International Action Research

Educational Reform

Sandra Hollingsworth, Sandra Hollingsworth

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781135715342
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

How groups of people, from various educational settings worlwide, conduct research together is the subject of this book. Rather than wait for top- down policy changes in education, many practitioners are conducting research in order to implement reform from the bottom-up, the aim of this research being to progress action necessary for educational reform. The authors look at different aspects and the impact of action research on educational reform around the world, including: how do geography and philosophy affect differences on this work worldwide?; what is the political nature of groups currently taking action to improve education?; and what are the tensions between personal and instructional changes that come from participating in action research? The text also considers the effects of action research on changes in the professions including education, social work, nursing and management.

Section III

Personal/Pedagogical Perspectives on Action Research

Section Editor: Melanie Walker

Section III looks at the tensions between personal and pedagogical transformation and research/development/production. Each author speaks personally about the issues which underlie tensions between life/theory/work/and reform. The tensions between the lifeworld and the world of work are laid out in Chapter 12:

‘Research’, we suggest, is not a technical set of specialist skills but implicit in social action and close to the ways in which we act in everyday life, for we find increasingly that the worlds of academe and social life, theory and practice, work and family are not really so different but constantly interrupt one another, often in complex ways.

Each author in this section attempts to lay out different issues around discourse which illuminate our understanding of the differences and connection between personal and pedagogical understandings and the production of research and development. Anchelee Chayanuvat and Duangta Lukkunaprasit write about how they use classroom research to study their experiences as language teachers in Thailand, and Lesvia Rosas uses the discourse of research to study teachers’ personal transformation in Mexico. Similarly, Christine O’Hanlon looks at teachers’ personal discourse in professional journals as a way of helping her understand her work as a teacher educator. Ivor Goodson and Christopher Day separately examine educator’s lives and working biographies to better understand the nature of action research. Finally, Robyn Lock and Leslie Minarik think about primary students’ discourse around the nature of gender and play as a way for Leslie to improve her teaching and students’ sense of agency in school and society.

12	Transgressing Boundaries: Everyday/Academic Discourses
	Melanie Walker (South Africa)

Research, we suggest, is not a technical set of specialist skills but implicit in social action and close to the ways in which we act in everyday life, for we find increasingly that the worlds of academe and social life, theory and practice, work and family are not really so different but constantly interrupt one another, often in complex ways. (Schratz and Walker, 1995, p. 2)

Finding Myself in Research

For a long time now I have been bothered by the divide between theory and action, between educational research and practice, and by powerful academic gatekeepers who construct hierarchies to determine what counts as research, and control what counts as educational knowledge. Thus there is a thread running through my research and writing, reaching back to my first encounters over ten years ago with a university-based education faculty and the tensions it generated for me, as a former school teacher, to work there. Why was it that within universities academic discourse seemed to be privileged as the authoritative version/s of educational life? Why was it accepted that specialized discourses restricted access to ideas? Did communities outside the academy not also have cultural resources of value in addressing social inequities?

Nor was I particularly drawn to research divorced from action and social change. Living and working in South Africa, I had a broader commitment to social and educational justice in the face of the gross disparities that marked the education system, and a belief that in some ways, however imperfectly, teachers in their professional lives could contribute to building democratic cultures. At that time I used the language of ‘building now in our schools for what we want later’, of ‘realizing education in practice’, and of exploring ‘a pedagogy for a future and non-racial democratic South Africa’ (Walker, 1988). Where (if at all) did these ideas fit in the academy where so much of the research seemed to support the raced, classed and gendered status quo?

It was in the context of such tensions that I first encountered action research; I was powerfully attracted by its promise (‘improvement’ and ‘understanding’) and possibility (‘democratic schooling’), and the central position for the professional knowledge and insight of practitioners, both teachers and teacher educators.

Recently, I read Susan Noffke (1995, p. 5) who explains lucidly that action research means ‘becoming practically critical’ in and through ‘a continuous process of clarification of our vision in the area of social justice, of recognizing the constraints on practice, and of developing the capabilities necessary to realize those visions, while at the same time holding all three as problematic’.

My understanding thus is that in changing my practice through action research I explore the lines of power and understanding in my own working life, and so become more critical of the power relations in which I and others are embedded. Thus might I might act as wisely as possible, with others, in my own particular social circumstances, and construct ‘really useful knowledge’ (Johnson, 1981) to build democratic education. For my own part, the attraction of action research still lies in the never ending spiral of action, reflection, inquiry and theorizing arising from and grounded in my practical concerns, ‘a process of becoming, a time of formation and transformation, of scrutiny into what one is doing, and who one can become’ (Britzman, 1991, p. 8).

In short, action research for me is exemplified in the notion of ‘praxis’ as a dialectical and interactive shaping of theory and practice, research and action, underpinned by a commitment to democratic social changes.

Reflexive Refrain I

Yet this is also not a storyline now victoriously concluded, or free of conflict and contradiction. Ten years on, still working in a university, albeit a different one, I wrestle in a different but related way with the seductive power of abstract discourse. It is not an easy struggle, indeed it has had extraordinarily emotional moments occasioned by presenting my profane offerings at Theory’s sacred shrine, shrinking inside myself when told ‘Hmmm, you need to look towards some tough theoretical engagement’; ‘a rather therapeutic account’; ‘very small beer theoretically’. I am silenced and excluded, and spend the next year puzzling over why I do not wish to be complicit in the construction of academic boundaries, but nonetheless desire some form of recognition that turns on those same hierarchies of research and knowledge.

Theory, Practice and Research

I used a short paper for an AERA symposium in 1995, called ‘Political, Practical and Pedagogical Problems in Teaching about Action Research’ as a first opportunity to publicly rehearse and share my problem. This chapter continues that discussion and should be read as an ongoing conversation rather than some final or authoritative pronouncement. My AERA paper turned on arguing for the importance of access to critical academic theory/discourse for such knowledge enables us to interrogate, understand and disrupt our everyday educational practices. My thinking was that, while the experiential learning in action research is undoubtedly powerful, is it sufficient as the sole arbiter of the knowledge we construct? How do we avoid recycling common sense, or romantically celebrating practice without facing up to the fact that experience is never unmediated but structured by particular cultures and settings (racist, sexist, classist). Often when we (academics as well as teachers) think we are producing our most true selves we are simply playing parts in someone else’s script (Silverman, 1993), playing out, not producing knowledge. Silverman (1993, p. 184) quotes Wittgenstein: ‘The aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity’. It seems to me that it is academic knowledge and academic theories which provide us with frameworks and categories for thinking that enable us to recuperate the good sense in common sense (Gramsci, 1971).

The point is to shift from immediate problem solving to the complexity of educational processes, where the latter might not solve immediate practical problems, but may well generate new questions. Michael Schratz and Rob Walker (1995, p. 125) explain this relationship between theory, practice and research with admirable clarity:

theory is not just a back-up that can be turned to when all else fails, rather it is what makes it possible to see the world differently and so be able to act in different ways … theory is concerned with giving meaning and intent to action, and with reading meaning and intent in the actions of others. Theory extends our capacity to see alternatives, reminding us of the lost opportunities we create with every action we take and every word we speak. Its concern is not simply to say why the world is as it is but to provide us with the space to think how it could be different.

Border Crossings

All this then raises, as I see it, the problem of access to different discourses, crossing and transgressing the ‘line’ (Muller and Taylor, 1994) between everyday discourse (what practitioners know and do in their classrooms) and academic discourse (the domain of university academics), between a discourse of practice and one of theory. Griffiths and Tann (1992) suggest that because teachers have only a partial view of the situations in which they work, they need access to more than one language, to be able to move from the discourse of professional practice to that of the academy. Yet they also point to the difficulties teachers experience when they try to make the connections between academic theory and personal theorizing and everyday experience.

Importantly, then, Bridget Somekh (1994) points to the need to ‘inhabit each other’s castles’, in other words the traffic across borders should be in both directions. She explores the nature of university school/teacher collaboration and argues that teachers bring to action research projects a commitment to their own professional learning; academics usually bring a concern for research in its own right (even at the expense perhaps of action in the action research couplet). The academics then bring the discourse of the academy (perhaps captured by ‘research’) which may well alienate teachers. Yet those same terms ‘give the project status in the eyes of the academy’ (p. 19) where personal knowledge and practical wisdom are still not accorded the same respect as more traditional research. Somekh sees the way forward as lying in giving each group access to the discourse of the other:

We recognized that the discourse of the academy was well honed to certain kinds of analytical thinking and we deliberately introduced some of its terminology in our discussions with our teacher-researcher partners. Although we felt the need to adapt our discourse when talking to teachers, we felt it would ultimately be patronizing to restrict it, so we attempted to compromise by learning to move from one discourse to the other, as fitted the circumstance and the individuals concerned. (p. 19)

And of course teachers must cross the border as well, although Somekh concedes that this was not easy. She learned that teachers often found academic literature on student learning inaccessible, while their working conditions did not anyway encourage research practice, not least that the press towards practical action works against the tentativeness of much academic writing. However, Somekh also stresses that it was not the case that academic discourse was more extensive than that of the school. The two were different, inescapably they implied differential status for the two user groups, but ‘neither was more extensive or in its way more exclusive than the other’ (p. 20).

For Somekh and her colleagues such school-university collaboration, while not overlooking the effects of power, marries Eisner’s (1991) notions of ‘educational connoisseurship’ and ‘educational criticism’, both of which are essential to educational improvement: ‘… the private world of the classroom is placed in the context of other classrooms, in other schools; the patterns of practice across the education system can be explored by meta-analysis of action research in individual classrooms’ (Somekh, 1994, p. 23).

Central to this is the notion of collaboration from different spaces and across different discourses, but a collaboration recognizably criss-crossed by lines of power rather than some patronizing notion of ‘equality’.

Of course, teachers might as easily guard their own territory and operate their own exclusions, arguing that academics are strong on theoretical prescriptions, but thin on ‘real’ knowledge of schools and classrooms. Teachers then resist crossing into theory’s domain. In part, at least such attitudes are the effect precisely of a faulty notion of theory engendered by academic gatekeeping! The point would seem to be that unless we learn to transgress, how are lecturers to be heard outside the academy, or teachers to be listened to seriously inside the university? The issue of access to different discourses is, however, not so easily resolved for people working under differing professional, cultural and institutional conditions. Muller and Taylor (1994, p. 5) warn of the possible danger in ‘hybridizing’ the boundary between different knowledge domains so that the emancipatory project ‘turns against the intentions that drive it’ (p. 12). They construct a useful argument, albeit one which assumes border crossings in one direction only, and a glaring absence of reflexivity as to how they and other academics come to construct those not in the academy as the Other. At any rate, they consider that the ‘boundary bashers’, or what McWilliam (1995, p. 6) refers to as the ‘inverted intellectual snobbery’ of those who insist that ‘a spade should be called a spade and never as an earthmoving agricultural implement’, unwittingly connive at their own marginalization by those who have the power to classify where the line should be drawn. They argue for the need to theorize the boundary rather than erase it and so make different discourses more widely accessible. They thus propose ‘prudent boundary crossing of the space between exclusive domains of discursive activity’ (p. 11). The correct strategy, they say, is to equip people with the ‘social and cultural papers needed to cross the border safely’ (p. 11...