatised male alcoholics who have become economically displaced and relegated to the margins of their communities and who operate in conditions of ‘bonded labour’. The challenges of engaging structurally compromised citizens in action research are captured in a realistic appraisal of starting points: ‘Men reluctantly agreed that to realise the vision of the village they wanted, something needed to be done about their drinking. Women agreed that slapping men might feel good but was unlikely to motivate them or to result in a happier family or community life.’ This open account provides the action research community with opportunities to reflect upon the importance of understanding process as progress (i.e. stimulating community agency) rather than clutching at metrics to measure the worth of the research.

In the next paper, ‘Does a teacher need authority to teach students self-direction? Reflections on embracing a paradox’, Bulterman-Bos addresses the very uncomfortable dilemmas that teachers encounter with regard to exercising authority in classrooms. Drawing on the work of Arendt and Omer, the author discusses the dilemmas and paradoxes of needing to establish a directive framework that might encourage students to become more self-directed and self-disciplined, and in many ways, this is a classic teacher action research dilemma whereby the action researcher becomes conscious of the contradictions between her aims and her practices. This account features an external researcher testing new approaches in an action research study conducted in another teacher’s practice setting. It provides stimulating food for thought about how best an ‘external’ researcher can contribute insights to empower mainstream practitioners. Perhaps Bulterman-Bos, as an external researcher, found time and space to introduce a breadth of underpinning philosophical discussion that may not have been so central to the agenda of a practitioner focused upon a wider range of practical demands.

Harrison’s paper ‘Deleuze-inspired action research in the university: Mobilising Deleuzian concepts to rethink research on the reflective writing practices of student teachers’ offers a playful provocation to action researchers, encouraging them to escape from assumptions that underpin popular prescriptions for action research. Deconstructing a detailed example of reflective writing from her practice, Harrison celebrates Deleuze’s call to actively search for different interpretations of written data, suggesting that researchers’ attempts ‘to code and categorise’ pre-emptively close down the possibilities of alternative readings of texts, and she invites action researchers to distance and disentangle themselves as researchers from the data which they present. She persuasively argues that action researchers should embrace such reflective writing transcripts as an opportunity to search for contradictions rather than unifying themes, claiming that such an approach would stimulate action researchers to consider, ‘What questions are raised that are otherwise unthought?’ Harrison argues that frameworks for coding and analysis of data often limit understanding, focusing on designing ‘alternative courses of action’, whereas we could be deliberating more productively about achieving ‘alternative modes of education’.

There is a history of facilitators adopting an approach of ‘creative conformity’ (Elliott 1991, 107) to promote action research and empower teachers, and two initiatives explore responses to the Swedish policy requiring teachers to base their teaching ‘on a scientific grounding’. In the first of these, ‘Development of professional learning communities through action research: Understanding professional learning in practice’, Johannesson investigated how action research can encourage the development of professional learning communities (PLCs) within schools. He identified that ‘doing action research’ could sometimes be viewed as a time-limited project – an end in itself – rather than as an ongoing development process, with less experienced teachers (often newer to the school) tending to view the action research activities within the PLC as a project task rather than as a developmental process. Johannesson employed Wenger’s analysis of Communities of Practice (CoP) to illustrate how successful PLCs demonstrate ‘engagement, imagination and alignment’ to improve current practices and relationships by integrating new ways of thinking. He concludes that PLCs require ongoing facilitative support to ensure that the action research learning process for participating teachers becomes owned by participants so that research can be seen as integral to, and aligned with, their teaching.

In the second Swedish study, Bergmark, a university-based researcher, was deployed to facilitate schools to adopt action research approaches. In ‘The role of action research in teachers’ efforts to develop research-based education in Sweden: Intentions, outcomes, and prerequisite conditions’, she reports on the importance of addressing teachers' motivations to engage in action research from the start; this improves their agency and encourages “bottom-up” evidence-informed practices which are teacher-driven and purposeful. Beginning action research around the teachers’ own questions helps teams to resist the action research process being subverted into exercises designed to simply roll-out ‘top-down’ evidence-based strategies into teachers’ practices. Bergmark also notes that teachers’ professional relationships flourished through participation in action research activities; although their initial motivations had focused upon students’ learning outcomes, they increasingly valued the social benefits from improved relationships with colleagues and principals.

In ‘The position of student teacher practitioner research in teacher education: teacher educators’ perspectives ’, Oolbekkink et al. offer further insights into the potential and promise of student teacher practitioner research in the Netherlands. The authors interviewed teacher-educators to evaluate the extent to which practitioner action research is justified in student teacher education, and, most significantly, how far it results in teachers graduating with a greater sense of agency which carries into their future practice. The interview findings prompted the authors to construct an analysis around the ‘connections’ and ‘consequences’ of action research activities for both individuals and institutions. This paper is a contribution to a long-running interest in this journal about the place of action research at different stages of teacher education, and concludes that student teachers will not develop the hoped-for ‘inquiry stance’ if their attempts to engage in action research are thwarted by the contradictory priorities of other important stakeholders in institutions. Interestingly, they also found little to support the popular claim that that student teacher practitioner research generates research knowledge with wider transferable value.

Finally, a quartet of papers fro m Nepal, Brazil, the UK, and Hong Kong investigate how action research approaches can create more active learning and a greater degree of learner independence. In ‘School gardening activities as contextual scaffolding for learning science: participatory action research in a communitygardening activities as contextual scaffolding for learning science: participatory action research in a community School in Nepal’, Acharya et al. explored participatory approaches to engage parents’ community knowledge of gardening to provide students with a grounded appreciation of science education. Through sharing the challenges of the science curriculum with students’ parents, they attempted to widen community participation by providing children with concrete examples of the application of science. The authors note that, despite students’ improved grasp of the underpinning conceptual scientific understanding, some teachers and parents were resistant to children learning outside of the classroom, as they were concerned that the garden-based scientific knowledge may not translate into the types of knowledge that would be rewarded in formal examinations.

In their paper, ‘Lenses on the post-oil economy: Integrating entrepreneurship into sustainability education through problem-based learning’, Hermann et al. describe their attempts to use an action research model to explore course development strategies to connect sustainability and entrepreneurship education in a short graduate course linking universities in Brazil and Norway. Besides identifying tensions regarding timing, levels of challenge, and thematic focus when organising problem-based learning strategies, they also concluded that the action research process supported the capacity of partners to modify the practical elements conducted in their different contexts and to manage discourses across the private and public spectrum. Meanwhile, in a UK HE context, Ike’s '“An online survey is less personal whereas I actually sat with the lecturer, and it felt like you actually cared about what I am saying”: A pedagogy-oriented action research to improve student engagement in criminology’ reports an experiment with an Interactive Action-Oriented Learning (IAOL) approach to improve student engagement. The author explored a variety of interventions, and she found that the process of gathering student evaluations added to the participating students’ heightened motivation as a result of increased engagement with the learning process.

Chan et al.’s paper, ‘Enhancing the impacts of international service-learning on intercultural effectiveness and global citizenship development through action research’ reports on an HE initiative in Hong Kong that was designed to improve the impacts of ‘international service learning’, which they describe as a combination of academic instruction and community-based service in an international context. Having recognised that exposing students to international experiences did not significantly improve their intercultural sensitivities and global citizenship, the researchers worked with a team of teachers to monitor and improve the value of international service learning through the introduction of a range of responsive strategies designed to stimulate greater intercultural awareness and responsibility. The authors reflect on the research methods they employed, the effectiveness of their evaluation, and the benefits for participating teachers of engaging in an action research approach.

To conclude an edition that delights in the problematics of action research, we offer Austin’s persuasive review of Generative Leadership: Rescripting the Promise of Action Research by Christine Joy Edwards-Groves and Karin Rönnerman, a book that provides unanticipated and encouraging insights into the influence of the action research process on participating teachers. Austin outlines how the authors build on their complementary experiences of facilitating teacher action research to show how engagement in action research accelerated participating teachers’ capacity to assume wider leadership responsibilities as they increasingly assumed greater control over their practice and their practice contexts. Whilst we can enjoy the intellectual satisfactions of engaging with the evolving problematics of action research, it is motivating to finish with the emotional uplift that the promise of action research never fails to provide.