First Person Action Research

Living Life as Inquiry

Judi Marshall

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781412912150, 9781412912143
• eBook ISBN: 9781473984813
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Research & Methodology
• Index: Social Sciences

In First Person Action Research Judi Marshall invites her reader to join her in the rich world of first person inquiry: a reflexive approach to life and to one's own participation in research and learning.

 

Written as a collage of interrelated chapters, fragments and voices, this is an important meditation on the nature of inquiring action. Judi Marshall's book provides an accessible introduction to self-reflective practice; exploring its principles and practices and illustrating with reflective accounts of inquiry from the author's professional and personal life. The book also considers action for change in relation to issues of ecological sustainability and corporate responsibility.

 

Writing is reviewed as a process of inquiry, and as a way to present action research experiences. Connections are made with the work of the literary authors Nathalie Sarraute and Kazuo Ishiguro to expand the scope of typical academic writing practices.

 

First Person Action Research is an important and practical resource for students, teachers and practitioners of action research alike. It is a thoughtful and sensitive account of an emerging field in Research Methods.

Part I Living Life as Inquiry

Living life as inquiry is my attempt to act with integrity, context-sensitivity and agency in an ever-unfolding, complex, always largely unknowable world. This approach draws on principles and practices of action research. It is always lived out in context, in ongoing inquiry into connections, interfaces, and emergent action. It is therefore thoroughly informed by notions of systemic thinking. Alongside sits attention to potential issues of power. The resulting experimental approach is at the heart of this book’s offering. As already admitted it is highly aspirational. Engaging life in this way can, at different times, be a steady approach to learning, exciting, or feel vulnerable and potentially unbounded.

In the next chapter I offer key notions in relation to action research, systemic thinking and power that inform the principles, practices and crafts of living life as inquiry. This chapter sits alongside the more elaborated dimensions of inquiry in Part II. Both are companions to the stories of inquiry in Part V. These various offerings and resources can be read in any order or in parallel.

As additional material in this Part of the book, I outline action inquiry (Fisher et al., 2003) which is an appropriately demanding framing on first person inquiry. It is accompanied by related notions of adult development and action logics.

Each person creates their own version of first person inquiry as an ongoing experiment. Each of us draw on our own distinctive array of influences and interests. Throughout this book I offer mine as potential resources, explaining how I find them helpful, and demonstrating the processes of crafting an inquiring approach to life, through which I am always seeking fresh learning, including to enhance my skills of inquiry. You will have your own influences and ways of going about the continuing process of development in inquiry, which I trust you will bring to your reading.

1 Integrating Action Research, Systemic Thinking and Attention to Issues of Power

In this chapter I set out some key reference points I draw on as I integrate action research, systemic thinking and attention to issues of power into living life as inquiry. My preferred way of working with this material is to take the frames along to an interactive workshop, to talk from them adding amplifications, contradictions and nuances as I go, illustrated copiously with stories from my own and others’ experiences, and then to elaborate in relation to participants’ interests. The sources of this material and how I hold it are reflected in how this chapter is written. The frameworks are offered relatively succinctly and schematically. Some sections are expressed through lists of bullet points, taken from PowerPoint slides I have developed over the years. Speaking this material interactively I feel I can keep it light, help it flow, make any statement that is too absolute in relation to the spirit of living life as ongoing inquiry shimmer briefly and fade so that it does not become too substantial. I cannot do this well here, without extensive chattering that would seem unseemly and inappropriate in print. The form adopted in Part II is thus a close companion to this chapter. Through short pieces on specific aspects of putting inquiry into practice it seeks to amplify, qualify, layer and interconnect the themes expressed here. The stories in Part V then provide extended illustrations.

In the following sections I explore action research, systemic thinking and issues of power in turn, building up a sense of how I integrate these into living life as inquiry.

Action research in brief

As backcloth to the approach of living life as inquiry there are a wealth of frames and resources for undertaking research generally and action research more specifically. These can all be tailored to given experiences and circumstances.

Action research is an umbrella term applied to a range of richly diverse approaches with their different heritages and informing ideas. In different depictions it can include organisational development (with Kurt Lewin, 1951, cited as one key source in the 1940s in the USA), the emancipatory participatory action research movements of the south (e.g. Fals Borda, 2001), action science (Argyris and Schon, 1974, 1996), teacher ‘self-study’ (e.g. Whitehead, 1989; McNiff and Whitehead, 2009) and the Scandinavian workplace democracy heritage (e.g. Gustavsen, 2001). Action research approaches are informed by and aligned with a wide range of other movements, intellectual and practice, such as feminisms. Connection is expressed through a host of regional and international networks and conferences. Work is collected together in Handbooks (Bradbury, 2015; Cooke and Wolfram Cox, 2005; Reason and Bradbury, 2001, 2008a) and review articles such as Cassell and Johnson (2006), which draw a variety of potential boundaries. Different actors and authors would place themselves differently in terms of research paradigms. Most are unlikely to align with positivist approaches and assumptions, although some might, many express interpretivist, social constructionist and critical theory dimensions to their work, and some connect fully to a participatory paradigm (Heron and Reason, 1997).

Action research is not then a world apart. Many of us would see ‘it’, and have lived its development in the last 20–30 years, as aligned with movements away from positivism towards more post-modern, post-structuralist, socially constructed, critical, participatory and action-oriented notions of social science. These changes are depicted in many publications across all disciplinary areas, whilst the continuing strength of positivist notions of science and their predominance in ‘mainstream’ circles is also noted. A relatively early contribution to moves away from positivism was the then radical Naturalistic Inquiry (Lincoln and Guba, 1985) posing alternative notions of researching and quality. The Sage Handbooks of Qualitative Research (Denzin and Lincoln, 1994, 2000, 2005b, 2011) have been major definitional contributions. Also in terms of the research topics they study, action researchers are engaged in many diverse worlds, thus involved with debates about appropriate notions of science and open to myriad influences.

Core characteristics of action research for me are that it:

• is concerned with knowledge in and for practice;
• involves engagement and being part of the action, with an interest in contributing to change;
• both adopts chosen disciplines and respects and works with emergent process;
• often operates through cycling between action and reflection;
• often seeks to promote participation and collaboration – although not all action research is participative co-action;
• is values-aware, rather than espousing objectivity or neutrality, wishing to contribute to human and ecological flourishing in some way;
• respects and works through multiple forms of knowing, being cautious about inappropriately privileging intellectual, analytic knowing;
• pays attention to issues of power, in multiple ways;
• is sensitive to context and to timing, judging whether it is beneficial in a given situation to blend with or challenge prevailing ways of being and social practices.
  (Marshall, 2011; Reason and Bradbury, 2001, 2008)

Working with these broad intentions, how to create an action research approach for specific inquiry questions in a given context is a creative, iterative process.

The research process: an action research perspective

Figure 1 seeks to show the dynamic interplay between the main dimensions of any research when taking an action research approach. The dimensions are interactive, always open to revision as learning develops. Inquirers generate and refine questions or issues and find appropriate ways to explore them. Learning is fed from one phase of inquiry into new questions and inquiry processes for the next phase, in emergent, strategic design. Fieldwork, whatever this means in a given project, happens as learning cycles, with periodic reviews informing and shaping each next cycle, rather than being wholly intellectually pre-determined at the outset. Any feature of the researching can be radically reviewed and changed, as an inherent, iterative quality process.

How the research is conducted is significantly influenced by the research paradigm(s) with which you are working. Whilst some consider that action research is inherently linked with a participatory paradigm (Heron and Reason, 1997), paradigmatic positioning is open to a variety of possibilities, with more diffuse boundaries between options than many scholarly attempts at mapping imply. Action research might well, for example, incorporate and blend influences from social constructionism and critical theory. In action, it might nest aspects of positivist analysis, such as attention to the material conditions of participants’ lives or planetary climate effects, within participative designs. How the research is framed is also influenced by the specific context within which it is conducted, and the issues of power that operate across it.

The repeated questioning in relation to each dimension as the research unfolds is: In what ways is this inquiry? This is an important reminder to those who are undertaking research with an intent of contributing to change, as advocacy can take over, can reduce the potential for learning, mutuality and perhaps for systemic impact. We can, of course, always inquire with critical reflection into our attempts at advocacy.

Figure 1 A dynamic model of action researching

In relation to all the research dimensions in the model, options need to be charted, and choices are then made, articulated, followed through and reviewed again, in explicit reflective sense-making processes.

How to scope appropriate topic literature is an interesting issue. Any researcher presenting their work for Masters or doctoral accreditation or wishing to publish in an academic journal will be asked what contribution they are making, with an emphasis on theory. Often people are advised from mainstream rubrics of research to focus, specialise, bound the issues they explore and identify relevant literatures. Containment of some appropriate kind is vital to engage with chosen kinds of depth and quality. Saturation – a notion that one has thoroughly explored in a given area, that researching further yields only repeated patterning and themes – is potentially relevant from grounded theory (Charmaz, 2005); and what this means can be reviewed, developed, articulated. Each researcher can explore in what ways such a notion might apply for them. But often action researchers work at intersections and their literatures and theorising reflect this. They may bring diverse sets of ideas with different heritages into conversation. It is helpful when they know and articulate this, saying how they are scoping different elements. (It can be confusing when ideas with different heritages are forced together, appear alongside each other, without apparent awareness. ‘Would these authors want to be in the same paragraph?’ you might wonder, and comment.) Rather than detracting from quality and contribution, this explicit work of creative juxtaposition generally enhances conceptual quality.

Writing from this dynamic modelling of researching can tell the learning journey, a potentially hackneyed phrase, but much Masters and doctoral research has this quality. Research in this frame is not about having an initial idea that then needs proving, or about ‘getting it right’. Rather it is about experimenting, encountering tensions and dilemmas, and learning more about these as facets of the issues being explored. Engaging requires allowing immersion to inform and expand the learning.

Given the potential richness and nuance of the research as experienced, there are usually dilemmas about how detailed any account of learning should be. The reader probably does not want to know every twist and turn, a ‘blow-by-blow’ account. Yet the unfolding development shows the learning, analysis and enacted quality processes. It is helpful to show some inquiring in rich enough action for the reader to judge the claims of quality for the work undertaken. Some stories in this book seek to show detailed inquiring selectively in this way. For example, please see Part V: Acting for sustainability: Planning Global Futures: Meeting vignette and Part V: Wondering what to do about an elderly relative: Experimenting with possibilities.

Territories of action researching

One way to tell the story of action research is to outline the qualities and implications of different territories of action, considering inquiry as first, second and third person. Often research is an integration of these (Marshall, 2011; Reason and Bradbury, 2008b; Reason and Torbert, 2001). This framework offers scope and flexibility. Chandler and Torbert (2003) chart the riot of proliferating forms of inquiry available from cross-matching first, second and third person inquiry into a three-dimensional array of options – identifying ‘27 flavors’. The potentially interwoven strands in inquiry can be seen as simultaneous attentions. This is a challenge to reflect in writing.

Living life as inquiry can be seen as especially offering a contribution to first person action research, with continual consideration of implications in second and third person terms. There are many potential connections with reflexive qualitative research, in terms of action and processes of interpretation (Denzin and Lincoln, 2011).

First person action research involves a person cultivating an approach of inquiry to all they think, feel and do, including being curious about their perspectives, assumptions and behaviour (Marshall and Reason, 2007). Their intent would be to develop their awareness, practice, choices and effectiveness in context, through developing their abilities to bring inquiry into the heart of ongoing action. This is a highly aspirational notion, and yet first person inquiry of some kind is vital, in my view, for all approaches to research that do not align with positivist presumptions of objectivity (Alvesson and Deetz, 2000; Denzin and Lincoln, 2011), especially those that engage with other people directly and open up issues of potential change in any way.

Seeking some form of self-awareness is a bold intention. ‘Of course, the whole of mind could not be reported in a part of the mind’ (Bateson, 1973: 408). So this is necessarily provisional, ever incomplete work, as other sections of this book show and discuss. But if we accept that we cannot give a ‘full’ account, that does not absolve us from integrating critical reflection into our wo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Publisher Note
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgements
• Contents
• About the Author
• Acknowledgements
• Introducing First Person Inquiry
• ‘Going, Going’ by Philip Larkin
• Part I Living Life as Inquiry
• 1 Integrating Action Research, Systemic Thinking and Attention to Issues of Power
• 2 Action Inquiry and Action Logics
• Part II Dimensions of Inquiry
• 3 Notions of Inquiry
• 4 Disciplines of Inquiry
• 5 Inquiry in Action
• 6 Images of Aspiring Inquiry Practice
• Part III Working with Ideas, Theories and Images as Inquiry
• 7 Working with Academic Literatures
• 8 Drawing on the Work of Nathalie Sarraute
• 9 Self-Reflection and Life Narrative in the Work of Kazuo Ishiguro
• Part IV Writing as Inquiry and as Representation
• 10 Writing as Inquiry
• 11 Writing as Representation
• 12 Selectively Adopting Freefall Writing Precepts
• Part V Stories of Inquiry
• 13 Inquiry Learning Groups and Working with Feedback
• 14 Acting for Sustainability
• 15 ‘Work Song’ by Wendell Berry
• 16 Wondering What to do about an Elderly Relative
• Part VI Coda
• 17 Ongoing Inquiry: Well, I Won’t be Doing that Again
• 18 In Reflection
• Appendix A: Scanning arenas of action in change
• Appendix B: Presenting First Person Inquiry for Masters and Doctoral Work
• Appendix C: Fictionalising Inquiry Accounts: An Example
• References
• Index