Partnership and Recognition in Action Research

Christine Edwards-Groves, Anette Olin, Gunilla Karlberg-Granlund

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9780429815546
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Critical participatory action research creates opportunities for people to work together to solve problems and address issues about the conditions under which they work, through mutually agreed on actions in practice. Partnership and recognition hold together the practices of critical participatory action research, and as mutually entwined ideals are fundamental for site-based education development.

Drawing on the theory of practice architectures, this book interrogates and extends the concepts and practices of partnership and recognition in action research as they are explored in different educational settings, and as these are played out in the day-to-day experiences and practices of people participating and collaborating in educational change. Partnership and recognition are considered in terms of the agency and actions of both individuals and collectives as they encounter one another in educational change, and in terms of the cultural-discursive, material-economic and social-political conditions that enable and constrain possibilities for partnerships and recognition. Of central importance is the concept of practice theory, and the authors illuminate how recognition, change, learning and development practices are experienced and recognised by people in a range of partnerships.

This book was originally published as a special issue of Educational Action Research.

Partnership and recognition in action research: understanding the practices and practice architectures for participation and change

Christine Edwards-Groves, Anette Olin and Gunilla Karlberg-Granlund

ABSTRACT

This article is the first and introductory article of this special issue. The article gives a societist account of the principles of partnership and recognition as they are encountered and experienced in practices in action research. A societist account of practices requires a social theory for understanding practices. Therefore, the article utilises the resources of a contemporary form of practice theory, the theory of practice architectures and ecologies of practices, to lay down the foundation for conceptualising partnerships and recognition. Specifically, it introduces the theory as a foundation for the other articles in this special issue which, as a collective, examine the cultural-discursive, material-economic and social-political arrangements that enable and constrain particular kinds of partnerships and recognition that exist or evolve in site-based education development. Additionally, the article presents theoretical considerations concerning the principles of partnership and recognition that emerge as enmeshments of one another which mutually form, reform and transform practices in action research.

Introduction

Not surprisingly … collaborative and partnership programs are frequently touted as the single most effi cient, effective and important ways of reforming education. (Adapted from Gore 1995 as cited in Grundy 1998, 38)

Participating in collaborative action research is becoming increasingly influential across the globe as a practice for securing sustainable educational change. People come together to create for themselves different kinds of partnerships that recognisably form enabling conditions for site-based education development (Kemmis et al. 2014). As suggested by Gore (1995) in the opening quote, partnerships formed through collaborations of one kind or another are recognised as important for forming, reforming and transforming the day-to-day experiences of those leading, learning, teaching and researching in particular educational contexts. Indeed partnerships of one kind or another seem an inevitable result of engaging in action research, in the sense that it fundamentally changes all one’s actions, interactions and relationships (Somekh 2006). Within the evolution of these partnerships (as they are developed, nourished and sustained), recognition emerges as a fundamental humanistic dimension of the relationships that prompt the following questions: how are people recognised within these partnerships? How do people recognise others? How do people recognise the partnership itself? What are the practice architectures (or the cultural-discursive, material-economic and social-political arrangements) that are influenced by and influence recognition in these partnerships? These questions underpin the central directions taken up in this introductory article.

Critical participatory action research creates the opportunities for people, in partnerships with one another, to work together on solving problems and addressing issues through mutually agreed-upon actions in practice. The two features of all action research identified by Kemmis, McTaggart, and Nixon are:

[first] the recognition of the capacity of people living and working in particular settings to participate actively in all aspects of the research process and [second] the research conducted by participants is oriented to making improvements in practices and their settings by the participants themselves. (2014, 4)

In other words, partnership is not an arbitrary concept. Partnerships are a social mechanism formed through particular cultural-discursive, material-economic and social-political arrangements. These arrangements form the preconditions for effective, democratic and respectful relationships through the mutual recognition of others in the social enterprise of change. These relationships are made visible in the particular partnerships that emerge in particular sites where educational action and development occurs. Taken together, these are principles sitting at the heart of practices in action research. Hence, there is a complex reciprocity between the practices and the practice architectures fundamental to theorising partnerships and recognition in action research.

This article is the first of the collection in this special issue that considers seriously partnerships and recognition as key conditions for changing education practices. In reality these constructs are enabling principles for action research (Somekh 2006) that evolve simultaneously and emerge as enmeshments of one another that mutually form and inform practices. However, in this article partnership and recognition are separated out to shed light on the distinctiveness each offers the other for understanding action research and its reaches. In addition, the article introduces the theory of practice architectures as a theoretical resource for understanding the sociality of the practices comprising the partnerships encountered and created in and through action research in a range of educational contexts – pre-schools, schools, vocation and education training, and higher education. This theory provides a mechanism for making overt the distinctive arrangements that prefigure, but do not determine, the site-based education development resultant from action research; these are the particular cultural-discursive arrangements (made comprehensible in language or sayings), material-economic arrangements (enacted in activities or doings) and social-political arrangements (made visible and experienced in relationships and ways of relating with one another that enable agency, power and solidarity among participants).

Partnerships in action research

Action research is a social human endeavour taking shape and being played out differently in different social, political and cultural circumstances (Somekh and Zeichner 2009). As the extensive body of literature describing action research illustrates, changing practices involves communities as well as individuals. People in these communities, described by Wenger (1998) as ‘communities of practice’, do not encounter one another in unmediated ways whereby individuals learn to adapt themselves and their individual actions to collective endeavours. Their encounters in communities of practice require partnerships of one kind or another. These partnerships are social–political forms whereby the roles and relationships between participants are ‘sufficiently fluid to maximise mutual support and sufficiently differentiate to allow individuals to make appropriate contributions given existing constraints’ (Somekh 2006, 7).

Partnerships are inherently interactional and transactional whereby individuals do not simply interpret each other on the basis of their sense impressions, and nor do they understand one another only via cognitive information processing (Kemmis et al. 2014). Partnerships therefore involve participants traversing the individual–collective dialectic. By their nature, partnerships-for-action are not entirely self-serving or individualistic, and nor are participants entering an empty room (so to speak). On the contrary, partnerships are intersubjective spaces. These intersubjective spaces are not neutral or without some pre-existing form; that is to say, they are interactional spaces where the historical meets the present in activities in physical space–time (Schatzki 2010). Intersubjective spaces are somewhat prefigured, although not pre-determined; they are shaped in and through the language, the activities and the particular kinds of relationships that come to inhabit the social world of participants in the actual happeningness of their interactions and actions at particular places and times.

In action research, people meet in these intersubjective spaces that are constituted in open communicative spaces where practitioners reflect together on the character, conduct and consequences of their practices (Kemmis, McTaggart, and Nixon 2014). The act of coming together in itself does not constitute genuine partnerships or communities of practice. Rather, there is a need to move toward partnerships (McAllister 1993); they simply do not exist instantaneously or because one’s designation is named a partnership. People need time to create conditions for partnerships to emerge. This means that partnerships need to be viewed as a process rather than as defined or bounded entity. Pathways to partnership therefore are formed over historical time (Shier 2001); and time enables the possibility for people to form a close, genuine, renewing relationship (Goodlad 1994; Groundwater-Smith and Mockler 2009). In this sense, partnerships are a lived experience rather than an artificial organisational construct reified by such notions as ‘communities of practice’; which when used as a ‘catch phrase’ (to nominalise the practices experienced when people engage in professional learning like action research) diminishes the realities, the complexities and lived experiences of participants. Over time partnerships come to exist democratically through interactions and relationships, thus forming enabling ‘relational architectures’ (coined by Edwards-Groves et al. 2010) as necessary conditions for change.

Relational architectures function as a conceptual resource to help us understand the social–political arrangements that influence and help researchers examine and critique the existence of agency, solidarity and power in practice and practice development (Edwards-Groves et al. 2010). Furthermore, the concept of relational architectures addresses the presence of the plurality, democracy, agency and solidarity through particular social–political arrangements that shape the partnerships encountered and developed in any change endeavour. It reflects the web of complexity, contestedness and connectedness between multiple practice architectures that impact on the daily lives of those involved in educational change and development. As Seddon, Billett, and Clemans argue:

Partnerships, their character and consequences are forged at the contested interface between localised networks and central agencies, and they are framed by the broader relations that play through partnerships as well as between partnerships and the wider political order. Like schools, partnerships are sites of struggle. They cannot be dismissed as simple neo-liberal policy instruments. (2005, 582)

Therefore, no matter where an educator or researcher finds himself or herself working, there will always be multiple practices and practice architectures enabling and constraining partnerships and so the consequent courses of action. As Groundwater-Smith and Mockler remind us, ‘what we need is the capacity to establish genuine communities of practice based on mutual respect and authentic partnerships in order to develop networks of learning’ (2009, 53). This is necessary so that members can navigate the necessary sites of struggle, tension, complexity and challenge which are the engine room for learning, transformation and change in action research.

Recognition in action research

Action research brings with it practical, philosophical, social, cultural, analytical and theoretical struggles. Among these struggles is how the participants are both positioned (McNiff 2013) and recognised in the different types of partnerships involved in action research and what this means for the intersubjective spaces in which they meet. How, and in what ways, research participants recognise each other in the discourse and language used in their encounters, the kinds of activities they do with one another and the ways they relate to one another interpersonally, is a genuine praxis-oriented concern for all persons entering the change endeavour.

Theorising recognition has been a developing interest for the academy for some years. Following initial work on recognition in the context of multiculturalism by Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor (1992), German philosopher Axel Honneth showed that understanding the identity, history, suffering, contemporary situation and unmet needs of a subaltern group, like for instance the Australian Indigenous people, involves a ‘struggle for recognition’ (Honneth 1995). This struggle for recognition involves two reciprocal processes: one within the subaltern group itself, and another in its relations with other groups. Both of these processes are conducted, in reality, as processes of dialogue: one within the subaltern group, and the other in conversations with other groups. The purpose of the dialogue is the same in both cases, however: to understand the history, the experiences, the sufferings and challenges, and the unmet needs of the subaltern group.

Within the subaltern group, the dialogue is aimed at self-understanding of the group’s current situation, sense of identity and agency, sufferings and unmet needs as the product of the specific histories that have shaped them. Thus, for example, following Iris Marion Young’s (1990) notion that there are only two forms of injustice, domination and oppression, a subaltern group might want to analyse and understand how its sense of identity and its contemporary situation have been historically formed and shaped by structures and practices that have historically limited its powers and capacities for self-determination (domination), and its powers and capacities for self-expression and self-development (oppression¹). The subaltern group might discover, in the process, how its history has included moments both of resistance and compliance (or collusion with oppressors), and yet how a sense of the group’s distinctive identity has persisted through both these kinds of moments. The internal dialogue is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for recognition, in the struggle for recognition. It must be complemented by external dialogues with other groups.

The struggle for recognition becomes ‘complete’, however, only when the internal dialogue is matched, and in some ways validated, by an external dialogue with other groups. In these external dialogues, the subaltern group articulates and presents its developing self-understanding to other groups who then confer their recognition on the subaltern group. What this means is that, through the dialogues, other groups come to recognise, acknowledge and empathise with the distinctive historical experience, suffering, contemporary situation and unmet needs of the subaltern group. That is, they see the claims and the self-analysis of the subaltern group as valid in the sense that they are comprehensible, true (in the sense of accurate), sincerely stated (not deceptively) and morally right and appropriate (to use the criteria of Habermas’s [1984] four validity claims). This is to acknowledge that the subaltern group is a group that is, in one special sense, just like one’s own group – namely, the product of its own distinctive history – and for that reason alone worthy of recognition and respect. This form of recognition is nothing more than the recognition of the uniqueness of the other – a uniqueness precisely equivalent to one’s own. In this process of recognition, there can be no ‘subalterns’, only equals.

This, then, is the struggle for...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: Editorial and dedication to Roslin Brennan Kemmis
• 1 Partnership and recognition in action research: understanding the practices and practice architectures for participation and change
• 2 Theorising partnerships for site-based education development in vocational education and workplace learning
• 3 Adult education in a workplace context: recognising production workers’ responses and partnership challenges
• 4 Facilitating a culture of relational trust in school-based action research: recognising the role of middle leaders
• 5 Zooming in on the partnership of a successful teaching team: examining cooperation, action and recognition
• 6 Principals and teachers as partners in critical, participatory action research
• 7 Facilitating democratic professional development: exploring the double role of being an academic action researcher
• Index