Action Research

Living Theory

Jack Whitehead, Jean McNiff

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2006
• Print ISBN: 9781412908559, 9781412908542
• eBook ISBN: 9781446240304
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Research & Methodology
• Index: Social Sciences

In Action Research: Living Theory, Jean McNiff and Jack Whitehead set out their vision for action research in the 21st Century.

This is a passionate, and compelling book, that defines the philosophy behind action research and the process of doing action research for all those interested in this fast growing area. It sets in place the foundations of action research as a discipline, and roots action research as a compassionate , ethical and politically-engaged form of enquiry.

McNiff and Whitehead?s book will be essential reading for all those with an interest in Action Research.

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PART 1

Backgrounds and Contexts

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In this part we make clear that we are writing an account of our own action research, and we set out the background and contexts. We explain our reasons for the research, and we outline our purposes. We identify specific research questions, and say how we intend to address those questions. Throughout we adopt a critically reflective stance to what we are saying. This part contains the following chapters:

1 Background to our research: reasons and purposes

What are our concerns?

2 Contexts of our research

Why are we concerned?

3 Looking for data

What experiences can we describe to show why we are concerned?

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1	Background to our research: reasons and purposes
	What are our concerns?

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This chapter sets out the main issues in the current phase of our ongoing research programme. These issues are deep concerns about what is happening in educational research and educational theory, and how this is influencing thinking and practices in education and the professional education of teachers. We also set out our concerns about what is happening in action research, specifically in relation to how it is used in education. In setting out our concerns, we are giving the reasons for our research, and saying why we are doing it. We are also stating the purposes of our research, that is, what we hope to achieve.

The chapter is organized as two sections:

1. The current status and future of educational research
2. The current status and future of action research

1 The current status and future of educational research

Here is a story that sets out our concerns.

In May 2005 a seminar was organized by the British Educational Research Association (BERA) on ‘The Future of Educational Research’. The seminar took place in Oxford, and was attended by delegates from around the world. Two strong themes emerged. The first was that educational research should continue to be approached via a traditional social sciences perspective. The second was about the status of practitioner action research. Delegates agreed that practitioner research was having a considerable influence in debates about the nature of pedagogy and the professional status of the teaching profession, and could indeed provide a credible alternative direction for the future of educational research. However, the issue of identifying appropriate standards for judging quality was a sticking point. The social sciences had well-established procedures for identifying what counts as quality and validity, and its very credibility as a tried and trusted research methodology made it attractive to policy makers. While practitioner research seemed to present exciting new departures, its procedures were not yet well developed, especially in terms of making judgements about quality. There was little doubt that practitioner research was a valuable form of professional development, and, since the 1990s, governments and other bodies had shown a keen interest in practice-based research in education. Two examples of initiatives that promoted practice-based research were first, the Best Practice Research Scholarship Scheme, whereby teachers in schools are funded to explore identified aspects of practice, and second, the networked learning communities supported by the National College of School Leadership, whereby groups of teachers are brought together to share ideas about good practice and learn from one another within a context of shared collegiality. Yet while the promise of practitioner research is generally widely acknowledged, it is still bedevilled by the particular issue of what counts as quality and what kinds of standards of judgement can be used in assessing quality (see Furlong and Oancea 2005).

This situation represents our concerns too. While we value contributions from social science approaches to educational research, for reasons which we set out in the next section, we are resistant to its hegemony; and while we promote the development of practitioner research, for reasons we articulate in Section 2, we are aware of the need to develop coherent standards of judgement for assessing the quality of practitioner research. For us, showing how and why we make judgements on our work, and justifying our reasons, is at the heart of quality scholarship. Agreement needs to be reached about standards of judgement, both by practitioners as they produce their research accounts, and also by the higher education research community as they assess the quality of practitioners’ accounts. These concerns about the need for quality scholarship in action research, which include articulating its processes of demonstrating judgement, give us the reasons for our current research focus, and are the main themes of this book. We are interested in what kind of standards of judgement are appropriate in action research, how they can be agreed by the practitioner action researcher community and the higher education community, and what kinds of validation and legitimation processes are necessary for such agreement to be reached.

First, however, we need to clarify why we promote practitioner action research in the first place, and this means saying what we find in action research that we do not find in the social sciences.

Social science research and action research

We understand research as more than activity. Non-research activity is when we do things unreflectively, such as laughing or waking up, or do things in a routine manner, such as shopping. Research however is purposeful investigation, which involves gathering data and generating evidence in relation to articulated standards of judgement, in order to test an emergent theory. While research and shopping are both purposeful activities, the purposes are different. The purpose of shopping is to buy bread or milk, whereas we see the purpose of research as generating and testing new knowledge.

The main feature of social science research that distinguishes it from a living theory approach to action research is that a researcher aims to generate new knowledge (theory) about what other people are doing. They observe what other people are doing, and describe and explain those people’s actions. They tend to maintain a spectator, outsider perspective throughout (but see the section below on insider research). The theory generated is the researcher’s theory about other people. The researcher also tells the research story, so it is the researcher’s theory that goes into the public domain. This remains the state of affairs also in some action research contexts. Practitioners investigate their practice, observed by an external researcher. The researcher observes, describes and explains what they are doing, so the theory is generated and owned by the researcher, and is about other people.

In action research, the focus swings away from the spectator researcher and onto the practitioner researchers. Practitioners investigate their own practice, observe, describe and explain what they are doing in company with one another, and produce their own explanations for what they are doing and why they are doing it. Practitioner researchers already know what they are doing in their everyday lives in the sense that knowledge is embodied in what they do. Each person already has their own tacit theory within themselves about how they should live, and they work collaboratively to make sense of what they are doing by talking through their ideas, and monitoring the process. They monitor what they are learning, and how their learning influences their actions. Because they are doing research, they bear in mind that they need to explain how what they are doing counts as theory, so they produce their accounts of practice to show how their social activity can be seen as purposeful research activity. The theories they generate are their own theories, and they constantly test these theories against the critical responses of others to see if the theories can withstand criticism, in other words, have validity. To establish the validity of their theories, they articulate the standards of judgement they use, that is, the way they make judgements, in evaluating whether the theories they generate actually reflect the values that inform their practices.

We develop these ideas throughout. An important starting point is to establish what a social science perspective to educational research means, and to consider some of the possible implications for education.

The nature of the social sciences

The social sciences were originally modelled directly on the physical, or natural, sciences. The physical sciences were about studying the physical environment, at first to understand its nature, and later to understand how it works in order to control it. The objects of enquiry (what was being studied) were the phenomena of nature, and also the relationships of the phenomena to one another. Scientists studied nature; they described and explained it, in an empirical way, by maintaining an objective stance and studying what was ‘out there’. For some, this empirical approach became an empiricist approach. This remains the dominant form of government-funded research in the United States. They studied nature in order to control it, often with the idea that, if they could control nature, they could also predict what would happen, and so control the future. This view of research is still very much alive today, as when, for example, an agriculturalist experiments with plant food on tomatoes in order to find the best way of increasing the yield.

This process may work well in relation to tomatoes, but the analogy breaks down when the assumptions and methods of the physical sciences are transferred to the social sciences, that is, when humans become the objects of inquiry and are regarded in the same way as tomatoes, and are also expected to behave in the same way. Humans of course have minds of their own, and do not always do what a scientist expects them to. They tend not to conform to the scientist’s preconceived ideas about correct behaviour. However, many scientists, and their social scientist counterparts, do not accept this situation, because they tend to see their mental models as more important than the people whom they expect to fit into those mental models, and they often assume that so-called non-conforming people are the problem, rather than their own entrenched assumptions about the reified nature of mental models.

The social sciences have developed over recent centuries, and different people have developed different attitudes and methodologies. Some have continued to adopt the largely positivist methodologies of the natural sciences, while others have not (see below). Those who adopt positivist attitudes believe as follows:

• An object can be objectively and dispassionately studied by a social scientist, who remains outside the situation they are studying. The responsibility of the social scientist is to maintain a value-free perspective. This will ensure non-contamination and purity of results. This purity is the factor that qualifies the research findings to be applied to other situations.
• The social scientist will be able to provide descriptions and explanations for human behaviour in the same way that descriptions and explanations can be offered by natural scientists for, say, the growth of vegetables. Descriptions and explanations make up theories, so, in the same way that a physical scientist offers their theories about the nature, origin and workings of the physical environment, the social scientist also offers theories about the nature, origins and workings of human behaviour from their spectator stance.
• On the basis of these theories, the future behaviours of people can be predicted and controlled. The best way to ensure a good society, in terms of the positivist social scientist’s vision, is to apply the theory, which involves moving people around, in the same way as a natural scientist arranges appropriate conditions, in terms of what the scientist thinks is the right way to test their own theory.

Other social scientists however do not share these views. The disciplines of anthropology and ethnomethodology are premised on the idea that a researcher observes people in their natural settings and respectfully offers descriptions and explanations (theories) for what the people are doing. Mitroff and Kilman (1978) made the point that four distinct approaches to social science methodologies exist. These are the methodologies of the analytic scientists, the conceptual theorists, the conceptual humanists, and the particular humanists. Each methodology is distinguished by its preferred logic of mode of inquiry. Carr and Kemmis (1986) also seriously critiqued positivist assumptions as rooted in technical rationality. Whatever their internal differences, however, the social sciences maintain an overall position that takes human behaviour as an object that can be studied from a spectator point of view.

Different social scientists also hold different views about knowledge (to do with epistemology) and forms of thinking (to do with logic). Some – not all – believe the following:

• Knowledge can be discovered. Like the external physical environment that the scientist is studying, knowledge is also ‘out there’, so it can be studied from outside. Again, the scientist stays out of the field of enquiry, so as not to contaminate their findings. Sometimes however researchers do get involved in the situation they are studying. They then become insider researchers, working with the people they are investigating. However a difference in status in the relationship remains. The researcher is still in charge of the research process, and the researcher’s account and theory, not the people’s, go into the public domain. Occasionally, social scientist researchers get so drawn into participants’ lives that they abandon their externalist perspective and begin to investigate their own practice and their relationships with their research participants, but then they transform themselves from social scientists into action researchers. For us, a distinguishing feature of our approach to action research is that practitioner researchers enquire into their own practice.
• Knowledge can be organized into laws, such as the laws of gravity or electricity. These laws apply universally, to humans as well as to physical phenomena such as tomatoes. Theories work in the same way as laws, so theories cannot be changed. They are established for all time.
• Knowledge can be applied in like-to-like situations. Physical objects should not break the laws. Apples should not fall upwards, and humans should not behave in aberrational ways (but of course they do).

The key point is that many social scientists, like physical scientists, believe that there is a correct view of knowledge, and that they know what it is. They also believe that theirs is a correct form of logic.

Some social scientists also use logics that are

• linear and one-dimensional, because they move towards a specific end point, to find the answer that is assumed to be there;
• mechanistic and functional, because they often force an answer even when no obvious answer is available;
• imperialistic, because they apply the answer to each and every situation, without regard for local contexts.

(Ideas about knowledge and logics are developed in Chapter 2.)

We said earlier that not all scientists assume this to be a view of knowledge or a form of logic that is appropriate for scientific enquiry. Scientists such as Sir Peter Medawar, Thomas Kuhn and Paul Feyerabend maintained that scientific inquiry involves disciplined episodes of empirical testing as well as creative episodes of imaginative thinking. Throughout his work, Popper (1959; 1963; 1972) also stressed the importance of being open to criticism. He advocated testing the val...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• Working with the Text
• PART 1 BACKGROUNDS AND CONTEXTS
• PART 2 GATHERING DATA AND GENERATING EVIDENCE
• PART 3 ESTABLISHING VALIDITY AND LEGITIMACY
• PART 4 IMPLICATIONS, EVALUATIONS AND DISSEMINATION
• PART 5 TESTING OUR CLAIMS TO EDUCATIONAL KNOWLEDGE
• References
• Index