Seperate essays: 4/22/15

(Unit 1&2) Reading

The Action Research Dissertation: A Guide for Students and Faculty text

2

Action Research Traditions and Knowledge Interests

As we discussed in Chapter 1 , action research is a cover term for several approaches that have emerged from different traditions. Everyone who uses action research for a dissertation should be steeped in the particular tradition they are working out of and its attendant methodological, epistemological, and political dilemmas (e.g., participatory action research [PAR], teacher research, community-based participatory research, etc.). We do not pretend to provide this level of grounding in this chapter, but we do try to provide some sense of how these traditions relate to each other and where students and faculty can go for more extensive accounts. There are several historical overviews of action research, but most are told from a particular intellectual and social tradition, such as the overviews provided by Anderson et al. (2007, practitioner research); Argyris, Putnam, and Smith (1985, action science); Bullough and Pinnegar (2001, self-study); Chambers (1997, participatory rural appraisal); Cochran-Smith and Lytle (1993, teacher research); Fals Borda (2001, participatory action research); Greenwood and Levin (2006, action research); and Maguire (1987b, feminist participatory action research). In this section, we will try to be as inclusive as possible so that students consulting this book for guidance on their dissertations can find their particular tradition of action research represented. There is also a need for a participatory dialogue among these traditions, which academic departmentalization has tended to balkanize into self-contained scholarly communities and bibliographies.

Historians are in the business of creating—not discovering or interpreting—historical meaning. In this chapter, we have done our best to get our “facts” straight, but the meaning one makes of them will depend on who is telling the story. To our knowledge, no attempt at a comprehensive history of action research exists, and our intent is not to provide one here. While the previous chapter attempted to offer some common elements of action research, there may be as much variation across action research traditions as there is between action research and some mainstream approaches to research. Some action research is group oriented and some is individual oriented; some is done by those within the setting and some is done by change agents from outside the organization in collaboration with insiders; and some is highly participatory and some is much less so. Similarly, some see the goal of action research as improving practice or developing individuals, whereas others see its goal as transforming practice, participants, organizations, or, in some cases, even society. Debates rage within action research around these issues.

To the extent possible, our goal in this book is to present all of these perspectives in an evenhanded way. We believe that action researchers who write dissertations should be able to defend the particular tradition from which they have chosen to work, as well as to appreciate—and not naively conflate—differences among traditions. In many cases, the issue is not that one or another tradition is better, but that it may be more or less appropriate to the context of a particular study. Or, students may find one approach to action research more congruent with their own set of beliefs, values, and goals.

The popularity of action research has waxed and waned during the second half of the 20th century. Ironically, its popularity has often been linked to trends in areas as disparate as business administration and anticapitalist, grassroots movements. We caution students not to ignore differences or transfer models inappropriately beyond the contexts for which they were developed. While a revolutionary thinker like Paulo Freire and a business guru like W. E. Deming may both have advocated a cycle of inquiry involving plan-act-observe-reflect, this does not mean that their two philosophies are epistemologically, methodologically, or ideologically compatible. In the public sector, there has been a growing—but, in our opinion, misguided—influence of business models and techniques designed to increase productivity and accountability (Ward, 2011). Perhaps the most pervasive are the techniques associated with total quality management that incorporate cycles of plan-act-observe-reflect and methods of statistical control that carry the assumptions of the business models from which they were derived. Using statistical control to eliminate variation in a product makes perfect sense when mass-producing hamburgers or jet engines. However, it makes much less sense for healing patients, educating children, or solving community problems (Cuban, 2004).

On the other hand, there are excellent accounts of using action research within the business and corporate sector. If you are doing an action research dissertation in a business school, you may find a classic like Whyte’s (1991) Participatory Action Research more useful than Freire’s (1970) Pedagogy of the Oppressed. One uses PAR to pose and solve problems within businesses to raise productivity, while the other uses PAR to pose and solve problems to transform consciousness and ultimately society.

On the end of the continuum farthest from business-oriented versions is action research as emancipatory practice aimed at helping an oppressed group to identify and act on social policies and practices that keep unequal power relations in place. Here, action research is working with an oppressed community to identify what Freire (1970) called generative themes, or issues that the community agreed had highest priority. In this way, action research is seen as challenging traditional notions of change and change agency that bring in outside experts to solve local problems. PAR tempers this expert knowledge with the expertise of locals about their own problems and solutions.

Freire (1970) was suspicious of researchers, planners, and technocrats arriving in communities with more answers than questions, but he also criticized socialist revolutionaries who arrived in poor communities with more answers than questions. While he might have shared some of their goals, he was adamant that the process of co-learning through participation was central to any attempt to work alongside the oppressed.

As discussed in the introduction, action researchers are often more interested in their projects than in writing them up. Practitioners are too immersed in their day-to-day work, and consultants tend to move from project deadline to project deadline. Neither have the leisure of those who work in the academy to write up research reports. This is one reason why action research dissertations are such a potentially important contribution to a field’s knowledge base. Action research dissertations contain a local perspective that few traditional researchers are able to provide. A dissertation forces action researchers to think not only about what knowledge they have generated that can be fed back into the setting (local knowledge), but also what knowledge they have generated that is transferable to other settings (public knowledge). 1 As more action research dissertations are written, it is hoped that more of them will find their way into publication. For now, however, dissertation abstracts are an important source of action research studies. 2 Although only some are the product of dissertations, excellent sources for book-length published action research include the Dialogues on Work and Innovation series at John Benjamins Publishing Company and the Practitioner Research series at Teachers College Press. 3

THE MULTIPLE TRADITIONS OF ACTION RESEARCH

Action research is carried out under diverse intellectual traditions, and these traditions are distinct from and generally at odds with the mainstream academic research traditions in the social sciences. It may be helpful to think of these traditions as distinct scientific communities that are in constant evolution. The notion of scientific community is important because what “counts” as valid research is what sociologists call a social construction (Berger & Luckmann, 1967). At different times, in different social contexts, what constitutes valid ways of creating knowledge will vary. It is not by accident, for example, that emancipatory, grassroots approaches to research emerged from the oppressive social conditions of the developing world and among disenfranchised groups in the U.S. It is also not surprising from a historical perspective that positivistic, quantitative methods—what Mills (1959) called abstracted empiricism—emerged as dominant in the social sciences in the U.S. during the mid-20th century when social engineering was a popular approach to social problem solving.

In this chapter, we provide a highly condensed account of a variety of action research traditions. There is only space to whet the reader’s appetite to further explore the work summarized here. We invite the reader to delve into those traditions that are of particular interest. We hope that researchers and practitioners, armed with knowledge of previous attempts to promote action research, will be in a better position to articulate the importance and legitimacy of their own work. Undoubtedly, new traditions are being born as we write this. For instance, as people increasingly move online and communicate through social media, PAR is also going online, and PAR communities are forming there. The issues associated with working with PAR online are only beginning to be explored (see Hearn, Tacchi, Foth, & June, 2008; Machin-Mastromatteo, 2012).

ACTION RESEARCH AND ORGANIZATIONAL DEVELOPMENT/LEARNING

Some view the origins of action research as being in the work of Kurt Lewin and the group-dynamics movement of the 1940s. Although Lewin was not the first to use or advocate action research, he was the first to develop a theory of action research that made it a respectable form of research in the social sciences. Lewin believed that knowledge should be created from problem solving in real-life situations. Among the problems he studied were those related to production in factories and discrimination against minority groups (Lewin, 1946, 1948). His work on human dynamics in groups evolved into later research on work teams and site-based management, and his theories of organizational and social change were taken up by a growing human relations and organizational development movement. Using a thermodynamic metaphor of unfreezing, floating, and freezing matter, he saw change as a series of discrete episodes. This view of change was later criticized by Argyris and Schon (1974), who argued that it limited change to short-term interventions that move from one stable state to another rather than encouraging continuous organizational learning that could be sustained over time.

Current business models promote work teams, statistical control, continuous improvement, site-based management, and so forth, for both private and public sector organizations. While many practitioners believe these are recent innovations, they in fact go back to the early work of Lewin and the growing critique of industries’ dependence on the Taylorist principles of hierarchy, bureaucracy, direct supervision, and other mechanistic forms of worker control. Until the 1940s, it was believed by most industrialists that workers could be manipulated in much the same way that machinery was manipulated. Time and motion studies, inspired by Frederick Taylor, were done in workplaces to determine which work variables to manipulate to raise worker productivity.

By the 1940s, the human relations movement’s critique of Taylorism was widely known, and many industrialists were experimenting with these more worker-centered, participatory techniques. The human relations movement was associated with the well-known Hawthorne studies and theorists such as Elton Mayo, George Homans, and, somewhat later, Kurt Lewin. During the late 1950s and 1960s, the human relations movement evolved into the human resources school associated with Douglas McGregor and Frederick Herzberg. Most of the assumptions of these theorists concerning human motivation and, later, human capital theory are still very much a part of management and organizational theory. Action research’s insistence on worker participation played an important role in these movements but was often used as a management technique to get worker buy-in. However, it also had the potential to democratize workplaces and heed Lewin’s call for theory grounded in local problem solving. (For a critique of this movement, see Carey, 1997.)

Lewin’s action research was taken up in the U.S. by external consultants who set up controlled experiments and measured results. This tradition of action research was captured for over 40 years by a positivist approach that manipulated isolated variables. Levin (1999) speculates on why this trend occurred in the U.S.

First, the strong professional norms within American academia allowed little freedom to break out of the barriers defined by positivistic social science. Second, mainstream action research in the U.S. was linked to businesses competing in the marketplace. It was generally contracted and paid for by companies. In this context, action research soon became organizational development work in which the core interest was organizational change in support of a power elite’s interests. The research part was subordinated to other goals and the open-ended inquiry dimension disappeared. (p. 26)

Europe and developing countries, then, were more fertile ground for the development of action research, particularly in its participatory forms. In Europe, where there was strong labor union participation, the tendency for management control of the process was somewhat lessened, and social movements in developing countries, particularly in Latin America, embraced action research as a form of activist or militant research.

Perhaps one of the most ambitious action research projects in workplace democracy was the study of the Mondragon cooperatives in the Basque region of Spain. Led by Davydd Greenwood, it represents in many ways a classic case study of PAR in which insiders and outsiders to the setting set a research agenda together and collaborate on all phases of the research. The Mondragon cooperatives are a large group of labor-managed businesses in Spain that became an international model for workplace democracy. Much previous experimentation in workplace democracy, such as the projects undertaken in the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations in London or the Industrial Democracy Project in Norway, ultimately lost their emphasis on the democratic participation of workers (Greenwood & Levin, 2006). This was particularly true in the U.S., where the human relations movement was viewed by many as a wedge against unionism (Carey, 1997). Thus, the Mondragon experiment attracted many advocates of worker participation because the experiment involved not only workplace democracy but also worker control of the business itself.

The Mondragon action research project began when William Foote White was invited to Mondragon to help them solve problems he had identified in a previous research visit. He elicited the aid of Cornell colleague and anthropologist Davydd Greenwood, who had done fieldwork in the Basque region where Mondragon is located. The work teams that Greenwood encountered were expecting a set of lectures from an expert on organizational culture. To their surprise, Greenwood insisted that the Mondragon workers become involved in the project as participants, helping to identify problems and research questions. Thus began a three-year participatory research project that has been extensively documented in terms of both the obstacles that were encountered in creating a participatory research team and the findings that resulted from the study (Gonzalez, 1991; Greenwood & Gonzalez, 1992; Greenwood & Levin, 2006). The documentation is of particular interest because the director of personnel of the Fagor Group at Mondragon, Jose Luis Gonzalez, and the Cornell researcher, Davydd Greenwood, have both published extensively on both the process and findings of the study.

Action research in the tradition of organizational development and workplace democracy has more recently taken what van Beinum (1999) calls a communicative turn, influenced primarily by a group of Scandinavian-based researchers working out of a long tradition of workplace democracy. From 1985 to 1990, a state-funded Swedish research program, Leadership, Organization and Codetermination, funded several landmark action research studies. After funding ended in 1990, the Scandinavian-based Action Research Development Program (ACRES) was formed as a collaboration between the Swedish Center for Working Life and the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim, Norway.

Drawing on the work of Habermas, Wittgenstein, and Vygotsky, and postmodern theories of language and discourse, researchers associated with this movement view democratic organizational development as closely linked to language and communication. Drawing on Habermas, they view organizational life as an “internal public sphere” in much the same way that Habermas theorized communication in a broader public sphere. 4 Not surprisingly, a central concept within this approach is dialogue, and a variety of forums have been developed in which dialogue is encouraged and guided. This perspective has been described in detail in several publications (Engelstad & Gustavsen, 1993; Gustavsen, 1992; Palshaugen, 1998), so we will not describe it in detail here. Palshaugen’s (1998) The End of Organization Theory? describes an action research study that was an attempt at organization development through the reorganization of discourses.

ACTION SCIENCE

Action science is largely associated with the work of Chris Argyris (Argyris et al., 1985), whose central concern is the ability of organizations to learn. Based on the notion of organizations as self-correcting systems, he, like the Scandinavian researchers, sees communication as central to organizational change. (For a systems theory approach to action research, see also Burns, 2007.) He and his associates have also incorporated aspects of critical theory into their work, particularly Habermas (1979), whose theory of communication seeks to establish nondistorted communication in which the force of the better argument prevails, as judged in free and open discussion.

Argyris also wishes to return to action research its scientific dimension, arguing that the problem-solving focus of action research has moved it too far away from the tasks of theory building and testing. The goal of an action science, according to Argyris et al. (1985), is the generation of “knowledge that is useful, valid, descriptive of the world, and informative of how we might change it” (p. x). Argyris has also criticized some types of action research for adhering to traditional social science notions of “rigorous research,” arguing that “to attain a certain level of rigor, the methodology may become so disconnected from the reality it is designed to understand that it is no longer useful” (p. x).

Drawing on the previous work of Dewey and Lewin, and often writing with Donald Schon (Argyris & Schon, 1974), Argyris over the years has evolved an intervention strategy for changing the status quo that stresses organizational learning. According to Argyris et al. (1985),

In social life, the status quo exists because the norms and rules learned through socialization have been internalized and are continually reinforced. Human beings learn which skills work within the status quo and which do not work. The more the skills work, the more they influence individuals’ sense of competence. Individuals draw on such skills and justify their use by identifying the values embedded in them and adhering to these values. The interdependence among norms, rules, skills, and values creates a pattern called the status quo that becomes so omnipresent as to be taken for granted and to go unchallenged. Precisely because these patterns are taken for granted, precisely because these skills are automatic, precisely because values are internalized, the status quo and individuals’ personal responsibility for maintaining it cannot be studied without confronting it. (p. xi)

Argyris’s work is important for action researchers because it suggests why many institutions may not be thrilled at the idea of close examination. It is also important because, unless solutions to the problems under study tap into the complex theories of action that underlie and maintain the status quo, problems will only be solved in a superficial and temporary manner.

Robinson (1993), a former student of Argyris, describes the need for problem-based methodology in educational research:

Much research has failed to influence educational problems because it has separated problematic practices from the pre-theorized problem-solving processes that gave rise to them and which render them sensible to those who engage in them. Once practice is understood in this way, the theorizing and reasoning of practitioners becomes a key to understanding what sustains problematic practice. Problem-based methodology provides a way of uncovering, evaluating and, if necessary, reconstructing these theories of action. (p. 256)

What Robinson’s work implies is that practitioner research should not simply promote practitioners’ “practical theories” (Sanders & McCutcheon, 1986) in a nonproblematic way, but rather explore in self-reflective ways how some practical theories may be perpetuating the very problems practitioners identify for study. Related work is referred to as action learning, although there is a lively debate about whether action learning, like other forms of reflective practice, is actually considered research (see Coghlan, 2013).

PARTICIPATORY RESEARCH: THE LEGACY OF PAULO FREIRE

The work of Miles Horton and John Gaventa of the Highlander Center served as an early inspiration for participatory research in North America (Gaventa & Horton, 1981; Lewis, 2001), but it was the appearance of Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed in English in 1970 that galvanized critical researchers in the U.S. Long before feminists and critical theorists began their critique of politically conservative and white, male-dominated action research models, a model of action research as liberation was taking hold in Latin America (Flores-Kastanis, Montoya-Vargas, & Suarez, 2009). After the Brazilian military coup of 1964, Paulo Freire went into exile in Chile. During the late 1960s and early 1970s, Freire and a group of Chilean literacy educators began a series of thematic research projects. Freire (1970) views thematic research as a highly inductive process in which research is seen as a form of social action. In this type of research, generative themes, or issues of vital importance to community members, are identified and used as a basis for literacy instruction and also studied in a collaborative fashion. Such projects have a dual purpose: (a) to help participants (usually adults) acquire literacy and (b) to help them engage in social critique and social action. In other words, literacy involves learning to read the word and the world.

In 1976, the Participatory Research Group was created by the International Council of Adult Education in Toronto and its network centers around the world. During the last three decades, participatory research has been done all over Latin America and in other developing countries (Brown & Tandon, 1983; Chevalier & Buckles, 2013; Fals Borda, 2001; Gaventa, 1988; Hall, 2001). The first World Symposium of Action Research was held in Cartagena, Colombia in 1977. This conference has since been held throughout the world and attracts thousands of attendees (Wallerstein & Duran, 2008). Although methodological considerations depend on the context within which the study is undertaken, de Schutter and Yopo (1981) described the following as general characteristics of participatory research:

• The point of departure for participatory research is a vision of social events as contextualized by macro-level social forces.

• Social processes and structures are understood within a historical context.

• Theory and practice are integrated.

• The subject–object relationship is transformed into a subject–subject relationship through dialogue.

• Research and action (including education itself) become a single process.

• The community and researcher together produce critical knowledge aimed at social transformation.

• The results of research are immediately applied to a concrete situation. (p. 68)

Kemmis and McTaggart (2005) provide a more recent set of characteristics based more on Habermas’s writing on communicative action and emancipatory knowledge.

1. It is a social process and focused on the interrelationship between an individual and their social environment.

2. It is fundamentally participatory, where participants go to work on themselves, examining the relationship between knowledge, identity, agency, and practice.

3. It is practical and collaborative, in that it involves groups investigating in relationship their practices (including their relational practices).

4. It is emancipatory, in that it helps people address the “constraints of irrational, unproductive, unjust, and unsatisfying social structures that limit their self-development and self-determination.” (p. 567)

5. It is critical in the way it encourages participants to contest the ways they are positioned to view the world in particular ways.

6. It is reflexive in that the object of investigation is to change the world for the better in a number of ways: practice, knowledge of practice, social structures, and social media (what we might call discourse structures).

7. It aims to transform both theory and practice, and views these as mutually dependent. (p. 566)

In Freire-inspired participatory research, the academic research model is challenged at almost every point. The dualisms of macro/micro, theory/practice, subject/object, and research/teaching are collapsed. This perspective also challenges many of the premises of more traditional models of action research. Many of the criticisms are similar to the feminist critique of action research discussed below. Brown and Tandon (1983) indicate that traditional action research tends to concentrate on an individual or group level of analysis of problems, whereas participatory research, with its more emancipatory emphasis, tends to focus on a broader societal analysis. Traditional action research tends to emphasize issues of efficiency and improvement of practices, whereas participatory research is concerned with equity, self-reliance, and oppression problems. More recently, some authors promoting an emancipatory approach are using the term participatory activist research (Hunter, Emerald, & Martin, 2013).

Participatory research takes place within a force field of power relations in which conflicts of interest often create resistance to the research. Participatory researchers assume that they will be resisted from above (i.e., powerful vested interests), whereas traditional action researchers are often consultants who are hired by the powerful. These differences also exist between PAR and practitioner research. There are some attempts to bridge PAR traditions with practitioner research—including this book—most notably, Brydon-Miller and Maguire (2009).

While less overtly political than Freire, Heron’s (1996) experiential approach to action research—which he terms co-operative inquiry—emphasizes the intersubjectivity among researchers and participants.

In meeting people, there is the possibility of reciprocal participative knowing, and unless this is truly mutual, we don’t properly know the other. The reality of the other is found in the fullness of our open relation (Buber, 1937), when we each engage in our mutual participation. Hence the importance of co-operative inquiry with other persons involving dialogue, parity and reciprocity in all its phases. (p. 11)

Although Freire was influenced by Marx and liberation theology, and Heron by humanistic psychology, both are concerned with using participatory research as a way to highlight paths toward greater humanization and away from dehumanization. In both models, our ontological vocation is to become more fully human. Grassroots global movements have appropriated some of the ideas of PAR, particularly notions of revaluing subjugated knowledge. For example, Souza Santos (2008) has linked global social forums to the creation of a new epistemology and new knowledges from social struggles in the southern hemisphere.

PARTICIPATORY EVALUATION

In Chapter 6 , we describe a PAR project that began as a contract to do program evaluation. The field of evaluation has long supported approaches that blend in many ways with PAR. During the 1960s and 1970s, the field of program evaluation was widely criticized for being methodologically narrow, irrelevant to those being evaluated, unfair in favoring influential people and bureaucratic sponsors, and narrow in the types of questions that were asked (Weiss, 1987). Stake (1975) used the term responsive evaluation to describe a shift toward a more reflective, participatory approach to evaluation.

An educational evaluation is responsive evaluation if it orients more directly to program activities than to program intents; responds to audience requirements of information; and if the different value-perspectives present are referred to in reporting the success and failure of the program. (p. 14)

The increasing acceptance of including stakeholders in evaluations led to its use by the federal government to evaluate programs like Jesse Jackson’s PUSH/Excel (Farrar & House, 1986). While the results were mixed, evaluators continued to refine more participatory and utilization-focused approaches (Patton, 1996; Raymer, 2007). What Guba and Lincoln (1989) call fourth-generation evaluation is barely distinguishable from the tenets of PAR. For a participatory evaluation dissertation, see Seigart (1999).

In international development work, a form of participatory evaluation known as Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA) has gained widespread support. Although there are different views of PRA, the primary source for understanding its theory and practice is the work of Robert Chambers (1994, 1997). PRA practitioners struggle with many of the dilemmas of participatory evaluation research, discussed above, that is sponsored by powerful external agencies. For examples of dissertations that address PRA, see Pelletier (2001), Perez (2000), Toness (2002), and Tuttle (2003).

ACTION RESEARCH AND COMMUNITY PSYCHOLOGY

Action research has gained its greatest acceptance in applied fields such as organizational development, education, social work, criminology, nursing, public health, international development, and agriculture. Among social science disciplines, psychology has traditionally tended to marginalize most nonpositivist approaches to research, even qualitative, interpretive approaches largely accepted in other disciplines. Nevertheless, action research has gained a small foothold among community psychologists who see the relationality that action research builds among researchers and participants as an advantage rather than a threat to validity (Tolman & Brydon-Miller, 2001). Tandon, Kelly, and Mock (2001) refer to this as ecological validity:

By including the Developing Communities Project (DCP) representatives throughout this work, the research team made a continuous effort to construct a genuine, trusting partnership between DCP and the University of Illinois, Chicago research team that would enhance this work’s ecological validity (Bronfenbrenner, 1979; Chavis, Stucky, & Wandersman, 1983; Kelly, 1999), or the degree to which the constructs and products of this work are relevant to DCP. (p. 201)

This community-based approach has especially found fertile ground among public health researchers (Hacker, 2013; Minkler & Wallerstein, 2008) and those who work with youth in low-income neighborhoods (Flicker et al., 2008). Much of the work in youth participatory action research (YPAR) described below has been partly influenced by community psychology.

ACTION RESEARCH IN EDUCATION

In the field of education, action research has enjoyed widespread success, both as an individual route to professional development and as a collaborative route to professional and institutional change. Because so many educators are themselves in graduate programs, many have done theses and dissertations as action researchers working on the inside of their organizations. As we will discuss in the next chapter, this insider status creates a set of dilemmas that are quite different from PAR, in which the outside change agent collaborates with insiders.

While action research in education has evolved differently than in other fields, its popularity has created a rich debate that can inform dilemmas encountered by action researchers in all fields. In fact, action research has become so popular in education, particularly as a mode of professional development and “data-based decision making,” that, as with the democratic workplace movement, there is much concern that it may become a form of domestication rather than empowerment.

The theoretical foundations of action research in education are grounded in the importance that John Dewey gave to human experience and active learning in the generation of knowledge. From Dewey, it was a short step to the notion of taking the professional experience of teachers and other practitioners and using it as a source of knowledge about teaching. Schon’s (1983) notion of the reflective practitioner and professional learning owe a similar debt to Dewey. Unfortunately, during the second half of the 20th century, this simple logic has been largely drowned out by the fixation in education on using positivist research methods that enjoyed greater legitimacy in the natural and social sciences, as well as psychology—education’s parent discipline.

The idea of educational practitioners doing research in schools goes back at least as far as the late 19th and early 20th centuries with the movement for the scientific study of education. Teachers were viewed as the frontline of data gatherers for a massive research movement that saw teachers as researchers, working scientifically in their classroom laboratories (McKernan, 1988). Although this vision of teachers as researchers never materialized, it is interesting to note that within this model, teachers were allocated the role of carrying out research in their classrooms that was designed by university researchers. This vision of teachers as researchers tended to view teachers as mere gatherers of data that could be analyzed statistically.

As early as 1926, Buckingham (cited in McKernan, 1988) recognized the potential of qualitative, case study research: “Among the many types of research work available to teachers, the making of case studies is by no means unimportant” (p. 176). The hierarchical relations between universities and schools reflected in most of this early work on practitioner research continues to be a source of tension today.

Overlapping with this scientific movement in education was the Progressive movement inspired by John Dewey. Referring to Dewey’s contribution to action research, McKernan (1988) states,

In Logic: The Theory of Inquiry, he once again argues that there must be a unity of the structure of inquiry in both common sense and science. He promoted logic as a method of scientific thinking and problem resolution. Later Action Researchers, such as Lewin, Corey, and Taba, also followed these steps of reflective thinking, thus demonstrating the linkage of the scientific method with Action Research. (p. 176)

For a more complete discussion of action research and the Progressive era, see Schubert and Lopez-Schubert (1997).

During the early 1950s, action research was promoted in the field of education principally by Corey (1949, 1953, 1954) at Columbia Teachers College, who believed that teachers would likely find the results of their own research more useful than that of “outsiders,” and thus would be more likely to question current curricular practices. Corey was the executive officer of the Horace Mann-Lincoln Institute of School Experimentation, which had been founded at Teachers College by H. L. Caswell. Under Corey’s direction, members of the Institute’s staff collaborated on research with classroom teachers. In his 1953 book, Corey published several of these studies and a summary of what he called the “cooperative Action Research movement.” Arthur Foshay (1993) a participant in the movement (Foshay & Wann, 1953), describes the rather sudden demise of action research in education.

The chief limitation of cooperative Action Research, from the point of view of the educational researchers of the time, was that it was not possible to generalize from the examined population to others, because no attempt was made to see whether the examined population was representative of a larger population. In addition, since much of the research was designed and carried out by classroom teachers, who were not trained in research, the data often were flawed. For these reasons the movement was ridiculed in the publications of the American Educational Research Association (AERA), and it did not spread. It disappeared as the members of the Institute staff scattered with the passage of time. (Foshay, 1993, p. 3)

It is not surprising, given the general hostility that educational researchers in the 1950s felt toward nonpositivist research of any kind, that action research would be ridiculed and judged by positivist standards. By the end of the 1950s, action research had not only declined in the field of education but in the social sciences as well. Sanford (1970), in an article titled “Whatever Happened to Action Research?” suggested that funding agencies wanted more basic research and that an increasing split between science and practice led to the cult of the expert (Lindblom & Cohen, 1979) and the top-down, social engineering mentality of the period.

Although action research never totally disappeared, interest waned during the 1960s—a decade in which adherence to the cult of social engineering reached its height. The late British researcher Lawrence Stenhouse is usually credited with renewing interest in action research in Britain during the 1970s.

THE TEACHER-AS-RESEARCHER MOVEMENT IN BRITAIN

Although there had been much discussion throughout the 20th century of the idea of school practitioners doing research within their own sites, there had generally been more talk than action. A teacher research movement that began in Britain during the late 1960s began to change this. This movement is most often associated with the work of Lawrence Stenhouse, who established the Center for Applied Research in Education (CARE) at East Anglia University, and, later, with the work of John Elliott and Clem Adelman with the Ford Teaching Project.

Elliott (1991) makes the case that, in reality, teacher research began as a teacher-led curriculum reform movement that grew out of concern by teachers over the forced implementation of behavioral objectives in curriculum and Britain’s tracked educational system. Elliott describes his own participation in the teacher-as-researcher movement in England during the 1960s:

Curriculum practices were not derived (by us) from curriculum theories generated and tested independently of that practice. They constituted means by which we generated and tested our own and each other’s theories. Practices took on the status of hypotheses to be tested. So we collected empirical data about their effects, and used it as evidence in which to ground our theorizing with each other in the context of collegial accountability. We didn’t call it research, let alone Action Research. This articulation came much later as the world of academia responded to change in schools. But the concept of teaching as reflexive practice and a form of educational inquiry was tacitly and intuitively grasped in our experience of the innovation process. Our research was by no means systematic. It occurred as a response to particular questions and issues as they arose. (p. 8)

The heyday of action research in Britain saw a teacher research movement develop in the schools as well as in a series of large, state-funded collaborative action research projects. During the 1970s and 1980s, a lively debate took place in Britain over a number of issues in action research. Among them were a search for a guiding paradigm (Altricher & Posch, 1989), the political problems of promoting action research within institutions that do not want to look at themselves too closely (Holly, 1989), and the usefulness of more quantitative approaches to action research (Harwood, 1991). One of the most interesting critiques was that of action researchers.

Feminist researchers involved in the Girls and Occupational Choice Project (Chisholm, 1990; Weiner, 1989, 2004) and Girls in Science and Technology (Whyte, 1987) argued that action research was being turned into a project in social engineering and was losing its “emancipatory” potential. German feminist action researcher Maria Mies (cited in Chisholm, 1990) argued that the radical potential of action research was lost when it was turned into a recipe and controlled by state agencies:

[Early on] “action” was interpreted not as socially liberating and dynamic praxis, but rather, in a manner observable in many activist groupings where precise short-term goals are set, as a narrow pragmatism. The same would appear to be true for what is termed “Action Research,” which typically comprises planned intervention in specific social contexts, mostly under the control and direction of state agencies and monitored by researchers—in other words, a sort of social engineering. (p. 255)

This concern with moving action research beyond narrow pragmatism and planned interventions by external agencies was taken up earlier by a group of Australians led by Stephen Kemmis, who spent time with British action researchers at East Anglia (Tripp, 1990). Carr and Kemmis’s (1986) book Becoming Critical challenged older models of action research as essentially conservative and positivistic. In a later article, Carr (1989) reasserts, “In theory, Action Research is only intelligible as an attempt to revive those forms of democratic dialogue and reflective theorizing which under the impact of positivism have been rendered marginal” (p. 89). He is concerned that as action research becomes more methodologically sophisticated and technically proficient, it will lose its critical edge.

Two booklets that had a powerful effect on action researchers in education were Kemmis and McTaggart’s (1987) The Action Research Planner, a user-friendly introduction to the action research spiral, and Kemmis’s (1982) The Action Research Reader, a compilation of critical action research studies.

THE PRACTITIONER RESEARCH MOVEMENT IN NORTH AMERICA

Although the teacher researcher movement in North America occurred later than in Britain and Latin America, it was not derivative of either movement, nor was it a reappropriation of the North American action research movement of the 1940s and 1950s. The Center for Applied Research in Education at East Anglia in Britain and the work of Paulo Freire inspired many North American academics and some teachers, but the movement among North American teachers to do research began with a unique set of circumstances.

1. The dominance of the quantitative, positivistic paradigm of research in education was challenged by qualitative, case study, and ethnographic research from the late 1960s on. Because they more closely resemble the narrative forms already used by practitioners to communicate their craft knowledge, making qualitative forms of research legitimate helped open the door for practitioners to experiment with more systematic qualitative approaches in studying their practice.

2. Research on successful school change efforts and schools as contexts for teachers’ professional work began to report that school-based problem-solving approaches to change were more likely to be successfully implemented than large, federally funded, outside-in initiatives (Lieberman & Miller, 1984). These findings spawned a large number of collaborative, or interactive, research and development efforts in which educational practitioners were invited to work alongside research and development experts in implementing programs and improving practices. (For accounts of these collaborative research projects, see Griffin, Lieberman, & Jacullo-Noto, 1982; Oja & Ham, 1984; Tikunoff, Ward, & Griffin, 1979.)

3. The increased deskilling of teachers and the dissemination of teacher-proof curricula spawned an effort on the part of educational practitioners to reprofessionalize teaching and to reclaim teachers’ knowledge about practice as valid. Donald Schon’s (1983) book The Reflective Practitioner encouraged practitioners to begin to tap into their store of professional knowledge to make it explicit and share it with other practitioners. From the notion of reflective practice, it was only a short step to that of action research, which became linked to an overall attempt by educational practitioners to reassert their professionalism. The Boston Women’s Teachers’ Group’s report The Effect of Teaching on Teachers (Freedman, Jackson, & Boles, 1986) describes the structural conditions and isolation of teachers’ work that makes professionalism difficult. They point out that teachers work “in an institution which supposedly prepares its clients for adulthood, but which views those entrusted with this task as incapable of mature judgment” (p. 263). Liston and Zeichner (1991), in reviewing the group’s work, point out that their research was used to

combat the individualistic bias in the school reform movement of the 1980s, which served to direct teachers’ sense of frustration with and anger about their work away from a critical analysis of schools as institutions to a preoccupation with their own individual failures. (p. 150)

These problems have increased in the wake of the omnibus No Child Left Behind educational reform legislation, signed by President Bush on January 8, 2002, which gives these deskilling tendencies the force of law (McNeil, 2000). Its social engineering tendencies, obsession with testing, and narrow forms of accountability have decreased professional autonomy for teachers and administrators. Under the influence of such regimes, action research is too often captured by the technical knowledge interests described later in this chapter. However, it has also produced teacher resistance and more critical approaches to teacher research (see Allen, 1999; Allen & Alexander, 2012).

4. Encouraged by the pioneering work of Atwell (1982), Brookline Teacher Research Seminar (2003), Goswami and Stillman (1987), Graves (1981a, 1981b), Myers (1985), and the Bay Area Writing Project, language arts teachers led the way in doing teacher research and writing about it from an insider perspective. Not only have they used student writing as data, but also they have written case studies of a variety of issues in the teaching of writing. Because of these teachers’ own commitment to writing, they have tended to lead the way in writing and publishing accounts of their experiences as teacher researchers. (For examples, see Ballenger, 1992, 1998; Brookline Teacher Research Seminar, 2003; Bruce & Pine, 2010; Gallas, 1993, 1997, 2003; Hatch et al., 2005.) The increasing importance of Vygotskian, sociocultural approaches to literacy have also encouraged greater collaboration among researchers and practitioners (Lee, Smagorinsky, Pea, Brown, & Heath, 1999).

5. Many university teacher education programs and university/school collaborations began to emphasize teacher research. One of the best-known efforts to incorporate teacher research into a teacher education program is that of Ken Zeichner and others at the University of Wisconsin (Liston & Zeichner, 1991). Susan Noffke, Jennifer Gore, and Marie Brennan, all former university supervisors in the elementary teacher education program at Wisconsin, have documented the uses of practitioner research in the training of teachers (Noffke & Brennan, 1991; Zeichner, 1981–1982).

Programs of this kind are becoming more common in colleges of education and promise to have an important impact on moving teacher and administrative preparation programs toward a more reflective model. For accounts of other similar programs and discussions of the role of action research in teacher education and school–university collaborations, see Christman et al. (1995); Clift, Veal, Holland, Johnson, and McCarthy (1995); Gitlin et al. (1992); Johnson (2002); and Moller (1998).

6. The school restructuring movement of the 1980s began to propose restructuring schools to create conditions that nurture teacher inquiry and reflection. The Holmes Group’s (1990) Tomorrow’s Schools contained a chapter dedicated to schools as “centers for reflection and inquiry.” This chapter covers themes first reported in Schaefer’s 1967 book, The School as a Center of Inquiry. The notion of schools as professional learning communities has grown over the past two decades (Rogoff, Turkanis, & Bartlett, 2001; Lieberman & Miller, 2008).

Many independent collaborative efforts to restructure schools have included practitioner research as an aspect of teacher empowerment. In Georgia, the League of Professional Schools made action research a key component in the move to shared governance and school renewal (Glickman, 1993). The Coalition of Essential Schools was founded on the notion of ongoing inquiry and reflection, and attempts to build these habits of mind in students. While the notion of schools as professional learning communities is still rhetorically strong, the notion of using test data to remediate teaching has in many schools replaced authentic forms of collaborative inquiry among teachers (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2009).

The teacher research movement has come a long way since the 1980s. Teacher action research was framed early on by academics who saw teachers as classroom ethnographers. While useful to some extent, the “teachers as classroom ethnographers” idea was ultimately flawed because it was based on the conception of academic outsiders unfamiliar with the lived realities of conducting research from the inside. Teachers are actors in the site as well as researchers, a departure from that of an ethnographer carrying out one designated role, that of researcher. Teachers began to exert more control over the definition of teacher research, and together with academics, like Marilyn Cochran-Smith, Susan Lytle, Ken Zeichner, Susan Noffke, and many others, they began writing their own accounts of classroom and school life. As teachers saw the potential for action research to extend beyond creating accounts of teaching to transforming school culture, teacher research also began to become more collaborative. Unfortunately, as Miller (1990) and others predicted early on, teacher-initiated collaborations were colonized by school reform movements that emphasized test scores and were data driven rather than inquiry driven. It is this tendency to co-opt action research that we will discuss in the next section.

THE DANGER OF CO-OPTATION

Even before the deskilling tendencies of the No Child Left Behind legislation, there has been great concern about using action research as a motivational tool that focuses on the best means to ends determined elsewhere.

When the critical dimension of teacher research is negated, the teacher-as-researcher movement can become quite a trivial enterprise. Uncritical educational Action Research seeks direct applications of information gleaned to specific situations—a cookbook style of technical thinking is encouraged. . . . Such thinking does not allow for complex reconceptualizations of knowledge and as a result fails to understand the ambiguities and the ideological structures of the classroom. [In this way] teacher research is co-opted, its democratic edge is blunted. It becomes a popular grassroots movement that can be supported by the power hierarchy—it does not threaten, nor is it threatened. Asking trivial questions, the movement presents no radical challenge or offers no transformative vision of educational purpose, as it acts in ignorance of deep structures of schooling. (Kincheloe, 1991, p. 83)

In a similar vein, Miller (1990) recounts how she and a group of teachers in a research study group struggled with this very issue of expanding the focus of practitioner research so as to become “challengers” of nonresponsive educational institutions. One teacher researcher in the group asked the following question:

Do you think that we could just turn into another form, an acceptable professional form of empowerment? Well, what I mean is that nothing would please some administrators I know more than to think that we were doing “research” in their terms. That’s what scares me about the phrase “teacher-as-researcher” these days—too packaged. People buy back into the very system that shuts them down. That immediately eliminates the critical perspectives that we’re working on, I’m afraid. But I’m still convinced that if enough people do this, we could get to a point of seeing at least a bigger clearing for us. (p. 114)

As Schon (1983) has pointed out, social institutions are characterized by dynamic conservatism. It is dynamic in that it constantly pulls practitioners back to a status quo that, as noted by Argyris et al. (1985) above, consists of norms, rules, skills, and values that become so omnipresent as to be taken for granted and to go unchallenged. Action research can either reproduce those norms, rules, skills, and values, or it can challenge them. However, practitioners intuitively know that when they challenge the norms, the institutions’ dynamic conservatism will respond in a defensive, self-protective manner.

Practitioners will have to make their peace with how much of a challenger of the status quo they wish to be. Some are more skillful and in stronger positions to take stands on issues than others. However, if action research is not done with a critical spirit, it runs the risk of simply legitimating what may be—from the perspective of equity considerations—unacceptable social arrangements within schools and society.

While teacher research often has as its aim the enrichment of learning experiences for students, the students themselves are cast more as informants rather than included as researchers. While expanding their participation, “students, who are also primary stakeholders in educational processes and practices continue to be mere recipients of insights gained and decisions made” (Van Sluys, 2010, p. 141). Student action research is aimed in part at bringing youth to the table as more equal partners in the school improvement and reform processes. It is “one response to the widespread problem that young people are not viewed as legitimate stakeholders or participants in institutions that shape their lives” (Kirshner, 2010, p. 239). A central tenet is the belief that those traditionally “studied” must move beyond the role of being a knowledge holder and be repositioned as architects of the research process (Ayala, 2009). We take up notions of youth as researchers in the next section.

PARTICIPATORY ACTION RESEARCH WITH YOUTH: YPAR

Variously called student action research or youth participatory action research (YPAR), Rubin and Jones (2007) characterize these research efforts as ones that are “conducted by youth, within or outside of classrooms with the goal of informing and affecting school, community, and or global problems and issues” and in the process “contributes to the positive development of a variety of academic, social and civic skills in youth” (p. 363). Youth, often with involved adults, have the opportunity to study firsthand issues of concern to them, and, using the inquiry process, they then begin to craft actions to address these issues. New understandings are constructed via this kind of collaboration as well as new roles for youth (Galletta & Jones, 2010). Cammarota and Fine (2008) note that “YPAR teaches young people that conditions of injustice are produced, not natural; are designed to privilege and oppress, but are ultimately challengeable and thus changeable” (p. 2). In the process, they gain valuable skills in active citizenry and begin to see themselves as capable of instigating change.

Student action research works at transforming relationships among youth and with adults whereby they are more equal partners in the inquiry and change process (Ayala, 2009). It is not that power differentials are not recognized; rather, part of the work becomes the transformation of relationships in ways that recognize that all around the table have important contributions and responsibilities toward improving the public good as manifest in their sites and communities.

Ideally, youth partner with adults in the overall investigation: forming the research question, collecting and analyzing data, reporting the results, as well as helping to shape possible interventions aimed at improving the conditions studied. But in reality, the research process is carried out in multiple ways (Ayala, 2009). Youth may join research initiated by adults with a working research question already in place or, more rarely, youth may be the initiators of the inquiry and adults are invited to join them. Checkoway and Gutierrez (2006) assert that the issue is not who leads the research—whether it is youth led, adult led, or intergenerational—but rather whether youth have an actual effect on the process. Commonly, adults mentor students into the research process while also trying to buffer obstacles to the inquiry; in addition, they may try to connect youth to other influential adults who are key actors to the problem of study (Galletta & Jones, 2010).

Typically utilizing a social justice perspective, participatory action researchers work “to address the underlying causes of inequality while at the same time focusing on finding solutions to specific community concerns” (Williams & Brydon-Miller, 2004, cited in Brydon-Miller & Maguire, 2009, p. 81). Seeing their own communities and the sites they inhabit through a critical lens, students and their partners move toward a more systemic understanding of the issues they encounter. This clearer understanding of their social contexts support youth in moving from self-blame to demanding more equitable treatment from societal powers. They begin to challenge “normal” practices of systematic oppression (Cammarota & Fine, 2008). For example, Youth United for Change studied conditions in Philadelphia schools around the issue of “pushouts” and zero tolerance (Youth United for Change, 2011). Reframing the “dropout” issue, the young authors explain their use of the term pushout:

[T]he term “dropout” points the finger at the individual in a negative way. The term “dropout” suggests that people leave school because of individual mistakes and poor decisions; the term neglects the larger, systemic problem that lead to young people leaving school. We chose the term “pushout” because it focuses on the school-based factors that lead to young people leaving school. (p. 2)

Current published accounts of YPAR, while often taking up issues of education, are not often accounts of teacher and student collaborations within their school sites. More commonly, youth may be involved in an afterschool or community group that has YPAR as one aspect of its offerings. The work of Youth United for Change cited above would be an example of this kind of arrangement. The organization partnered with other groups (Research for Action and the Advancement Project) to provide expertise in research and teach the youth the needed inquiry skills.

Many of these efforts come out of community organizing and educational reform traditions. As part of their mission, youth are actively invited to engage in efforts for societal change, often with education as a primary focus. For example, the Urban Youth Collective (UYC), with the assistance of the Community Organizing and Engagement staff of the Annenberg Institute for School Reform at Brown University, recently released a document, No Closer to College: NYC High School Students Call for Real School Transformation, Not Schooling Closings (2007). The youth call into question the approach taken in New York City (NYC) whereby school closure is used as the primary school improvement policy rather than other initiatives that might transform struggling schools. In making their case for transforming existing schools, UYC projects that under the current policy, the educational experience of over 65,000 NYC high school students—“more students than the entire Boston public school system”—will be interrupted by school closures (p. 6). UYC, in coalitions with other community groups, has already scored significant educational reform successes including the funding of Student Success Centers where youth are trained to work with their peers on the college application and financial aid processes. They also led the campaign that preserved free and reduced-price metro cards for students using public transportation to and from school.

When youth action research moves within the schoolhouse walls, youth typically work with adult allies although they are not necessarily members of the school staff. One model that appears in published accounts is one where an outside researcher, sometimes a graduate student or university professor, works with a group of youth to explore issues of concern within their school setting (Irizarry, 2011; Smith, Davis & Bhowmik, 2010). Or the researcher may have a project in mind and recruit students to be part of the inquiry team. For example, Stoudt (2007) initially conducted research at an elite private school for boys with four faculty researchers. The researchers became increasingly concerned with evidence they were uncovering of institutionally facilitated boy-on-boy violence, which they described as “relational, emotionally ambiguous, culturally advantageous, and at times, associated with teachers” (p. 282). An outgrowth of this research was the formation of a student research team to join in the exploration of school violence.

Stoudt (2007), although an outsider to the school, did have an extended relationship with it due to his involvement in an ongoing consortium of schools exploring best, evidence-based practices for teaching boys. He was asked to teach research skills to students taking a social psychology class, and four seniors from that class were then asked to become members of the student research team he was forming. Stoudt hoped that “the training would help the student researchers become more sensitive to their surroundings and notice peer interactions in a way that they had previously taken for granted as normal: to practice making the normal strange” (p. 286).

YPAR is being used increasingly in education, public health, community psychology, social work, and other fields (Cammarota & Fine, 2008; Kindon, Pain, & Kesby, 2007). In social geography, it is being paired with Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and asset-based community mapping. Within action research, YPAR has been an area of exponential growth, and we have increasing numbers of dissertations utilizing this approach (see Chapter 6 for examples). Commonly, this work is social-justice based with emancipatory aims. Some students have been able to partner with larger YPAR undertakings and derive their dissertations from a piece of this work. For example, Michelle Fine, Maria Torre, Caitlin Cahill, and others associated with the Public Science Project at the CUNY Graduate School have used a Freirean approach to do PAR with youth in their communities, and a number of dissertations have resulted from these efforts. The Public Science Project has been generative for the youth involved as well as the graduate student researchers.

ACTION RESEARCH AS NARRATIVE: SELF-STUDY AND AUTOETHNOGRAPHY

As narrative research has gained greater acceptance in the social sciences and humanities, it has found its way into action research (Clandinin & Connelly, 2004; Herman & Vervaeck, 2005; Holstein & Gubrium, 2011). Some writers on action research criticize its tendency to privilege the group over the individual (Webb, 1996), and personal and professional narratives bring the focus back to the individual, although not an individual divorced from society. Whitehead (1991, cited in Webb, 1996), for example, justifies action research that is a self-reflective process focused on the individual.

I believe that the incorporation of “I” as a living contradiction in explanations for the educational development of individuals, has distinguished an original contribution to the Action Research movement. . . . I experience problems or concerns when some of my values are denied in my practice; I imagine ways of improving my practice and choose a course of action; I act and gather evidence which will enable me to make a judgment on the effectiveness of my actions; I evaluate the outcomes of my actions; I modify my concerns, ideas and action in the light of my evaluation. (p. 94; see also McNiff & Whitehead, 2000)

This focus on the individual practitioner follows the lead of Schon (1983) in attempting to understand how practitioners learn their craft. A focus on one’s own personal and professional selves is a form of action research usually called self-study (Bullough & Pinnegar, 2001) or autoethnography (Bochner & Ellis, 2002; Hayler, 2011; Reed-Danahay, 1997). These sub-fields of action research have developed their own validity criteria and handbooks (Bullough & Pinnegar, 2001; Jones, Adams, & Ellis, 2013; Laughran & Hamilton, 2004).

Not all self-reflective action research focuses on the individual. Narrative approaches to action research are often done collaboratively (Anderson & Saavedra, 1995; Chang, Ngunjiri & Hernandez, 2012; Christman et al., 1995). The advantage of collaborative narratives is that participants can comment on each other’s narratives and push beyond the more superficial level of narrative observation toward a deeper problematization of personal and professional experience (Tripp, 2012).

ARTS-BASED APPROACHES TO ACTION RESEARCH

As with arts-based approaches to research in general, arts-based approaches to action research challenge how we think about what counts as data and findings, and especially how data and findings are represented (Cahill & Torre, 2007). Video-based action research is perhaps the most common arts-based approach (Goldman, Pea, Barron, & Derry, 2007; Kindon, 2003; Lovett, 2008; Lykes, 2001), although photovoice approaches are increasingly popular as well (Horwitz, 2012; Strack, Magill, & McDonagh, 2004; Wang, 1999). Strack et al. (2004) point out that in documentary photography, images, taken from the photographer’s perspective, are used to draw attention to social issues. They point out that most commonly this provides an etic or outsider viewpoint and may fail to capture the insiders’ more emic perspective. But even within documentary photography, these distinctions are increasing blurred. For example, Deborah Scranton (2007), a journalist, was invited to “embed” herself with U.S. troops in Iraq. Instead of traveling with the troops, she convinced the authorities to allow her to give video cameras to 10 soldiers and work with them to create their own versions of their experiences of the war. The result was a video documentary called “The War Tapes” that highlighted three of the soldiers’ war experiences. It was not insider action research, as Scranton communicated on e-mail with the soldiers regularly, visited and interviewed their families back home, and interviewed the soldiers on their return. She also was the primary editor of the tapes. The result, while achieved collaboratively, provides an insiders’ view of war that would have been difficult to achieve through more traditional forms of research or journalism. While Scranton’s aim was not action research per say, her work shares many of the tenets sought through that process.

Photovoice, a methodology whereby insiders document their own realities via images and then systematically analyze them, moves the process of photographic documentation into what would more commonly be recognized as research. The process is seen “as an innovative participatory action research (PAR) method) based on . . . education for critical consciousness, feminist theory, and nontraditional approaches to documentary photography” (Wang, 1999, p. 185). Photovoice was designed, in part, to challenge assumptions about representation and documentary authorship (Wang, 1999), and move documentary photography into more participatory realms (Horwitz, 2012). Developed by Wang and Burris as a strategy to promote women’s health, they used photovoice with Chinese village women, enabling them to photograph everyday health and work realities (Wang, 1999). While developed within the field of health promotion, photovoice has shown its usefulness in a variety of fields. Using photographic images, community members document the needs and assets of the community with a goal of promoting dialogue about community issues; this is coupled with a goal of promoting concern and pride to policymakers and those beyond their own community (Strack et al., 2004).

FEMINIST, POSTCOLONIAL, AND ANTIRACIST APPROACHES TO ACTION RESEARCH

Feminist and antiracist approaches to action research have produced many dissertations that have pushed the boundaries of PAR, critiquing dominant paradigm thinking that creeps into even more critical approaches. As discussed above, feminists and critical theorists both have critiqued the social engineering tendencies of turning action research into a codified and packaged professional and organizational development strategy. Maguire (1987b) and others have pointed out the lack of female voices in the international debate about action research. Racial discourses have yet to be examined in depth in action research (Bell, 2001), but with the advent of critical race theory, such critiques are likely to become more common (see Chavez, Duran, Baker, Avila, & Wallerstein, 2008). Since PAR is linked to international development projects, insights from postcolonial theory might also be useful. Some of the dissertations listed under PAR provide the beginnings of a postcolonial critique. For examples of feminist and feminist, antiracist action research dissertations, see Cullen (2008), Goldin Rosenberg (1999), Horst (2007), Maguire (1987a), Martin (1998), Paradis (2009).

THE KNOWLEDGE INTERESTS OF ACTION RESEARCH

There is a built-in conservatism in much action research, particularly research done in institutions by practitioners, who are immersed in a reified and naturalized world in which common sense is constructed. Furthermore, role expectations for legitimation of the status quo are embedded in most institutions. This problem, which has been noted by many advocates of organizational learning and critical reflection (Argyris et al., 1985; Argyris & Schon, 1974; Robinson, 1993; Tripp, 1990), requires some mechanism that can problematize those taken-for-granted aspects of organizational life. These issues are linked to a long tradition of analyses of sources of distortion in social inquiry beginning with the shadows in Plato’s cave, Freud’s subconscious, Marx’s false consciousness, and Gramsci’s hegemony, through more recent versions such as Habermas’s distorted communication, Lindblom’s impairments to inquiry, and Argyris’s theories-in-use. Many writers on action research have taken a critical approach to action research, arguing that there is nothing in current approaches to action research or reflective practice that might interrupt the mere reproduction of current “best” practices that support the current social order (Anderson & Herr, 1999; Carr & Kemmis, 1986; Tripp, 1990; Zeichner & Noffke, 2002). Although there is much talk about reflection and reflexivity, relatively few accounts of how this is done in action research exist (see Hall, 1996).

The author most cited in this regard is Jurgens Habermas (1971), who argued that knowledge production is never neutral, but rather is always pursued with some interest in mind. Habermas also has argued that communication within any public sphere is always distorted through the relations of power that form the context of the communicative act.

While all research traditions have some set of criteria for determining the validity of truth claims, most research traditions advocate a disinterested stance toward the generation of knowledge. Critical and feminist approaches to research tend to take a more normative position (Anderson, 1989), as do Argyris et al. (1985), who suggest “that action science is an exemplar of critical theory as formulated by the Frankfurt School. A critical theory seeks to engage human agents in public self-reflection in order to transform their world” (p. 2). Kemmis (2001) provides a much more in-depth discussion of applications of Habermas to action research, and Fraser (1997) provides a feminist critique of his theory of communicative action.

Habermas (1971) pointed out that knowledge and human interests were inseparable. He argued against the claim of the objectivist that valid knowledge could only be generated through methodologies that were empirical-analytical in nature. These research methods attempted to separate what was considered the bias of the researcher from the subject being investigated. However, Habermas insisted that such a separation was an illusion that is ultimately shattered through the process of self-reflection. He maintained that because knowledge was generated through the interest of the mind, knowledge and interest are forever linked and cannot be unattached. In refuting the claim of objectivism as the sole pathway to valid knowledge, he presents three distinct “interests” of the researcher in the pursuit of knowledge generation: technical, practical, and emancipatory. Each interest establishes an orientation and an associated research methodology.

Technical interest focuses on human desire to take control over the natural and social realm. Knowledge generated through this orientation historically assumes a disinterested stance toward the topic being investigated, and knowledge generated takes on the form of causal explanations and instrumentation. Practical interest refers to an orientation toward gaining understanding through interpretation. The researcher engaged in the pursuit of practical interest employs interpretive methodologies—primarily hermeneutic interpretation—in an effort to provide understanding of a given situation. Consequently, interpretative understanding seeks to generate knowledge that informs and guides practical judgments. Methods associated with the practical interest include hermeneutical methods such as textual, conversation, and discourse analysis, as well as ethnographic and other qualitative methods.

An emancipatory interest orients the researcher toward the release of human potential and the investigation of ideology and power within the organization and society. The ultimate goal of this kind of research is that of the “emancipation of participants from the dictates or compulsions of tradition, precedent, habit, coercion or self-deception” (Carr & Kemmis, 1986). These are thought to be subtle and deeply embedded into the belief structure of the organization, and, through the process of critical self-reflection, they can be accessed and surfaced for examination ultimately leading to transformation.

While Habermas’s knowledge interests have been criticized, particularly Carr and Kemmis’s appropriation of his work to action research (see Gibson, 1985; Webb, 1996; Whitehead & Lomax, 1987), we find his distinctions useful in guarding against the potential for action research to unreflectively reproduce current practices. The notion of emancipatory knowledge interests leads to the potential for critical reflection and the problematization of current practices as well as one’s own unexamined assumptions (Tripp, 2012). In other words, it stresses problem posing rather than merely problem solving. See Table 2.1 for a summary of Habermas’s knowledge interests.

Table 2.1 Continuum of Intentionality Based on Habermas’s Knowledge Interests

Our point here is not to disqualify any particular methodology for action research. For example, while certain methodologies tend to be associated with certain knowledge interests, we don’t see a conflict in using statistical methods toward emancipatory ends, as long as it forms part of a cycle of ongoing critical reflection.

Our emphasis in this chapter has been on presenting alternative criteria for goodness for the unique purposes and positionalities of action research. We hope we have provided dissertation writers with some conceptual tools for thinking through both the limitations and strengths of their methodology.

NOTES

1. While the distinction between local and public knowledge is a useful conceptual distinction, we don’t want to suggest that one type of knowledge is superior. Nor is the distinction always so easy to distinguish in practice.

2. Because action research has not enjoyed legitimacy in the academy, many students and dissertation committees have not used the term action research for studies that are, in fact, action research. We have found that merely doing a search for action research or related terms may not be sufficient to locate many action research studies. Research-oriented Listservs are often another source for identifying action research studies on a particular topic.

3. The Dialogues on Work and Innovation series is edited by Hans van Beinum, Richard Ennals, Werner Fricke, and Oyvind Palshaugen. The Practitioner Research series is edited by Marilyn Cochran-Smith and Susan Lytle.

4. See Nancy Fraser’s (1997) feminist critique of Habermas on this point. In this regard, it is important to point out that the researchers associated with this movement are largely male.

3

The Continuum of Positionality in Action Research

Researcher positionality is important in all research. Essentially, your positionality as a researcher means asking the question, Who am I in relation to my participants and my setting? It has to do with the myriad forms of border crossing that researchers do as they embark on their studies. Action research shares all of the kinds of border crossing (e.g., class, race, gender, etc.) that other research requires (Villenas, 1996), but a central dilemma unique to action researchers is their relationship to their setting and participants. Because action researchers may be outsiders or insiders to a setting, and may be seeking collaborative relationships with participants, sorting out the implications of this unique relationship to one’s study is often confusing. In fact, Thompson and Gunter (2011) point out that even the notions of insider and outsider are multilayered and fluid, and can shift at various times during a research study.

Our intent here is not to naturalize the positions of insider and outsider, but rather to help action researchers interrogate where they are on the continuum as they begin a study, while acknowledging that this positionality can contain elements of both insider and outsider or change during the research process. So while we will address all kinds of positionality, the main focus of the chapter will be on the continuum of positions researchers assume, from being an insider to being an outsider in relationship to the setting and participants in the study.

Much action research is centrally concerned with these issues of the relationship between outsiders and insiders, since clarity about them is necessary for thinking through issues of research validity or trustworthiness, as well as research ethics. From the 1940s through the 1970s, the consultancy approach to action research was dominant in many fields, and in some fields remains so today. Within this approach, action researchers have been seen as outside change agents who either are contracted by an organization or community or have received grant funding. This research has tended to be undertaken by an outsider, and the central issue has been how to involve insiders in the research to a greater extent than is the case with traditional research or evaluation. Much of this research was—and continues to be—contract or evaluation research, and it was usually funded to solve a particular problem or evaluate a particular program. Master’s theses and doctoral dissertations from this action research approach are often done in applied fields that prepare graduates to work collaboratively in areas such as international development, community psychology, social work, health promotion, and other fields.

With the growth of highly educated professionals who have acquired research skills and are enrolled in doctoral programs, action research dissertations are today often done by organizational or community insiders. These practitioner researchers see research as a way to deepen their own reflection on practice toward problem solving and professional development, as well as a way to generate knowledge of practice from the inside out. In such cases, the researcher and the practitioner may be one and the same (see Anderson et al., 2007; Coghlan & Brannick, 2001; Coghlan & Casey, 2001; Robinson & Kuan Lei, 2005). Research by Anderson and Jones (2000) on dissertations in educational leadership suggests that these practitioners—mostly principals and superintendents—were partly motivated by the convenience of studying their own site, where they had a deep level of tacit knowledge. However, more important, they wanted their research to make a contribution to their own setting and clients. In many cases, they wanted to use it to empower themselves professionally and personally, and to bring about organizational change.

In contrasting academic research with insider action research, Cochran-Smith and Lytle’s (1993) important book Inside/Outside: Teacher Research and Knowledge was one of the first to lay out in detail the possibilities and dilemmas of this type of insider research. The issue for many teachers was that knowledge about teaching was being generated exclusively by academic researchers, and that this knowledge was not viewed as useful to the teachers themselves. Clandinin and Connelly (1995) argued that outsider knowledge was often experienced by practitioners as a “rhetoric of conclusions,” which “entered the practitioners’ professional landscape through informational conduits that funneled propositional and theoretical knowledge to them with little understanding that their landscape was personal, contextual, subjective, temporal, historical, and relational among people” (p. 24). While insiders can do research without outsiders, insiders doing dissertations have a dissertation committee of outsiders they can rely on for methodological guidance. Unfortunately, faculty on dissertation committees have seldom had extensive experience with action research, and therefore may unwittingly provide well-meaning but problematic advice based on their own outsider epistemologies. Besides a dissertation committee, most practitioner researchers also seek independent critical friends who can help them problematize the taken-for-granted aspects of their setting. Insider and outsider positions are at the extremes of the continuum. In the middle are studies done by collaborations among insiders and outsiders. These studies are known as participatory or collaborative research; Bartunek and Louis (1996) use the term insider/outsider team research.

We dedicate an entire chapter to the issue of positionality because the degree to which researchers position themselves as insiders or outsiders will determine how they frame epistemological, methodological, and ethical issues in the dissertation. As faculty who advise action research dissertations, we have looked in vain for sources that help students think through how their decisions about positionality influence the many other decisions they will make throughout the study.

There are other ways to think about positionality that are useful to this conversation. Collins (1990) uses the term outsider within to refer to the particular perspective on society that being black and female gives her. In Chapter 6 , we discuss Lynne Mock’s relationship to her African American participants. As an African American, she is racially an insider, but as a university researcher, she is also an outsider. At the end of this chapter, we will take up in more detail these other ways researchers and participants position themselves.

The continuum and implications of positionality presented in Table 3.1 are, in part, the product of a study of numerous action research studies in education that included dissertations, published articles, and conference papers (Anderson & Jones, 2000). The original goal of the study was to explore the potential of action research studies as a new source of professional knowledge in the field of education (more specifically, educational leadership). For this book, we have expanded our database beyond educational leadership and explored implications of each position for the validity of action research studies, as well as the unique ethical dilemmas that arise for each position.

While the researcher’s positionality in relation to the setting is important, it is often no simple matter to define one’s position. Some researchers who are outsiders to the setting have little knowledge of it, while others may have extensive—and often firsthand—knowledge of the context. For instance, some researchers studying social service agencies may have previously been social workers. Many educational action researchers studying schools may have been teachers. An outside researcher studying a particular Puerto Rican community may be Puerto Rican and may have once lived in the community.

Furthermore, participatory action researchers, who tend to be outsiders to the setting under study, report that their relationship to participants can shift throughout a study and can vary for different parts of the study. For instance, participation may be stronger at the problem-posing and data-gathering part of the study than at the write-up and dissemination part. To further complicate matters, insiders to a setting do not have direct access to the “truth” of the setting. Theirs is merely one truth among many.

Table 3.1 Continuum and Implications of Positionality

a. A flawed and deceptive version of this is when an insider studies his or her own site but fails to position himself or herself as an insider to the setting in the dissertation (outsider within).

In the following sections, we have attempted to make some sense of a continuum of positionalities using somewhat oversimplified categories. As we have pointed out, one’s positionality doesn’t fall out in neat categories and might even shift during the study. Researchers will have to figure out the nuances of how they position themselves with regard to their setting and participants. The reader will find more examples from the field of education on the insider end of the continuum, because insider practitioner research is most common in education, although it is becoming increasingly common in fields such as nursing and social work. (For insider research in hospitals, see Coghlan & Casey, 2001; for social work, Fuller & Petch, 1995; and for counseling, McLeod, 1999; Brooks-McNamara & Torres, 2007.) On the outsider end of the continuum, we provide more examples from organizational and international development, public health, and applied sociology and psychology, particularly community psychology.

INSIDER: RESEARCHER STUDIES OWN SELF/PRACTICE

If we begin on the far left of the continuum, category 1 in Table 3.1 , we have dissertations in which insiders, either alone or in collaboration with other insiders, are researching their own practice or practice setting. It is useful to discuss the lone insider researcher separate from an insider group of researchers as we have done in Table 3.1 . While one’s practice cannot be separated from the setting within which it takes place, a focus on one’s own practice versus the actions initiated within the setting is an important conceptual distinction. A focus on one’s own personal and professional self is a form of action research sometimes called self-study (Bullough & Pinnegar, 2001) or autoethnography (Bochner & Ellis, 2002; Hayler, 2011; Reed-Danahay, 1997). Jack Whitehead’s website ( www.actionresearch.net ) provides an excellent overview and examples of theses and dissertations done from this vantage point. Such studies add to the literature on reflective practice and professional learning (Schon, 1983, 1987). In these cases, there is a greater emphasis on narrative, self-reflective methods.

On the other hand, practitioner researchers often want to study the outcomes of a program or actions in their own setting, much like an internal evaluation study. These studies often rely on more traditional qualitative and quantitative methods of data gathering. As we will discuss in this chapter, a common mistake in this type of research is to treat one’s personal and professional self as an outside observer rather than as an insider committed to the success of the actions under study. We find it is difficult and perhaps deceptive to attempt to separate the study of one’s self and practice from the study of the outcomes of actions initiated in a setting. If a researcher is studying a program that is his or her “baby,” then the tendency for self-promotion may be too great to overcome. In such cases, an outsider should be brought in to do the evaluation, even if it means finding another dissertation topic. But if the insider’s aim is to continue to study herself in relationship to the program she has developed or to fold the action research immediately back into the program in terms of professional or organizational development, we distinguish this from a formal evaluation done for, perhaps, an outside funding source. (For a dissertation that successfully navigated this tension, see Hyman, 2013.) Some of the worst action research studies are done by researchers who are insiders, but fail to fully acknowledge this positionality and think through its implications. We are aware of a dissertation done by a superintendent of schools who wanted to study a professional development program that he developed and implemented for the principals in the district. A major source of data was his interviews with the principals on how useful the professional development had been for them. Had the superintendent acknowledged and then thought through the methodological implications of his position of power, he probably would have offered more anonymous means of gathering data than face-to-face interviews could offer. But without this kind of acknowledgement and grappling with the power dynamics in his research design, it was difficult to ultimately convince readers that the study could be seen as trustworthy.

Our point is not that administrators cannot do action research in their own organizations, but that one’s positionality has to be carefully thought through. We have seen cases in which action researchers who are studying their own settings refer to themselves as “the researcher” and use third person instead of first person pronouns. This typically is a sign that the action researcher (or his or her dissertation committee) lacks a fundamental understanding of the epistemology of the insider action researcher.

The following excerpt from Moyra Evans’s (1995) dissertation illustrates the impulse to self-reflection that often leads to an action research study. At the time of the study, Evans was a deputy head (what would be called an assistant or vice principal in the U.S.) of a school in Britain.

“What are you doing?” I asked George, one of the other deputy heads, one Wednesday afternoon at about five o’clock. “Oh, this and that,” he replied. He stopped doing this or that, and tried to put his mind to talking to me.

“I don’t seem to have anything to do,” I said, naively. I had only been there a few days. He looked at me as if he were about to launch into a diatribe about what he had to do, and then thought better of it.

“You will soon” was all he said, soothingly, and turned back to his pieces of paper.

Gradually, I became the proud receiver of pieces of paper. At first they only trickled in. I felt very important, and looked for places to file them. That seemed to be a useful task—to update the previous Deputy’s filing cabinet. I thought I would just leave last year’s papers there and then add my own. But it wasn’t that easy. I couldn’t work out why papers relating to twenty years ago were still there. I made an early decision to throw them all out and start again.

I developed a good system, I had a space for everything, and for the first three weeks or so, every letter or document was put away. The papers covered a much wider range of items than those I had received when I was a Senior Teacher elsewhere. I realized that the Head and three Deputies had copies of practically every document that was generated in the school, and that this was a good way of ensuring communications were effective. I certainly couldn’t complain that I had been left out; neither could I complain that I didn’t know something, because the chances were, that if I had read my paperwork, I would know.

Lessons, marking, administration, meetings, planning—all gathered pace, and eventually I was caught up in the race with everyone else. It was tremendously exciting and I felt very privileged to be at the heart of the management of the institution. I enjoyed talking about how we should go about achieving our aims and planning all of this with various groups of people in the school. I enjoyed doing the work—“getting my hands dirty” is the expression we used.

I remember my life as being on a series of interconnecting treadmills. The momentum had increased so much that I felt I was running along from one rung to the next, jumping from one wheel to another—just keeping going, not pausing to see the scenery. I had always liked running, and reckoned to be good, but eventually, I became a little disenchanted. I wanted to get off. I wanted to stop and see what was happening around me. (p. 97)

We cite the above passage from Evans’s dissertation because it captures the spirit of practitioners’ need to make meaning of their practice. Schon (1983) used the notion of the reflective practitioner to describe those practitioners who “learn to learn” about their practice and therefore become better practitioners. In a sense, these types of dissertations are insider case studies of practitioner learning that both become a form of professional development for the researcher and provide case study data on how practitioners learn and grow in different professional contexts.

Some academics don’t take dissertations very seriously as sources of knowledge because they are seen as being done by amateur researchers who are just learning their craft. However, this type of action research dissertation is more than an amateur researcher demonstrating a certain level of competence in doing research. It is an account of how one practitioner goes about learning his or her craft and what was learned in the process. Such insider accounts generate important knowledge to be shared among practitioners, just as case studies reported by academic researchers do. In fact, they begin to build a knowledge base that can inform the research community about the actions and beliefs of practitioners—a knowledge base that is otherwise unavailable.

This type of self-reflective action research is always written up in the first person. Evans’s (1995) narrative has characteristics of a story, with elements of humor and irony and a narrative hook that leads the reader into wanting to read more. Practitioners tend to use narrative and story as a way to communicate professional knowledge, which makes it particularly appropriate for action research. Some action research studies adapt ethnographic and behavioral science methods, while others may use journals and diaries as major sources of data. (For a discussion of quality criteria for narratives, see Heikkinen et al., 2007.)

Insider researchers have unique dilemmas. A simple logistical dilemma is that they can’t be in two places at once. Practitioners don’t have the luxury of the ethnographer, who can take copious field notes, write them up, and transcribe interviews. Using the ethnographic approach places practitioners in a logistically untenable position because they can’t work and record data at the same time. A few accounts, primarily in schools and classrooms, exist of how practitioners have adapted traditional methods to their own contexts (Anderson et al., 2007; Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 1993; Hubbard & Power, 1999). As practitioner research continues to become more prevalent in fields such as nursing and social work, we anticipate that similar accounts will be produced for those unique contexts.

The tacit knowledge that a practitioner acquires over months and years of working in a site raises both logistical and epistemological issues. Logistically, this tacit knowledge is an advantage in that it would have to be reproduced from scratch through ethnographic observation at a new site. However, it raises epistemological problems in the sense that unexamined, tacit knowledge of a site tends to be impressionistic, full of bias, prejudice, and uninterrogated impressions and assumptions that need to be surfaced and examined. Furthermore, insiders, because they are often true believers in their particular practices, are too often tempted to put a positive spin on their data. For this reason, mechanisms for dealing with bias need to be employed. (See Chapter 4 for validity criteria.)

We will discuss these issues in more detail, but one way to deal with bias is to acknowledge one’s presence in the study and build in methods of self-reflection. In the following dissertation abstract, Fecho (1995) describes how he went about doing a study in his own classroom in which he wanted to do ethnographic research while acknowledging his own presence as teacher and researcher. He frames his research as a “hybrid between the traditional dissertation study and studies carried out by teachers on their own practice” (p. 2).

This study was a year-long investigation into the work and attitudes associated with language and language study of the teacher and students in a North Philadelphia classroom. The text describes the complex evolution of a class where language was made problematic and students were encouraged to raise and investigate questions about the roles language played in their lives. It was conducted as a form of teacher research using qualitative methods and, as such, represents a hybrid between the traditional dissertation study and studies carried out by teachers on their own practice. It argues that the study benefits from both paradigms in that it is responsive to the scope, knowledge base, and rigor of academic research while documenting the practice of the teacher from an emic, or insider, perspective—a perspective too rare in the current literature. Research methods included collecting and analyzing student work, audio field notes, class transcripts, and both individual and focus group interviews. In addition, the collected data was analyzed by diverse networks of teacher researchers at both a local and national level, thereby bringing multiple perspectives to the analysis. Focused around the following question—what does it mean for a teacher and students to take a critical stance on language—this study concerns itself with the roles which were played, the topics and issues which were raised, the ways in which knowledge was generated, and the range of student attitudes on critical language issues. (p. 2)

Although this is a study of Fecho’s classroom and the interactions that occur around language use, he also owns his own role as insider, turning it to his advantage by arguing that it provides a rare emic perspective on classroom life, while also incorporating rigorous ethnographic methods and data analysis.

INSIDER IN COLLABORATION WITH OTHER INSIDERS

Insider researchers often collaborate with other insiders as a way to do research that not only might have a greater impact on the setting, but also has the potential to be more democratic. However, power relations in a setting operate even when insiders think they are being collaborative. For instance, while principals, teachers, and counselors may collaborate to do inquiry as insiders in a school located in a low-income community, they may or may not view the students or community as part of the collaboration. Unless they do, the results of their action research might benefit them at the expense of those excluded from the process.

These insider collaborations—the second category in Table 3.1—are manifested in many organizations as inquiry groups that go under different names. In business, they are often teams that engage in what is called data-based decision making or quality circles. In communities, they can be Alinsky-inspired, interfaith community organizing groups such as the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF), parent organizations in schools, or consumer groups. In education, they go under names such as teacher study groups, teacher inquiry groups, critical friends groups, or leadership teams. These typically are aimed not only at using collaborative approaches to inquiry, but also reculturing organizations into professional learning communities.

These various forms of insider collaborative inquiry vary in their degree of autonomy. Some groups are fairly spontaneous and work at the margins of organizations or communities (see Miller, 1990), whereas others either evolve into or are incorporated into the governance structure (Johnson, 2002). Collaborative inquiry groups often are the result of formal institutional efforts that create site-based management teams to engage in data-driven organizational change efforts. While more autonomous groups provide more freedom and idiosyncrasy, more mainstream groups hold out more possibility of impacting the overall organizational culture. Inquiry groups can be structured to focus specifically on addressing equity issues (Johnson & Avelar LaSalle, 2010). Some argue that autonomous inquiry groups lead to greater balkanization and micropolitics (Holly, 1989); others argue that groups that are brought into the organizational mainstream may be too easily co-opted (Herr, 1999c; Maguire, 1987b; Miller, 1990). While these insider collaborations around inquiry hold great potential for both improving professional development and democratizing organizations, there is much debate about to what extent they should be mandated or voluntary.

Recently, the New York City Department of Education mandated inquiry groups in all schools. They struggled with issues of trust, logistics, and authenticity. Many viewed the inquiry groups as merely a vehicle for implementing the large ARIS database the district purchased and found the data (mostly in the form of spread sheets of student instructional data) “drove” the inquiry rather than the inquiry driving decisions about what data to gather. In other words, these insider inquiry groups were too often data driven rather than data supported. As time went on, this mandated space that had opened up for engaging in collaborative inquiry was taken over by more directive and utilitarian pursuits, such as implementing the common core standards. More research is needed on how to foster more authentic and voluntaristic spaces for collaborative inquiry in schools. (See also the social work example in Chapter 6 .)

Regardless of how groups of participants interested in inquiry choose to situate themselves along the continuum of formal institutional to informal autonomous, these group efforts have several potential benefits in common: They can engage in inquiry in ways that help the group move from working as isolated individuals toward a collaborative community; they can seek to engage their members in learning and change; they can work toward influencing organizational change; and they can offer opportunities for personal, professional, and institutional transformation. 1

Headman (1992), a fourth-grade teacher, did a collaborative study for her dissertation with the parents of her students.

Parents and teachers typically establish and maintain hierarchical relationships which ascribe excessive authority to the school, thus limiting the possibilities for dialogue and mutual learning. Their discussions of children’s literacy often fail to acknowledge the contributions that parents can make, based on their knowledge and experiences with children at home. Neglecting parents’ voices in schools, and in home and school literacy research, means the parents’ critical role in supporting children’s literacy development is overlooked. By investigating with parents their perspectives on children’s literacy experiences in and out of school, this study seeks to understand the relationships between children’s home and school literacy and to model processes by which parents and teachers develop a reciprocal dialogue. Eight parents of my fourth grade public school students joined me in a two-month co-investigation. Individually and collectively we raised questions, observed, documented, and reflected on children’s uses of reading and writing in and out of school. . . . Through the parent teacher research process, parents raised issues about current practices in classroom grouping, integrative curriculum, assessment, and teaching and learning relationships, providing further evidence for the importance of including parents’ knowledge and experience in the design of effective learning contexts for their children. (p. 7)

While most collaborative insider studies are done among organizational professionals, this is not always the case. Here a teacher collaborated with parents to engage in inquiry about her teaching. This collaboration returns us to the complexity of notions of insider and outsider. One could argue that the parents are typically viewed as outsiders by school professionals who view them as not having a legitimate role in teaching and curriculum. Here the teacher views the parents as insiders to the extent they share a common goal of educating their children, and both bring relevant—though different kinds of—knowledge to the inquiry.

INSIDER(S) IN COLLABORATION WITH OUTSIDER(S)

A less common position is insiders initiating collaborations with outsiders. In such cases, organizational or community members contract or invite outsiders to collaborate on research. This collaboration can also range from merely bringing someone in to consult on methodology to collaborations that involve outsiders from the point of problem definition. Collaborative or participatory action research (PAR) in general raises unique issues with regard to how knowledge claims are justified and how power and control over the research process is distributed.

We make a distinction in this chapter between collaborations initiated by insiders and those initiated by outsiders (most typically the case for dissertations). However, as we have stressed, insiders are not monolithic. For instance, an administrator of an organization might invite an action researcher to work with an organization, but this does not mean that there is consensus among all organizational stakeholders, much less stakeholders outside the organization. In such cases, what may look like collaboration can end up being unintended collusion by professionals against the interests of their clients and communities (Anderson, 1999). These issues of power become increasingly important as funded participatory international development projects are led by researchers who are invited in by organizations in developing nations (Chambers, 1997). By now, it should be clear that achieving an equitable and democratic collaboration across differences in power, status, and resources is extremely complicated. This does not mean that we should give up engaging in collaborative research, but the more we understand its complexity, the more likely the project will create professional and organizational learning and produce new knowledge.

PAR: RECIPROCAL COLLABORATION (INSIDER-OUTSIDER TEAMS)

If there were an ideal form of PAR, the insider-outsider team would probably fit the bill. However, because all action research is done within a particular context, there may be many situations in which this would not be the best way to design a study—at least not initially. Furthermore, achieving this kind of reciprocal collaboration often requires many years of negotiation among all stakeholders, as illustrated in Lynn Mock’s dissertation study described in Chapter 6 . In the case described in that chapter, it took many meetings between university faculty and the community organization to build the level of trust and understanding that allowed the research project to move forward with a high probability of success. After years of engaging in action research in organizational contexts, Whyte (1991) concluded that

the social scientist should not seek to establish such a partnership the moment he or she enters the field. In industry or agriculture, the technical specialists will generally have little understanding of what the social scientist might contribute, and they will react against the newcomer who claims powers they lack. Those social scientists most successful in establishing such interdisciplinary partnerships view themselves initially as participant observers, showing respect for the work of practitioners and technical specialists, and seeking to learn from them. As the social scientist gains an understanding of the organizational culture and work systems, he or she will find ways of contributing that are appreciated by the technical specialists. This will pave the way for establishing the full partnerships represented by PAR. (p. 240)

While taking time (sometimes months or years) to build trust and expertise may be the ideal for a PAR study, in practical terms, a doctoral student may not have the time for this kind of full partnership to form, unless it forms as part of a pilot study or, as in Mock’s case, previous to her entering the study. In the following section, we will further address problems associated with arriving at the right level of participation among researchers and participants.

PAR: OUTSIDER(S) IN COLLABORATION WITH INSIDER(S)

The notion of insider and outsider is often a matter of degree. On the continuum of positionality in Table 3.1 , positions 4, 5, and 6 illustrate the gradations from participatory insider-outsider teams all the way to nonparticipatory outsider research. For instance, in the studies described in Chapter 6 , the Mock (1999) study was part of a collaboration that would be located near 4, the middle of the continuum. The Cahill (2005), McIntyre (1995), & Nygreen (2006) studies would be located closer to 5 on the continuum. This probably is the most common type of collaborative action research because it has traditionally been more common for outsiders (usually consultants) to initiate research projects than insiders.

Those projects that locate themselves at the center of the continuum of positionality in Table 3.1 are rare indeed. As our case examples in Chapter 6 suggest, insiders are often too busy to be full participants, and seldom do the incentive structures of organizations—other than universities—reward research. While the Mock (1999) collaborative study described in Chapter 6 came perhaps as close as is possible to creating an insider-outsider team (Bartunek & Louis, 1996), even these researchers acknowledged the difficulty of negotiating equal levels of commitment to the project (Kelly et al., 2004).

Cochran-Smith and Lytle (1993) point out that there is some justifiable fear that collaborations between university researchers and practitioners or communities can be co-opted by the university researchers, who have greater incentives and interest in publication. Whyte’s (1991) insight, mentioned previously, about the defensiveness of organizational insiders goes a long way in explaining why they are often reluctant to invite outsiders into their research projects. For instance, the Teachers-as-Researchers Special Interest Group of the American Educational Research Association initially discouraged academics from joining so they could have conversations that were not monopolized by university scholars.

The issue of what each stakeholder wants out of the research needs to be negotiated carefully if reciprocity is to be achieved. The attitude of PAR can be illustrated by a model reported by Tolley and Bentley (1996), which is adapted by MYRADA, a nongovernmental organization involved in rural development in India, from the four squares of self-knowledge published in Luft (1963; see Table 3.2 ). When outsiders enter a collaborative research study with the mindset of the third quadrant of this diagram, they frame themselves as outside experts rather than collaborative researchers. This often reinforces a tendency by insiders to place themselves in quadrant II, undervaluing their own professional or vernacular knowledge (McLaughlin, 1996). The goal of collaborative research is to reduce the tendencies of quadrants II and III and to expand quadrant I.

Table 3.2 The Four Squares of Knowledge

Issues of reciprocity for PAR and collaborative research are very complex. Cornwall (1996) has adapted a continuum of purposes for PAR that is displayed in Table 3.3 . She provides a useful list of the varying degrees of participation/collaboration that take place in PAR. Her use of pronouns is helpful in thinking through to what extent outsiders are doing research on, for, or with insiders, or whether the research is done largely by insiders.

For excellent discussions of reflexivity and the external researcher in PAR, see Dickson (1997), Dickson and Green (2001), and Maguire (1987b). Bartunek and Louis (1996) provide a more extended discussion of when insider-outsider teams are appropriate and what makes them successful.

Often it is difficult to identify a researcher’s position, and thus the issue of whether one is actually doing action research may be called into question. The following dissertation abstract provides an example in which the researcher’s position is ambiguous. She is a facilitator or coach of several teacher research groups, works for the school district, but is an outsider to the teachers’ professional settings. Her working hypothesis is that teacher research groups, if left on their own, tend to reproduce current practices rather than challenge them. She highlights the importance of the facilitator, but her positionality as a member of the district hierarchy implies a particular agenda.

The purpose of this research study is to examine my four-year role as a facilitator of twelve teacher research groups throughout British Columbia. I examine facilitated teacher research groups as one pathway to engendering educational reform. My thesis is that, without the external voice of the facilitator, contexts for pedagogical dialogue have the possibility of becoming nothing more than a retelling of incidents that occur consistently in the dailiness of teaching. Without the external facilitator, teacher research groups may become rooted in process at the expense of substance. The rigorous conversations and the rethinking of practice may be in jeopardy of being replaced by sessions in which teachers are emotionally and socially supported, yet changes in practice are not viewed as vital. This research study focuses on problematic aspects, tensions, and perplexing questions that emerged in my practice as a facilitator for teacher research groups. These dilemmas included grappling with the colleague/expert dichotomy, “contrived” collegiality, unexamined practitioner constructions of knowledge, and prodding practitioners to move beyond the seductive peril of retelling their own stories to take action towards rethinking and subsequently changing their own practice. Teachers viewed my role as facilitator as important because it contributed an external perspective which focused practitioners on what made a difference to student learning. (Dockendorf, 1995, p. 3)

Table 3.3 Participatory Methods: Means to What End?

There is some ambiguity here as to what kind of study this is. Is it a self-study, in which the researcher is studying her own practice as a facilitator, using journaling and field notes? Is it a study of the teachers and their ability to problematize their practice without the help of an outside facilitator? If so, how would authentic teacher data be gathered given the researcher’s position in the organizational hierarchy? How does the researcher problematize her own positionality and her thesis about teachers’ need for outside facilitation? These are the kinds of sticky positionality issues most action researchers doing dissertations have to resolve in order to carry out a valid and ethical action research study.

This example illustrates that positionality occurs not only in terms of inside/outside, but also in terms of one’s position in the organizational or social hierarchy, and one’s position of power vis-à-vis other stakeholders inside and outside the setting. As we will discuss below, all of these nuances must be taken into account in an action research dissertation.

OUTSIDER(S) STUDIES INSIDER(S)

This category may seem irrelevant to action research because it describes a traditional outsider position taken by quantitative and qualitative researchers. However, this end of the continuum does contain some gradations of insider-outsider collaborations and some interesting debates about whether action research is really that different from traditional research. In this section we will discuss (a) how action research is different from what social scientists call applied research; (b) collaborative research among outsiders; (c) research done by outsiders who study action research projects; and (d) scholarly work on action research as a methodology (its history, epistemology, etc.).

There is some debate about whether action research is a separate epistemology or merely a type of applied social science research. Spjelkavik (1999) states,

The difference between the applied research model and the action research model is that participation with the actors in the field is an important part of action research. . . . Although the applied research model is very general, it is no different epistemologically from an action research model. Action research is simply one of several possible ways to conduct applied research. . . . Thus, action research is a method that can be fruitfully combined with other methods (questionnaires, interviews, observations, whatever), and in this respect it does not require specific epistemological commitments. (p. 126)

He sees the participatory aspect of action research as merely supplementing the applied model. Thus, an action research study on this end of the continuum is viewed as applied research in which the outsider may engage more closely with the study’s participants. This level of engagement, according to Spjelkavik, can vary during the life of the study. In his study of Norwegian fish farms, he began as an outsider doing applied research aimed at generating knowledge about rural development and survival strategies in marginal or remote areas. The study evolved into PAR as the questions shifted and as relationships with informants deepened. Thus, it is not uncommon for qualitative or ethnographic studies to start out as traditional outsider research, but over time evolve into more participatory action research.

Ethnographers have traditionally lived in their informants’ communities and have called what they do participant observation. They often develop close relationships with their key informants. In fact, the ability to participate effectively in community life is often a sign that the ethnographer has learned the culture. Nevertheless, few ethnographers would call what they do PAR. Thus, the notion of outsider is complex and nuanced. In fact, just as insiders collaborate with other insiders to do action research projects, outsiders sometimes collaborate with other outsiders to form collaborative research teams. They are not necessarily doing action research, but they are doing research collaboratively. When doing any kind of applied research with participants, it is sometimes difficult to predict how a study will evolve in terms of its action orientation or the extent to which participants are included in deliberations about questions, methods, data gathering, findings, and dissemination of the research.

Because action research has gained popularity in recent years, there are a large number of doctoral students who have studied action research projects but are not using action research to do so. Most of these are qualitative or mixed methods studies of teacher research teams in schools or international development projects. Although these are not action research dissertations and thus not the focus of this book, it is important to emphasize that action research projects can be documented by insiders, outsiders, or PAR teams.

For instance, O’Donnell-Allen (1999) did a study for her dissertation of a teacher research group, but positioned herself as an outsider. She makes no pretense of doing collaborative research of any kind. Her goal was to observe the group and gather examples of teacher discourse. It is an example of a study of teacher research rather than a study with teacher researchers.

Besides outsider research on action research projects, there is also scholarship on action research methods and epistemology. These dissertations use a combination of historical, philosophical, or sociological methods. Noffke (1990), who has published extensively on action research since her dissertation, did a conceptual analysis of action research, asking the following questions central to understanding and evaluating action research:

1) Under what conditions does it emerge as a competing form of research? 2) How do forms and intentions of action research vary? And 3) What forms of action research offer a possibility for educational research that is responsive to teachers’ working conditions, to theory, and to the furtherance of social justice? (p. 4)

Using primarily historical methods and feminist theory, she found—among other findings—contradictions in action research between democratic and social engineering intentions and methods.

Zuniga-Urrutia (1992), who herself did action research in Chile in the 1970s, interviewed 31 action researchers, not “to define what ‘true’ or ‘real’ action research was, but to construct a conceptual framework to facilitate dialogue about issues and differences in action research practice” (p. 2). Like Noffke (1990), she found that views of action researchers varied from

a “restricted” view which is micro-based and emphasizes social efficiency and traditional research; a “broad” view which is macro-oriented and emphasizes empowerment and social action; and a mixed view which attempts to integrate aspects of each of these approaches. (p. 3)

We have further discussed these views of action research in Chapter 2 , drawing on what Habermas (1971) called the knowledge interests behind different types of action research.

MULTIPLE POSITIONALITIES

In this chapter, we have attempted to help action researchers clarify their often-complex relationships to the setting that is being studied. There are other ways, however, to think about researcher positionality. The list below provides multiple ways of thinking about one’s position within an action research project and some citations of work that can help sort these issues out.

1. Insider/outsider positionality vis-à-vis the setting under study (Anderson & Herr, 1999; Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 1993)

2. Hierarchical position or level of informal power within the organization/community (Anderson & Jones, 2000; Israel et al., 2003)

3. Position vis-à-vis dominant groups in society—class, race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, age, ability/disability, religion, and so forth (Anzaldua, 1987; Bell, 2001; Collins, 1990)

4. Position within colonial relations within and between nation states (Chambers, 1997; Tuhiwai Smith, 1999; Villenas, 1996; Willinsky, 2000)

The complexity of the notion of inside/outside is captured by Collins’s (1990) discussion of being an “outsider-within.” She suggests that one’s location in an organization or community makes for varying vantage points and differing lenses of “reality.” Some people are outsiders-within, residing in the margins and observing “the contradictions between the dominant group’s actions and ideologies” (p. 11). Collins maintains that outsiders-within offer a specialized, subjugated knowledge, a “peculiar marginality,” that provides a unique standpoint on self and society. For example, women in a male-dominated organization may become expert observers of the male culture as they navigate their day-to-day interactions with colleagues. The knowledge they possess in this case is not unlike that of Collins’s example of black slaves who have “special knowledge” of the white household because their survival is dependent on knowing the culture of whites. The dominant group is under no equivalent obligation. As Foucault (1980) points out, subjugated knowledge is offered by those who are sufficiently outside the mainstream of an organization or entity, perhaps those located down low on the institutional hierarchy. This specialized knowledge can foster organizational learning or be seen as a threat to the maintenance of the culture of an institution.

But each of us as researchers occupies multiple positions that intersect and may bring us into conflicting allegiances or alliances within our research sites. We may occupy positions where we are included as insiders while simultaneously, in some dimensions, we identify as outsiders. In the latter case, these dimensions often encompass one’s race, social class, gender, or sexual orientation in relationship to the site being studied. These dimensions extend into the worldview that one brings to the institution, both in terms of political or ideological beliefs as well as cultural assumptions. Each of these dimensions enters into the construction of the reality we capture in our research. We suggest that our obligation as researchers is to interrogate our multiple positionalities in relationship to the question under study. Our sense is that, in making explicit the tensions we experience as researchers in our varying roles and statuses, we have the possibility of crafting uniquely complex understandings of the research question. In addition, we hope to avoid the blind spots that come with unexamined beliefs.

Tammy Ann Schwartz’s (2002) dissertation research exemplifies the complexities of positionality. Schwartz was a doctoral student at the University of Cincinnati who did a PAR project with 11 urban Appalachian girls to explore their writing practices.

After dialoguing about writing and related issues, the girls conducted their investigation by interviewing their sisters, mothers and female friends and cousins. Themes of place, identity, class and writing emerged from subsequent analysis and dialogues. These dialogues, in turn, led to action as the girls began to confront class-specific stereotypes connected to place. (p. 2)

On the surface, Schwartz appears to be an outsider convening group dialogues with these girls in a classic PAR model. Her adult status and educational level also make her an outsider to the girls. However, Schwartz is also an insider in terms of her working-class origins, which matches that of the girls, but, more important, it turns out she also grew up in a neighborhood adjacent to the one in which these girls live.

What follows is a story of lives and research. For me, it is a story of traveling away from the community, traveling back, traveling between knowing and not knowing, between insider and outsider. For the girls, it is a story of traveling between knowing and conscientization and action, and between living and revising neighborhood narratives about what it means to be a girl in this place at this time. For all of us together, it is a story of questioning our selves, our neighborhood, our identities, our worlds. (p. 12)

We share her introductory narrative below in part as an example of how researchers can narrate themselves into their dissertations, but also to demonstrate the tensions that arise when one shares certain positionalities with one’s participants.

I am home again, indeed, and it is this research that brings me home. It brings me back to my days as a young urban Appalachian girl growing up in a “bad” neighborhood full of “hillbillies” and “white trash.” Willingly, I assumed the shame so often associated with my neighborhood, a shame outsiders expected me to claim. “Oh, you are from City Hill?” they would say with disdain. I also heard what they didn’t say. “You are no good if you are from that neighborhood, that place.” “Well, they must be right,” I thought. Of course, they were right. After all, they were better dressed than me, they didn’t use no double negatives, they had their own washers, and they didn’t have to ride the bus—they owned cars. Different, I was . . . from them.

Who I was, according to so many “others,” was associated with where I lived, City Hill. Trash on the streets, crowded Laundromats, corner convenience stores good for pops, bags of chips, and rolls of toilet paper when the big grocery store five blocks up the Avenue felt too far away. Section-eight housing, food stamps, Mom’s welfare check, roaches in the kitchen, no child support for my mother, trips to the local Goodwill for “new” sweaters, and lots of love, hard work and a stubbornness to be somebody. I wanted out. Out was the only way to claim an identity as someone—at least as someone who mattered in ways that gave one access to power. In my adolescent eyes, getting an education could get me out. There were problems with this “education-gettin’,” though. Education-gettin’ meant I might not talk like my family, I might move away and become part of a foreign and scary world. Sometimes, accepting my “white trashness” was simple and comforting. I knew the expectations.

Now, more than twenty years and lots of education-gettin’ later, it is ironic that what I used to escape, education that is, is what brings me back to the place I longed to flee, the place that filled me with shame to call home—City Hill. I am home again, indeed, and it is haunting.

The research presented in this dissertation takes me back to my youth by taking me back to a neighborhood similar and adjacent to the one in which I grew up. It also takes me back to my adolescent self. Because of this work I am reminded of struggles I encountered growing up, struggles that I can only now name as ones related to my class—poor, my race—white, my gender—female, and my ethnicity—Appalachian, and the strange and mysterious ways in which all of these identities intersected with place—my neighborhood. (pp. 6–7)

Rivera (1999) did a similar PAR study with six Puerto Rican and Dominican young women. She studied their strategies of resistance for self-determination and collective determination within various relationships and contexts, including their schools, neighborhoods, and homes. She found that forms of resistance varied by setting and were often simultaneously oppressive and liberating. She explored resistance patterns by engaging with the young women in three participatory projects over two years: a community video project, an arts-centered project on Latinas’ lives, and an educational workshop series. Rivera found that participatory methods were instrumental in developing relationships with the women and maintaining the integrity of the study.

An Appalachian woman studying Appalachian girls or a Latina woman studying Latina young women provides a certain insider status and deep tacit knowledge about the participants’ ethnic communities and gendered perspectives. There is also an added sense of self-discovery and social advocacy for the researchers. However, being an insider in any sense also brings a subtle tendency to take some aspects of the setting for granted and a need to make the apparently familiar seem strange.

THE OUTSIDER-WITHIN STANCE AS A FLAWED APPROACH TO ACTION RESEARCH

While Collins (1990) and others have discussed the special vantage point that being a marginalized member of society—an outsider-within—provides, there is another way that action researchers—particularly practitioners—use an outsider-within approach that is misleading and tends to skew the research process. Too often, when insiders to an organization or community do dissertation research, the researcher and the dissertation committee members treat it as outsider research. This may be because few dissertation committees are trained to deal with the complex issues of research positionality, or they may feel the study will appear more legitimate if presented as qualitative research instead of action research. Often, they simply draw on the validity criteria for more traditional forms of research and ignore the insider status of the researcher. In such cases, insiders end up taking an outsider-within stance in which they frame the study inappropriately, using outsider validity criteria (e.g., prolonged engagement with the field) that fails to address the unique dilemmas of practitioners studying their own sites or participatory action research projects.

This most often occurs when members higher up in the organizational hierarchy engage in action research and when neither the doctoral student nor the dissertation committee has familiarized themselves with the tenets of action research. We believe that this outsider-within stance toward practitioner research causes epistemological and methodological problems, since validity criteria—particularly for qualitative research—was designed with nonparticipatory outsiders in mind. The dilemma of the insider is the opposite of that of the outsider:

Academics (outsiders) want to understand what it is like to be an insider without “going native” and losing the outsider’s perspective. Practitioners (insiders) already know what it is like to be an insider, but because they are “native” to the setting, they must work to see the taken-for-granted aspects of their practice from an outsider’s perspective. (Anderson et al., 2007, p. 27)

The outsider-within position also ignores the potential of studying the researcher/practitioner’s ongoing actions and shifting perceptions as an actor within the setting as part of the research. Instead, following the norms of outsider research, one’s actions within the setting are either not acknowledged or seen as a problem of reactivity or contamination of the setting. Such a position is part of a research tradition that sees the sole purpose of the research as generating valid knowledge as a contribution to a knowledge base in a particular field. Anderson and Jones (2000), in their study of practitioner research dissertations, found that “although personal, professional, or organization/social transformation might be a byproduct of insiders doing ‘outsider within’ research, it was usually reported—if at all—as an afterthought in the dissertations” (p. 440).

To downplay or fail to acknowledge one’s insider or participatory status is deceptive and allows the researcher to avoid the kind of intense self-reflection that is the hallmark of good practitioner research. Such deceptive studies are often done for the sake of convenience or to use an evaluation of a local program as a dissertation study. Anderson and Jones (2000) found that when researchers authentically positioned themselves as insiders doing action research or self-studies, they focused more on individual, organizational, and social transformations that resulted through actions taken within the setting. These authentic studies were more likely to engage in the traditional action research spiral of iterative cycles of plan-act-observe-reflect (Lewin, 1948). The increased understandings of practice and the practice setting that result from these studies represent the “findings” of this type of self-reflective research.

CONCLUSION

Our purpose in this chapter is not to recommend any particular positionality as an ideal. Although it is true that position 4 on the continuum in Table 3.1 (the insider-outsider team) represents the most potentially democratic approach, we believe that knowledge production from all positions is valid as long as one is honest and reflective about the limitations of one’s multiple positionalities and takes them into account methodologically. All dissertations have a limitations section because all research methods have limitations. Unless researchers are honest about these limitations, they will end up making claims not substantiated by the evidence.

As we have argued, self-reflection has important consequences for the study’s trustworthiness and on the ethics of the research. In the following chapter, we will discuss in more detail how positionality determines how one thinks about the criteria for quality or trustworthiness of the study. Insiders, outsiders, and insider-outsider teams all have different dilemmas to resolve in designing and carrying out an action research project. For students doing action research dissertations, it is crucial to think these issues through as much as is possible prior to beginning the study, and to make them explicit in the dissertation proposal.

NOTE

1. See Anderson and Grinberg (1998) and Barker (1993) for a poststructuralist discussion of how such groups can exercise what Barker calls concertive control, resulting in a more subtle, but effective, form of control.

Action Research text

2 THE THEORY BEHIND THE PRACTICE

THE THEORETICAL FOUNDATIONS OF ACTION RESEARCH

Chapter 1 alluded to the underlying philosophical stance of action research, revealing the emergence of the tradition and its relationship with other research paradigms. Fundamentally, action research is grounded in a qualitative research paradigm whose purpose is to gain greater clarity and understanding of a question, problem, or issue. Unlike quantitative research (sometimes referred to as experimental or positivistic research) based on the precise definition, measurement, and analysis of the relationship between a carefully defined set of variables, action research commences with a broadly defined question, problem, or issue. Investigations therefore seek initially to clarify the issue investigated and to reveal the way participants describe their actual experience of that issue—how things happen and how it affects them.

In these circumstances, action research is necessarily based on localized studies that focus on the need to understand how things are happening, rather than merely on what is happening, and to understand the ways that stakeholders—people concerned with the issue—perceive, interpret, and respond to events related to the issue investigated. This does not mean that quantitative information is necessarily excluded from a study, because it often provides significant information that needs to be incorporated into the study. This information can be included in the processes of meaning making that are essential to action research, but it does not form the central core of the processes of investigation.

This research stance acknowledges the limitations of the knowledge and understanding of the “expert” researcher and takes account of the experience and understanding of those centrally involved in the issue explored—the stakeholders. By so doing, researchers take into account a central reality of social life—that all social events are subject to ongoing construction and negotiation. By 3637incorporating the perspectives and responses of key stakeholders as an integral part of the research process, a collaborative analysis of the situation provides the basis for deep-seated understandings that lead to effective remedial action.

Formally, then, action research, in its most effective forms, is phenomenological (focusing on people's actual lived experience or reality), interpretive (focusing on their interpretation of acts and activities), and hermeneutic (focusing on how people make meaning of events in their lives). It provides the means by which stakeholders explore their experience, gain greater clarity and understanding of events and activities, and use those extended understandings to construct effective solutions to the problem (s) on which the study was focused.

These processes do not, however, occur in a socially neutral setting but are subject to deeply seated social and cultural forces taken into account through the participatory processes of investigation of action research. A more extensive exposition of these forces is provided in the final chapter of this text.

THE PLACE OF THEORY IN ACTION RESEARCH

The place of theory in action research is far from clear and differs from its place in experimental or quantitative research. For the latter, established theory “drives” the processes of inquiry, and the hypotheses to be tested are drawn from established theory. In effect, researchers say, “Given theory ‘x,’ what explains the problem we are investigating?” An educator seeking to understand why particular students are performing poorly may, on the basis of a preliminary study of a representative group of students, suggest that the answer most likely lies in “lack of student motivation” (or “delayed cognitive development” or “poorly devised learning strategies”). These preliminary hypotheses are drawn from theories of motivation (or cognitive development or learning theory), and the suggested explanation—the hypothesis—is then formulated and tested, using carefully designed research procedures. Failure to disconfirm the hypothesis gives credence to both the suggested explanation and the theory from which it is drawn. It should be noted that research in this mode does not “prove” something to be true or false and that any one study merely provides some evidence for accepting the research hypotheses, within the conditions stipulated in the research design.

The purpose of theory in action research, however, is somewhat different. Reason and Bradbury suggest (2001 , p. 451) that “theory is used to bring more 3738order to complex phenomena, with a goal of parsimonious description so that it is also of use to the community of inquiry.” For them, a good interpretation—theory—is one that is more reasonable than others. And reasonableness can be tested in the community of inquiry. “A new theory enables us to ‘re-see’ the world, or see through taken-for-granted conceptual categories that are oppressive or no longer helpful.”

Earlier versions of action research assumed that there was a direct logical connection between theory and practice, but as Gustavsen (2001) points out, there can be no question of a direct relation. While theory can inform or influence practice, he suggests, “The link is a discursive one where ideas, notions, and elements from the theory can be considered in the development of practice but with no claims to being automatically applicable” (p. 18). “Theory,” he goes on to suggest, “can inform a process of enlightenment and out of this process can emerge new practices.”

There is another element to this relationship between theory and practice. The explanations and theories of the academic world often do not fit comfortably into people's everyday reality. The language, forms of propositional knowledge, and sometimes esoteric idiom of academic texts are frequently inaccessible to a professional or lay audience. Academic theories are embedded in a set of concepts, assumptions, and views of reality that make sense only within a particular social context—in this case, the discourses of the academic world.

Another reason why academic theory may not “make sense” to people is that any theory is just one in a wide set of possibilities for explaining or interpreting events in the social world. The particular lens through which we view the world will affect what we see. In astronomy, for instance, different “lenses” collect particular forms of light, particles, or energy. A lens designed to collect light in the infrared spectrum will show the same celestial object quite differently from a lens that collects X-ray or radio sources of information. So it is with social theory. Different theories will focus on different aspects of the situation and interpret the information according to the assumptions and orientations of the theory.

It is not that any theory is “wrong” or “right” but that it focuses on particular aspects of the situation and interprets them in particular ways. We might look at an event and “theorize” it in terms of colonialism, gender domination, racial politics, power relationships, personality, socially learned behavior, prejudice, or any number of other ways of describing and interpreting the situation.

One of the strengths of action research is that it accepts the diverse perspectives of different stakeholders—the “theory” each will hold to explain 3839how and why events occur as they do—and finds ways of incorporating them into mutually acceptable ways of understanding events that enable them to work toward a resolution of the problem investigated. People from outside the research context who impose their own theories without having a deep understanding of the nature of events and the dynamics of the context are likely to either misrepresent or misinterpret the situation. They are, in effect, prejudging the situation on the basis of limited understandings, even though they may feel they can see exactly what is happening.

One of the tasks of action research, then, is to ensure that the ways that stakeholders describe and interpret events become the central focus of the research process. These different perspectives consequently become subjects of interaction and negotiation as people creatively explore ways of conceiving the situation that assist them in resolving a problem.

Having said that, however, it is not possible to enter a research process atheoretically. That is, each person involved, including research facilitators and professional practitioners, will have assumptions about appropriate ways of enacting research processes drawn from their own perspectives and values. The approach to research presented in this book, for instance, is based on assumptions articulated within the first chapters as “working principles.” A fundamental assumption is that the procedures and processes of research work to ensure that power differentials do not undermine the need to clearly hear the voice of less powerful groups.

The theory, in this case, is a theory of method and provides clarity and understanding about the way participants enact processes of inquiry in order to achieve the practical and effective outcomes we desire. This type of theorizing we must do prior to and during the research to ensure that we can clearly articulate our purposes and processes. It is quite distinct from theories about the nature of events surrounding the particular issue on which a project focuses. Though academic theories may provide interesting interpretations of events, they are likely to distort and misinterpret the situation if they take precedence over stakeholder theories in practice. More relevant and effective theories emerge from the hermeneutic dialectic—meaning-making dialogues—between stakeholders, using the concepts, terminologies, and formulations that make sense to them. This does not mean that academic theories cannot enter the research arena, but it does mean that academic theories may become relevant only when stakeholder theories have been described and elaborated.

The following commentary, therefore, focuses on methodological theory—the theories that inform and clarify the nature of the action research processes presented in this book.

3940

THE THEORY BEHIND THE PRACTICE

Action research starts, as does all research, with a problem to be solved or an issue to be resolved. Unlike positivistic science, however, its primary goal is not the production of an objective body of knowledge that can be generalized to large populations. Instead, its purpose is to build collaboratively constructed descriptions and interpretations of events that enable groups of people to formulate mutually acceptable solutions to their problems. Action research, however, recognizes the complexities of human interaction and takes into account the need to enact ways of working that protect or enhance the dignity and identities of all people involved. As indicated in other chapters, it is oriented toward ways of organizing and enacting professional and community life that are democratic, equitable, liberating, and life enhancing.

The approach to inquiry presented in this book may appear somewhat idealistic. Competitive social values, impersonal work practices, and authoritarian modes of control impose themselves as constant conditions of our work. Institutionalized practices—those commonly accepted as “the way things are done”—seem so pervasive and normal that we often cannot envisage other ways of working, even when those practices are ineffective or, in some cases, detrimental to our purposes.

I once engaged in a study of classrooms by observing three primary school classes for a year. Although at that time I had been a classroom teacher for almost 10 years, the study dramatically changed my vision of schools. My discovery that children spent extended periods passively watching or listening resulted in a significant change in my perspective. As a classroom teacher, my vision of classrooms was one in which there was a constant and sometimes almost overwhelming flow of activity. I was astounded that young children were forced to cope with long periods of inactivity during which they were permitted only to watch and listen as the teacher interacted with other students. That experience changed my perception of classroom life quite fundamentally, so that I am now much more sensitive to the pervasive passivity of school life and to the need to engage students constantly in active learning processes.

4041

The pressures of bureaucratic life, the limitations of resources, and the competitive push for career advancement consistently work against attempts to humanize and democratize research processes. Procedures that highlight the active participation of people in formulating and controlling research activities and events are hard to attain and difficult to maintain. When they can be achieved, however, they provide a powerful means of accomplishing any set of social or professional goals. The act of observing and reflecting on our own practices can be an enlightening experience, enabling us to see ourselves more clearly and to formulate more effective ways of working that enhance the lives of the people with whom we work. Collaborative processes not only generate a sense of purpose and energy but also provide the means for the accomplishment of goals and the solution of problems and produce conditions that enhance participants’ personal, social, and professional lives.

“BUT IT'S NOT SCIENTIFIC”: THE QUESTION OF LEGITIMACY

Although action research is gaining increased support in the professional community, it has yet to be accepted by many academic researchers as a legitimate form of inquiry. From time to time, practitioners who engage in action research will find themselves subject to the negative comments, sometimes quite vitriolic, of people who do not regard such work as genuine research because “it's not scientific.” A recent proposal for a paper on action research that I submitted for presentation at a national educational research conference, for instance, was rejected after one reviewer commented, “There may be a place for this nonsense in AERA [American Education Research Association], but not, hopefully, in this [the research] division.”

It may be worthwhile, therefore, to spend a little time here exploring issues related to action research, so that those who enact it may rest easy in the knowledge that despite such comments and questions, action research is a legitimate, authentic, and rigorous approach to inquiry. Fuller treatments of this debate are provided in a number of other books (e.g., Reason and Bradbury's Handbook of Action Research [2007 ], Denzin and Lincoln's Handbook of Qualitative Research [2011 ], and Lincoln and Guba's Naturalistic Inquiry [1985 ]), but an overview will at least provide a basic understanding of the nature of the issues to be addressed.

4142

I have studied the issues related to the different forms of social research for many years. In that time, I have become aware that the field is sufficiently contentious to engage the attention of some of the world's leading scholars. The debate is far from concluded, although the weight of argument seems to suggest that what has traditionally been accepted as scientific research is but one of a number of legitimate approaches to academic and professional inquiry.

Whether action research is accepted as scientific depends on the way in which science is defined. Certainly it is, in one sense, rigorously empirical, insofar as it requires people to define clearly and observe the phenomena under investigation. Levin and Greenwood (2001 , 2011 ) suggest that action research is emphatically scientific, though not in terms propounded by experimental or quantitative researchers. For them, “The nucleus of scientific activity is deliberative, democratic sensemaking among professional researchers and local stakeholders” (2001, p. 105). It is evident, however, that action research does not follow the carefully prescribed experimental procedures that have become inscribed as scientific method.

Experimental method, a traditional approach to scientific inquiry, seeks to test theories that purport to explain why or how the world is as it is. The ultimate aim is to derive law like statements that explain the nature of the world or reality. This methodology seeks to generate knowledge that is objective (not amenable to the subjective or authoritative judgments of people, organizations, or institutions) and generalizable (applicable to a wide variety of contexts). It must also be reliable (the results should be replicable by any person similarly placed) and valid (it should describe a true state of affairs). The laws of science seek to provide invariant forms of knowledge that enable us to predict future events on the basis of a preexisting set of conditions. In recent history, this ability to predict and therefore control many facets of the physical world has provided humanity with the ability to manipulate the environment to an unprecedented degree. The technological miracles of the modern world are a testament to the power of knowledge derived from the application of the scientific method.

The success of this form of scientific inquiry in the physical world, however, has not been mirrored in investigations of human behavior and the social 4243world. Except to the extent that humans are physical beings, scientific investigation has largely failed to provide a social equivalent of the comparatively stable body of knowledge about the physical universe. A science of humanity, social life, or individual behavior has failed to emerge within anthropology, sociology, or psychology, despite the huge resources poured into research in these disciplines in the past few decades. Human beings, it seems, are hard to predict and difficult to control.

Two major factors account for the failure of the scientific method to provide a set of laws for human behavior and social life. First, scientific knowledge is now recognized to be much less stable, objective, and generalizable than previously assumed and therefore is less secure as a basis for formulating human action. Second, there is increasing acceptance of the fundamental difference between the nature of the social world and that of the physical world. Although it has been relatively easy to accept the notion of a fixed reality that could be discovered in the physical universe, the social universe is now recognized as a continually evolving cultural creation. Social reality exists as an unstable and dynamic construction that is fabricated, maintained, and modified by people during their interaction with each other and their environments. It operates according to systems of meaning embedded in each cultural context and can be understood only superficially without reference to those meanings. Investigation of the social and behavioral worlds cannot be operationalized in scientific terms because the phenomena to be tested lack the stability required by traditional scientific method. Humans are, to a large extent, what they define themselves to be in any given situation.

So where does this leave those who wish to investigate human affairs in order to provide knowledge that will “make a difference” to people's lives? In the past, it has been accepted that “experts,” or those authorized by credentials that signal their access to scientific knowledge, should provide answers to social problems. Researchers are becoming increasingly aware of the limitations of this perspective, however. Scientific knowledge is partial, incomplete, and reductionist (i.e., it reduces phenomena to minute components), and while it can contribute to an understanding of elements of the social world, in and of itself it cannot provide a comprehensive explanation of events.

Professional practitioners, armed with a set of practices purportedly derived from scientific theories about human behavior, often believe their activities are based on objective knowledge. Though scientific knowledge certainly contributes useful information, the routines and recipes that compose 4344professional practice are imbued with concepts, constructs, values, and perceptions derived from the particular social histories and cultural experiences of the individuals and groups that dominate professional and institutional arenas. They are also heavily influenced by the institutional imperatives of the organizational contexts within which practitioners work. As a result, programs and services often fail to provide for the real needs of the people, especially with marginalized or disempowered social groups. In some cases the failure to recognize the deep-seated disconnection of the service from the social reality of the people aggravates the problems the service was meant to remediate. Programs and services often deny the strengths that are an inherent part of their community and family lives, and welfare or educational services are often accompanied by degrees of implicit criticism and control that attack people's very humanity.

The strength and vitality of Aboriginal family and community lives, which I experience in a continuing way as I work in organizational and community contexts, is belied by the perspectives presented in the mass media. There is a tendency to focus on that minority of Aboriginal people who capture the sensationalizing gaze of the media, to generalize from that group to all Aboriginal people, and to fail to recognize and value the contributions of the many solid and hardworking persons who make up the majority of the Aboriginal community. Professionals tend to approach Aboriginal people with the intent of “helping” them or tend to believe them in need of “training.” They talk of the “cultural deficits” of Aboriginal children and the need for Aboriginal people to learn “social skills” or to acquire “cultural capital.” The ethnocentrism of this group of professionals would be merely annoying if it were not for the fact that many of them are in positions of power that permit them to have significant impacts on the lives of people for whom they have so little regard. Aboriginal people often find their lives controlled by experts and public servants who have little understanding of their social and cultural realities and are apt to act in ways that are inappropriate or demeaning from an Aboriginal perspective.

I have extended experience of similar dynamics in the United States, where Anglo or middle-class professionals fail to understand the deep social and cultural dynamics that affect the lives of their students and clients. African American, Hispanic, and Native American peoples continue 4445to struggle against the tide of ethnocentrism that flows so strongly through the fabric of institutional life.

I am once again reminded of the words of Aboriginal social worker Lilla Watson as she spoke to a group of non-Aboriginal social workers: “If you've come to help me, you're wasting your time. But if you've come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.”

POWER, CONTROL, AND SUBORDINATION

One of the fictions of modern professional and organizational life is that scientifically based procedures will provide the means to achieve effective outcomes in any form of service—health, welfare, education, business, and so on. “Scientific” management processes purport to identify a “best practice” and formulate processes for applying it in precise detail. This is a continuing source of frustration for those whose duty it is to perform these services or to gain the outcomes stipulated by government departments and agencies, educational institutions, and health services for which they work. Centrally devised best practices rarely take into account the dynamic social and cultural forces that operate in diverse contexts in which professional practitioners work and therefore place them and their clients and students in untenable situations. These groups are subject to increasing levels of stress and disenchantment as restrictive legislative mandates and highly prescribed administrative controls attempt to dictate precisely the ways they enact their professional duties. Managers and administrators of programs and services are often subject to even greater stress, caught in the nexus of organizational imperatives, recalcitrant subordinates and clients, the complex reality of the social contexts they engage, and their personal needs for ego satisfaction and career advancement. Highly prescriptive plans provide little opportunity for managers and practitioners to adapt and adjust their work to the realities of the particular environments in which they operate and act to increase the levels of anxiety associated with their work.

The problem is, of course, that it is impossible to control human behavior with the rigor and precision demanded by the procedures of the physical sciences. The dynamism of social life and the creative and willful facets of human behavior prevent the high degrees of control embedded in scientific method and technological production. Attempts to impose the same type and extent of 4546control in the delivery of human services have led to increasing levels of stress and alienation as practitioners struggle to provide necessary services within the boundaries of increasingly restrictive policies and procedural rules.

I rarely meet a friend or colleague who is “happy in the service” these days. Those who work in human service agencies or organizations as practitioners or managers frequently complain about the unrealistic demands and excessive numbers of directives that inhibit the effective accomplishment of their work. The complaints cover all fields, from social work, through education and health work, to community and youth work. The quality of professional life appears to be diminishing as demands for greater control and accountability increase.

How, then, are we to understand the events that make up our lives? Behavioral theorists, on the one hand, focus on the capabilities and characteristics of individuals and point to factors such as motivation, achievement need, intelligence, and cognition to explain people's behavior. Social theorists, on the other hand, tend to stress the large-scale forces—class, gender, race, and ethnicity—that influence social events. Marxist-oriented theorists, for instance, explain social events by the controlling and competitive relationships inherent in modern capitalist economic systems. The people who control the means of production, this genre of theory suggests, maintain systems of domination that reinforce the power and authority of those in positions of power at the expense of subordinate groups.

Although these theories are interesting and useful for some purposes, they are limited in their applicability to the problems experienced by people and social groups in their day-to-day lives. If we accept the economic determinism inherent in Marxist theory, for example, we are but puppets on the world stage, our lives ordered by the workings of the international economic order, our efforts to improve our lives essentially fruitless.

A recent genre of theory, known collectively as postmodernism, provides a distinctive way of envisioning the social world that enables us to understand human experience in different ways. Although modern perspectives of the world are bound to scientific visions of a fixed and knowable world, postmodernism questions the nature of social reality and the very processes by which 4647we can come to know about it. Elements of postmodernism suggest that knowledge can no longer be accepted as an objective set of testable truths because it is produced by processes that are inherently “captured” by features of the social world it seeks to explain. Scientists, as products of particular historical and cultural experiences, will formulate explanations of the social world that derive from their own experiences and hence tend to validate their own perceptual universes.

From a postmodern perspective, attempts to order people's lives on the basis of scientific knowledge largely constitute an exercise in power. Knowledge, and the research that produces that knowledge, is as much about politics as it is about understanding. An understanding of what research is about is not just an exploration of method but an inquiry into the ways in which knowledge is produced and the benefits that accrue to people who control the processes of knowledge production.

The theoretical discourse that follows is not presented as a description of “the” social world. It is articulated as one way of interpreting social experience and presents perspectives that seem to make sense from my viewpoint. In essence, I, as author, provide a framework of ideas as a rationale for action research. Those readers who find it unhelpful may choose to skip the next passage and formulate their own rationale for accepting or rejecting the approach to research that I advocate.

UNDERSTANDING POWER AND CONTROL: POSTMODERN PERSPECTIVES

Postmodernism derives much of its power from the way it deconstructs—that is, pulls apart for examination—mechanisms of knowledge production. Scientific rationality, a key feature of modern life, has itself become subject to forms of philosophical investigation that raise doubts about many of the taken-for-granted assumptions on which our understandings of the social and physical universe rest. An exploration of postmodern perspectives, therefore, assists us in extending our understanding of the frustrations experienced by practitioners as they work in social, community, and organizational contexts.

4748

Michel Foucault's (1972) exploration of social life, for instance, reinforces the notion that there can be no objective truth, because there is an essential relationship between the ways in which knowledge is produced and the way power is exercised. Foucault's study of the development of modern institutional life led him to conclude that there is an intimate relation between the systems of knowledge—discourses—by which people arrange their lives and the techniques and practices through which social control and domination are exercised in local contexts. Humans are subject to oppression, Foucault suggests, not only because of the operation of large-scale systems of control and authority but also because of the normally accepted procedures, routines, and practices through which we enact our daily public and personal lives.

From a Foucaultian perspective, such institutional sites as schools, agency offices, hospitals, clinics, and youth centers might be viewed as examples of places where a dispersed and piecemeal organization of power is built up independent of any systematic strategy of domination. What happens in these contexts cannot be understood by focusing only on systemwide strategies of control. At each site, a professional elite, which includes administrators, researchers and teachers, social workers, nurses, doctors, and youth workers, defines the language and the discourse and, in doing so, builds a framework of meaning into the organization and operation of the system. Individual members of this elite exert control by contributing to the framing and maintenance of ordinary, commonly accepted practices, which are often enshrined in bureaucratic fiat, administrative procedure, or government regulation. The end point of this process is the accrual of “profit” or benefit to people in a position to define the “codes of knowledge” that form the basis for organizational life. Professional acceptance, employment, promotion, funding, and other forms of recognition provide a system of rewards for people able to influence or reinforce definitions inscribed in reports, regulations, rules, policies, procedures, curricula, texts, and professional literature.

Foucault (1972) contends that any large-scale analysis must be built from our understanding of the micropolitics of power at the local level. For him, any attempt to describe power at the level of the state or institution requires us to

conduct an ascending analysis of power, starting … from its infinitesimal mechanisms, which each have their own history, their own trajectory, their own techniques and tactics, and then see how these mechanisms of power 4849have been—and continue to be—invested, colonized, utilized, involuted, transformed, displaced, extended, etc., by ever more general mechanisms and by forms of global domination. (p. 159)

If we accept Foucault's analysis, then many negative features of society are intimately related to the ways in which people organize and act out their everyday lives. Feelings of alienation, stress, and oppression are as much products of everyday, taken-for-granted ways of defining reality and enacting social life as they are the products of systems that are out of people's control. The means by which people are subjugated are found in the very “codes” and “discourses” used to organize and enact their day-to-day lives. Oppressive systems of domination and control are maintained not by autocratic processes but through the unconsciously accepted routine practices people use in their families, communities, and occupations.

Foucault suggests that the only way to eliminate this fascism in our heads is to explore and build on the open qualities of human discourse and thereby intervene in the way knowledge is constituted at the particular sites where a localized power discourse prevails. He maintains that people should cultivate and enhance planning and decision making at the local level, resisting techniques and practices that are oppressive in one way or another. Foucault (1984) instructs us to “develop action, thought and desires by proliferation, juxtaposition, and disjunction” and “to prefer what is positive and multiple, difference over uniformity, flows over unities, mobile arrangements over systems. Believe that what is productive is not sedentary but nomadic” (p. xiii). He suggests that we become more flexible in the ways we conceive and organize our activities to ensure that we incorporate diverse perspectives into our social and organizational lives.

The theme of control is also taken up by Fish (1980), who describes social life as “interpretive communities” made up of producers and consumers of particular types of knowledge or “texts.” Within these communities, individuals or groups in positions of authority control what they consider to be valid knowledge. Classroom teachers, administrators, managers, social workers, health professionals, policy makers, and researchers are examples of “producers” who control the texts of social life in their professional domains. In organizing classrooms, writing curricula, defining the rules and procedures by which services operate, formulating policies, and so on, they control the boundaries within which particular interpretive communities 4950operate. They have the power to dominate the ways in which things happen in their particular domains.

Fish's position is complemented by the work of Lyotard (1984), who casts doubt on the possibility of defining social and organizational life according to well-ordered, logical, and objective (read “scientific”) systems of knowledge. He suggests that people live at the intersection of an indeterminate number of language games that, in their entirety, do not constitute a coherent or rational order, although each game operates under a logical set of rules. His vision of a social world atomized into flexible networks of language games suggests that each of us uses a number of games or codes depending on the context in which we are operating at any given time. There is a contradiction, Lyotard suggests, between the natural openness of social life and the rigidities with which institutions attempt to circumscribe what is and is not admissible within their boundaries.

Derrida's (1976) notion of the interweaving of discourses provides yet another perspective on the texts of social life. Derrida provides insight into the continuing tension between people in positions of control and their subordinates and clients. According to him, cultural life can be viewed as a series of texts that intersect with other texts through the processes of social interaction. In portraying written texts as cultural artifacts—that is, as human productions—Derrida suggests that both reader and writer interact on the basis of all they have previously encountered. Both author and reader participate separately in the production of meanings inscribed in and derived from that text, although neither can “master” the text—that is, control the meanings conveyed or received—in any ultimate sense. Writers tend to accept the authority to present reality or meaning in their own terms, but these meanings are deconstructed and reconstituted by readers according to their own experiences and interpretive frameworks.

In the context of organizational and institutional life, people such as administrators, teachers, social workers, and other practitioners who control the rules and procedures by which their subordinates, students, or clients work or live often fail to understand that each of the participants will understand those texts according to his or her own framework of understanding. Even when participants accept what is said or written, they may enact their interpretations of the text in ways that seem to conflict with the perspectives of the authors of the text. Much of the apparent recalcitrance or wrongheadedness of workers, students, and clients might be understood as merely misinterpretation.

5051

There is an implicit ideological position in Derrida's writing. He suggests the need to find new ways of writing texts—rules, procedures, regulations, forms of organization, reports, plans, and so on—to minimize the power of people in positions of authority to impose their perceptions and interpretations. Thus he implies the need to structure organizations in ways that create greater opportunities for popular participation and a more democratic determination of the cultural values embedded in the procedures that govern people's lives. This also implies the need to enact knowledge-producing activities in ways that are more participatory and democratic, enabling the perspectives and agendas of client groups and students to be included in the development of programs that serve them.

Huyssens (1986) also speaks to these issues. He is critical of writers whose theorizing—systems of explanation—presumes to speak for others. He suggests that all groups have the right to speak for themselves, in their own voices, and to have those voices accepted as authentic and legitimate. The authenticity of these “other worlds” and “other voices” is an essential characteristic of the pluralistic stance of many postmodern writers. Huyssens's position has much in common with those of writers such as West (1989) and Unger (1987) , who place a premium on the need to educate and be educated by struggling peoples. This stance reflects a movement within the postmodern tradition that shifts the focus of scholarship away from the “search for foundations and the quest for certainty” ( West, 1989 , p. 213) toward more utilitarian approaches to the production of knowledge.

West (1989) provides a compelling argument for a more pragmatic approach to our ways of understanding the social world. His notion of “prophetic pragmatism” points to the need for an explicitly political mode of cultural criticism. He suggests that philosophy—more generally, intellectual activity or scholarship—should foster methods of examining ordinary and everyday events that encourage a more creative democracy through critical intelligence and social action. He advocates ways of living and working together that provide greater opportunities for people to participate in activities that affect their lives. He urges philosophers—academics, researchers, experts, and professionals—to give up their search for the foundations of truth and the quest for certainty and to shift their energies to defining the social and communal conditions by which people can communicate more effectively and cooperate in the processes of acquiring knowledge and making decisions.

The underlying notion in West's (1989) work is not that philosophy and rational deliberation are irrelevant but that they need to be applied directly to the problems of the people. West's pragmatism reconceptualizes philosophy—and therefore research—as “a form of cultural criticism that attempts to transform linguistic, social, cultural and political traditions for the purposes of increasing the scope of individual development and democratic operation” (p. 230). He advocates fundamental economic, political, cultural, and individual transformation guided by the ideals of accountable power, small-scale associations, and individual liberty. This transformation can be attained, he implies, only through the reconstruction of the practices and preconceptions embedded in institutional life. On the political level, West acknowledges the need for solidarity with the “wretched of the earth,” so that by educating and being educated by struggling peoples we will be able to relate the life of the mind to the collective life of the community.

West's emphasis on liberation links him, conceptually, with the German scholar Jurgen Habermas, who, although often not classified as postmodern, has provided important ideas that can assist us in understanding human social life. Habermas (1979) focuses on the need to rethink the cultural milieu in which people attempt to find meaning and satisfactory self-identity. He suggests that we clarify the nature of people's subjection and seek human emancipation from the threats of military conflict and dehumanized bureaucratic domination through more effective mechanisms of reflection and communication. Habermas proposes that the emphasis in institutional and organizational life on the factual, material, technical, and administrative neglects the web of intersubjective relations among people that makes possible freedom, harmony, and mutual dependence. His universal pragmatics attempt to delineate the basic conditions necessary for people to reach an understanding. The goal of “communicative action” is an interaction that terminates in “the intersubjective mutuality of reciprocal understanding, shared knowledge, mutual trust and accord with one another” (p. 3).

The general thrust of the ideas presented earlier is to question many of the basic assumptions on which modern social life is based. In general, these ideas are in opposition to rigidly defined work practices, hierarchical organizational structures, representation in place of participation, the isolation of sectors of activity based on high degrees of specialization, centralized decision making, and the production of social texts by experts or 5253an organizational elite. Inversely, these perspectives suggest emphasis on the following:

· •Popular and vernacular language and its meanings

· •Pluralistic, organic strategies for development

· •The coexistence and interpenetration of meaning systems

· •The authenticity of “other worlds” and “other voices”

· •Preference for what is multiple, for difference

· •Flexibility and mobility of organizational arrangements

· •Local creation of texts, techniques, and practices

· •Production of knowledge through open discourses

· •Flexibility in defining the work people will do

· •Restructuring of relations of authority

Postmodern thought moves us, therefore, to examine the ordinary, everyday, taken-for-granted ways in which we organize and carry out our private, social, and professional activities. In the context of this book, it demands that we critically inspect the routines and recipes that have become accepted and commonplace ways of carrying out our professional, organizational, and institutional functions. By illuminating fundamental features of social life, postmodern writers provide us with an opportunity to explore social dimensions of our work and to think creatively about the possibilities for re-creating our professional lives.

The influence of postmodern perspectives now can be seen throughout the academic disciplines and in the professional literature. The editors of a previous edition of the Handbook of Qualitative Research (Denzin & Lincoln, 2005) suggest that “postpositivist inquirers of all perspectives and paradigms have joined in the collective struggle for a socially responsive, democratic, communitarian, moral and justice-promoting set of inquiry practices” (p. 1, 123). They further suggest, “The search for ‘culturally sensitive’ research approaches—approaches that are attuned to the specific cultural practices of various groups and that ‘recognize ethnicity and position culture as central to the research process’ ( Tillman, 2002 )—is already underway” (p. 1, 123). These suggestions stand alongside their advocacy of a new praxis deeply responsive and accountable to those it serves and a reimagined social science that calls for an engaged academic world that leaves the ivory tower and learns from experiences in community, organizational, and family settings ( Levin & Greenwood, 2011 ). The next generation of research methods is emerging.

5354

ACTION RESEARCH: THE NEXT GENERATION

This chapter focuses largely on the philosophical foundations of action research. I have presented arguments that seek to substantiate my assertion that it is a legitimate approach to research, despite procedures that vary from commonly accepted practices associated with scientific method. My intent has been not to show that scientific method is wrong or incorrect but to demonstrate that it sits alongside action research as one of a variety of authentic approaches to inquiry.

Even within action research, there is a place for some of the methods, procedures, and concepts usually associated with traditional science. Insofar as people live in a physical universe, traditional scientific research methods—sometimes unhelpfully labeled “quantitative” research—can provide much useful information. We can describe, for instance, the number of people involved in a setting and how they are distributed geographically, organizationally, and culturally. We can also enumerate the number and proportion of unemployed people, the number and types of dwellings, the age distribution of the population, and relationships among features such as gender, social class, race, educational attainment, employment, and poverty.

The meaning or significance of any of this information, however, can be determined only by the people who live the culture of the setting, who have the profound understanding that comes from extended immersion in the social and cultural life of that context. Numbers can never tell us what the information “means” or suggest actions to be taken.

I recently engaged in a conversation with a colleague regarding the utility of merely quantifying events. “Jim,” I said, “if, over a period of 6 weeks, I read a local newspaper 40 times, have 120 meals, drink 30 bottles of beer, teach 24 classes, and punch the dean once, which event do you think will be most significant?” In this instance, it is easy to imagine which event is symbolically the most important. In many situations, however, outsiders, expert or otherwise, face grave risks in making judgments about the significance of events. Certainly, the number of times an event occurs is a poor indicator of its symbolic importance or the impact it is likely to have on people's lives.

5455

Action research, therefore, ultimately focuses on events that are meaningful for stakeholders. It provides a process or context through which people can collectively clarify their problems and formulate new ways of envisioning their situations. In doing so, each participant's taken-for-granted cultural viewpoint is challenged and modified so that new systems of meaning emerge that can be incorporated in the texts—rules, regulations, practices, procedures, and policies—that govern our professional and community experience. We come closer to the reality of other people's experience and, in the process, increase the potential for creating truly effective services and programs that will enhance the lives of the people we serve.

This move to emphasize the perspectives and agendas of the client group rather than those of professional practitioners in the development and improvement of programs and services does not mean that simplistic, populist ideas current in mass culture provide the basis for service delivery or institutional practice. For instance, the McDonald's fast-food curriculum model would provide a rather unhealthy educational diet in schools. It does mean, however, that professionals take seriously the ideas and perspectives of those they serve, developing ways of working that implicitly honor the intelligence and integrity of the people with whom they work.

Recent theoretical debates have provided substantial recognition of the philosophical strength of this approach to inquiry. The working principles and values revealed in the first chapters of this book are given credence by Denzin's (1997) forward-thinking work, aptly subtitled Ethnographic Practice for the Twenty-First Century. He seeks to engage social scientific practices that “will move closer to a sacred, critically informed discourse about the moral, human universe” (p. xviii). Drawing from the work of Christians, Ferre, and Fackler (1993) and Lincoln (1995) , he advocates approaches to inquiry that engage a feminist, communitarian moral ethic organized by the following assumptions:

· •Community as ontologically and morally superior to persons

· •Dialogical communication as the basis for moral community

· •Transformation as the major goal of any ethical or occupational practice

· •Commitment to the common good and to universal human solidarity

· •A sacred conception of science that honors the ecological as well as the human

5556

· •A stress on human dignity, care, justice, and interpersonal respect

· •A belief that those studied are active participants in collaborative research processes, with claims over any research materials produced in the research process

This perspective is consonant with an ethic of caring ( Collins, 1991 ) that celebrates personal expressiveness, emotionality, and empathy; values individual uniqueness; and cherishes each person's dignity, grace, and courage. It is a model, in other words, that fits the intent and processes of action research. It emerges, philosophically, from standpoint epistemologies, that is, the ways of knowing and understanding implicit in the experience of particular social groups that challenge traditional approaches to social science. Standpoint epistemologies emerge from feminist theory contending that studies involving women should privilege women's lived experience and the standpoints, or perspectives, that experience brings to the ethnographic project. These perspectives challenge the notion of a single standpoint from which a final, overriding vision of the world can be written ( Smith, 1989 ) and therefore question the ways traditional, patriarchal social science has been constructed. This dynamic extends to other interpretive communities and suggests that ethnic groups, people of color, gays, and so on draw on their group and individual experiences as the basis for texts that speak to the logic and cultures of these communities (Denzin, 1997).

Standpoint perspectives, therefore, advocate ways of formulating reports from the starting point of people's experience to provide a more accurate representation of reality, the production of local knowledge about the workings of the world (Denzin, 1989). Standpoint perspectives suggest the need to recover and bring value to knowledge suppressed by the existing texts and discourses of social science and by interpretations of people's lives that are inscribed in the apparatuses of the state, mass culture, and popular media.

Patricia Hill Collins's (1991) Afrocentric feminist epistemology, for instance, focuses on the primacy of concrete, lived experience; the use of dialogue in assessing knowledge claims; the ethic of caring; and the ethic of personal accountability. “This epistemology creates the conditions for an existential politics of empowerment that will allow African American women to actively confront racial, gender and class oppression in their daily lives” (p. 237). Trinh (1992) writes from an Asian perspective, 5657challenging systems of domination that seek to impose an essential identity on a person and her experience. She advocates the production of texts that allow women to experience and assert their difference in relation to others and to assume the position of active speakers, listeners, readers, writers, and viewers.

Although standpoint perspectives relate particularly to the experience of marginalized groups, there is a more general point. They should sensitize writers to the need to resist impulses to formulate objective, generalizable accounts claiming to include the perspectives of all people. Reports need to incorporate and represent the perspectives and experiences of the diverse social groups affected by the events and phenomena studied to ensure that the standpoint of each group is presented as authentic and legitimate, rather than an aberration from a hypothetical norm.

Not so long ago, the human services agency in my state produced a carefully compiled child protection manual, complete with detailed procedures for evaluating events related to the well-being of children and formulating appropriate intervention strategies. A consultant had carefully prepared the manual, taking into account the latest information on child protection available in the literature and using intervention strategies deemed to be appropriate. The procedures, however, were inappropriate to the realities of Aboriginal family and community life, applying criteria for child care that were contrary to the values and conventions of Aboriginal communities and advocating interventions that were reminiscent of more repressive eras in Aboriginal history. Aboriginal staff of the agency went on strike in one region, forcing the agency to have the offending manual reviewed and modified to take Aboriginal cultural values into account.

GIVING VOICE: REPRESENTING PEOPLE'S EXPERIENCE

The desire to give voice to people is derived not from an abstract ideological or theoretical imperative but from the pragmatic focus of action research. Its intent is to provide a place for the perspectives of people who have previously been marginalized from opportunities to develop and operate policies, programs, and services—perspectives often concealed by the products of a typical 5758research process. Research reports often mirror the style of “objective” scientific reports, providing dry, abstract renderings of ideas and events and masking the fact that they are the productions of a socially situated author who writes from his or her history of experience. The process often encapsulates events within the mystifying jargon of academic disciplines or buries them in the conceptual apparatuses of a bureaucracy.

Previous sections of this book have suggested alternative ways for action research participants to represent more effectively the outcomes of their research processes. The purpose of these alternatives is to ensure that accounts and reports capture the people's everyday, concrete, human experiences, allowing audiences to understand more clearly the realities of people's lives. The need for changes in reporting procedures is clearly presented in an increasing body of research literature (e.g., Berger Gluck & Patai, 1991 ; Bruner, 1990 ; Burnaford, Fischer, & Hobson, 1996 ; Lincoln & Tierney, 1996 ; Neumann & Peterson, 1997 ; Witherall & Noddings, 1991 ). These and many other authors explore ways of representing people's experience to more effectively grasp the many dimensions of life that formal, official reports often fail to reveal.

Denzin (1997) explores the underlying assumptions and principles of ethnographic writing and many of the dimensions of the reporting act. In so doing, he suggests that authors of official and academic reports might usefully employ technical processes used by journalists and fiction writers. He starts from the assumption that it is impossible to write objective accounts not ultimately inscribed with the perspectives and experiences of the author because of the interpretive processes inherent in data collection, analysis, and report writing. Drawing on a wide range of authors, he suggests that experiments in genre, voice, narrative, and interpretive style provide more effective ways of knowing—other ways of feeling our way into the experiences of others. Such writing, he suggests, reveals the meaning of events given by interacting individuals, focusing on experience deeply embedded in and derived from local cultural contexts that include homes, offices, schools, streets, factories, clinics, hotels, and so on. These accounts and reports recognize and represent the multiple interpretations of any event or phenomenon, yet also acknowledge the broader discourses inscribed or imprinted in people's local experiences—government policies, incipient racism, systems of privilege, imbalances of power based on social status, and so on.

5859

Denzin works from the premise that the purpose of accounts derived from research processes is more than to record experience. Their goal, rather, is to provide the basis for transforming people's civic, public, and personal lives through the truths—the new ways of describing and interpreting events—revealed in the research process. Reports, therefore, must be more than impersonal, abstract accounts of “facts,” which themselves are merely pieces of information acquired and interpreted selectively. They must be empathetic, evocative accounts that embody the significant experiences embedded in the taken-for-granted world of people's everyday lives. They must record the agonies, pains, tragedies, triumphs, actions, behaviors, and deeply felt emotions—love, pride, dignity, honor, hate, and envy—that constitute the real world of human experience.

In this context, the researcher-writer takes a different stance in the research and writing process. No longer “experts” capable of defining, describing, and interpreting the “facts” or “truth,” researcher-writers position themselves toward writing processes that assist others in describing and interpreting their own experiences, sometimes acting as scribes for research participants or as coauthors or editors. The writer as scribe-for-the-other helps people give voice to their own interpretations of events, working with them to identify the key elements of their experience and shape them into a report.

CHANGING WORK AND SOCIAL PRACTICES: “SCRIPTS” FOR POLICIES, PLANS, AND PROCEDURES

Change is an intended outcome of action research: not the revolutionary changes envisioned by radical social theorists or political activists but more subtle transformations brought about by the development of new programs or modifications to existing procedures. 1 These developments and modifications, however, must necessarily be carefully planned and derived from the research processes to provide people with the means to more effectively deal with the problems investigated. The procedures presented in Chapters 6 and 7 suggest some ways of moving from reflection and theorizing to action. These moves need to be made more explicit so that the institutional imperatives of universities and bureaucracies do not inhibit the potential of the research process. There is a need to more overtly review the outcomes of research so they are presented in forms that may be applied directly to the 5960texts that govern much of institutional life: the policies, plans, and procedures that dictate how programs and services are delivered to the people served by those institutions.

Experiments with forms of writing that more effectively capture people's experience, discussed in the previous section, are moves in the right direction, but they appear limited in their ability to provide tangible outcomes for those who participate in research. Academic research tends to focus on the production of written texts that reflect the imperatives of university life, and research reports often remain trapped within the walls of the university. They circulate within the texts and journals of the university and, even when enacted as performances, are presented as theatrical productions playing to audiences oriented toward institutional life. They do not penetrate the everyday life world of homes, schools, clinics, offices, shops, and factories and are especially remote from marginalized peoples whose lives are often framed by oral traditions misrepresented by the

Even approaches to research designed to be more sensitive to these dynamics are prone to processes of knowledge production that colonize the experience of others. Denzin's (1997) interpretive ethnography, for instance, seeks to produce evocative understandings through a variety of literary genres that perform or write of people's experience (see Chapter 5). Research products, such as reports, presentations, and performances, are taken from the locations of the study and used as generalized narratives for an audience unrelated to the research context. Those texts and performances are used largely by others to enable them to understand the experience of those written about and often place that experience in an etic (outsider) framework of generalized theory. Such theorizing tends to be macrofocused, incorporating broad concepts, such as power, class, gender, race, and so on, often providing no basis for action in people's daily lives. The terminology turns the focus away from people's lived experience toward more general social processes that they have little opportunity or hope of controlling. Critiques within this type of literary production usually focus on negative constructions of the situation, often framed within descriptions and explanations of macrosocial and cultural structures and treated as real entities, rather than as constructed ways of interpreting social phenomena.

These texts and performances are sometimes illuminating, providing understanding of the broader contexts within which people's lives are 6061played out and revealing underlying forces of social life not evident existentially. They are, however, etic constructs that have the power to distort people's lived reality and misrepresent the existential experience of their everyday lives. They tend to be generalizing interpretations that focus on underlying elements of social life, such as power, race, and gender, rather than revealing the dynamic, interactive play of people and events as they work their way through their day-to-day lives. Dealing with macrostructures as they do, they often fail to provide the possibility for restorative action and run the risk, therefore, of becoming voyeuristic and disempowering.

The use of those types of production should, perhaps, not be underestimated, because they do provide useful ways of communicating evocative interpretations of social life that inform readers of social realities far removed from their own experiences. Action research, however, suggests the possibility of more socially responsive uses of research, providing the means for people to have a more direct impact on the significant issues that continue to detract from their social life and to make a tangible difference in the problems that diminish their lives. It reconceptualizes research as a participatory process that allows scholars—to follow West's (1989) dictum—to make their skills available for the purposes of the people.

Action research enacts localized, pragmatic approaches, investigating particular issues and problems in particular sites at particular moments in lives of interacting individuals and groups. Its purpose is to provide participants with new understandings of an issue they have defined as significant and the means for taking corrective action. The processes are necessarily participatory, enabling all people affected by the issue to have their voices heard and to be actively engaged in research activities. Action research suggests a move in emphasis from the creative texts of experimental interpretive ethnography toward the production of “practice scripts”—plans, procedures, and models derived from the final stages of action research that describe the actions people will take or the behaviors in which they will engage. Practice scripts—plans, procedures, and so on—also provide the means for people in professional or occupational roles to reformulate policies and practices to enable them to support the activities or changes in behavior of their clients, students, patients, or customers (see Box 2.1).

Box 2.1 An Action Research Framework

6263

Although academic research often seeks critique from within the constructs of the social sciences, critique in action research derives from the conjunction or clash of the diverse perspectives of individuals and groups participating, each perspective being challenged by the others. Critique is derived not from an etic, outsider interpretive framework but from the process of exploring and negotiating the perspectives emerging from the process of investigation. It uses concepts and terms from within the context, rather than those drawn from academic texts or bureaucratic discourses, and seeks constructions and interpretations of the issue that provides the basis for direct, tangible uses within the research context.

Change, the desired outcome of action research, therefore derives from the here-and-now ideas and concepts taken from the taken-for-granted life-world of the participants. It is based on the language, ideas, and concepts that make sense in their homes, offices, schools, factories, shops, clinics, centers, organizations, and institutions and are part of their everyday experience of family, community, work, professional, and commercial life. The products of research are not only written reports but also “practice scripts”—plans, procedures, models, maps, and so on—that provide the basis for reformulating practices, policies, programs, and services related to people's occupational or community life.

I am reminded of the long list of official policies, projects, programs, and institutional processes that have damaged the lives of minority peoples in Australia and the United States. I think of Dee Brown's Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee (1970) and Anna Haebich's For Their Own Good (1988) , both of which depict the disastrous impact of official policies on the lives of indigenous peoples. I think of the way that I organized my classroom in an Aboriginal school, so that children were forced to sit with others with whom they had a taboo or avoidance relationship. I think of academics who, from the safety of their ivory tower, formulate research projects implicitly critical of professional practitioners. The list goes on. Last night, a good friend and I, musing over these dynamics, thought of the old saying that “the road to hell is paved with good intentions.”

But I am also reminded of the great triumphs of those who worked with people so that they became the instruments of their own liberation. Great 6364leaders such as Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. come to mind, but I am conscious of a flood of other local heroes with smaller accomplishments: the woman who established a play group to help young mothers come together to discuss their common issues-the genesis of a widespread network of play groups in my own state-and the psychiatrist who worked with parents and students in her local community to establish an independent school as a haven from a school ruled by an authoritarian principal. Fortunately, that list also goes on.

WHAT WE LEARN FROM THE LITERATURE

Historically, action research has been related to models of action research that sought to apply the tools of anthropology and other disciplines to the practical resolution of social problems (e.g., Goodenough, 1963 ; Lewin, 1946 ). Action research ultimately suffered a decline in favor because of its association with radical political activism in the 1960s. In the past two decades it has reemerged in response to both pragmatic and philosophical pressures and is now more broadly understood as “disciplined inquiry (research) which seeks focused efforts to improve the quality of people's organizational, community and family lives” ( Calhoun, 1993 , p. 62). Action research was also allied to the emergence of practitioner research (e.g., Anderson, Herr, & Nihlen, 2007 ), new paradigm research ( Reason, 1988 ), and teacher research (e.g., Kincheloe, 1991 ). The approach to research suggested by action research is implied within the methodological frameworks of fourth-generation evaluation (Guba & Lincoln, 1989). Their dialogic, hermeneutic (meaning-making) approach to evaluation implies a more democratic, empowering, and humanizing approach to inquiry, which is the ideological basis for action research. Since that time there has been a proliferation of texts that speak to a wide range of audiences in professional, organizational, and community contexts (see following discussion), providing a rich resource that, over time, may transform the notion of research. Perhaps the best review of recent resources is provided by Bob Dick (2012) , a testament to Bob's long history with and contribution to the field.

The literature on action research continues to expand significantly, with a wide range of books, journals, and social media providing information relevant to professional, organizational, and community contexts. The literature not only provides insight into approaches to action research but also presents many examples and case studies of the way people have applied it in different contexts. Since no one source can cover in detail all the issues that need to be addressed, the literature also assists us to extend our understanding through the ways that authors frame, explain, and describe action research. Different orientations and perspectives not only assist us to extend our understanding but also challenge the assumptions integral to any study or investigation. The particular way in which action research is framed in this text, for instance, is both challenged and informed by a number of other prominent authors in the field.

McNiff and Whitehead (2011), for instance, focus on self-study as an integral part of action research, suggesting that change must occur internally within the researcher—a change in the way people think and feel. Practitioners, they suggest, should not only commit seriously to improving their practice but in doing so give explanations of those improvements that make explicit the values and purposes that give meaning to their actions. These explanations take us past the everyday understandings and commonly accepted explanations and routines to develop “living theories” more closely grounded in the realities of the actual contexts within which people live and work. For them action research is about creating knowledge that enables people to find ways to improve their practice.

Coghlan and Brannick (2009) likewise characterize action research as an approach to inquiry that aims at taking action and creating knowledge and theory about action. Theirs is an integrative approach to research that incorporates three voices and audiences: first, second, and third persons. They suggest that research has traditionally focused on the third person. In a style reminiscent of McNiff and Whitehead, they present first-person research as a form of inquiry and practice one does on one's own, fostering an inquiry approach to his or her own life to act out of awareness of one's own basic assumptions, desires, intention, philosophy, and ways of relating to others. Second-person inquiry focuses on processes of working with others on issues of mutual concern, through face-to-face dialogue, conversation, and joint action. Third-person inquiry or practice aims at creating broader communities of inquiry, involving people beyond the direct second-person action, and is actualized 6566through reporting, publishing, and extrapolating past the concrete to the general. Coghlan and Brannick refer to Reason and Marshall's (1987) notion of three audiences of research: me, us, and them. Their focus on organizations emphasizes the need for members of the system being studied to participate actively and collaboratively in the cyclical processes of investigation. Coghlan and Brannick suggest that defining characteristics of action research include research in action rather than about action; collaborative, democratic partnerships; research concurrent with action; a sequence of events; and an approach to problem solving.

Greenwood and Levin (2006), whose work is also particularly relevant to organizational contexts, present action research as “a set of collaborative ways of conducting research that simultaneously satisfies rigorous scientific requirements and promotes democratic social change” (p. 1). As with authors previously cited, they see action research as a process of generating knowledge and designing action, with local stakeholders and trained experts working together in a joint learning process. Action research, they suggest, centers on doing “with” rather than doing “for” stakeholders and credits local stakeholders with “the richness of experience and reflective possibilities that long experience living in complex situations brings with it” (2006, p. 1).

The sources just cited represent a small sample of publications with a similar orientation to that presented in this text. The field of action research is now served by many publications, websites, and social media that provide a rich body of resources for those intent on exploring the diversity of approaches to action research and the contexts in which it is applied.

A major source of information is found in academic journals that now include the Action Research Journal, an international, interdisciplinary journal providing a forum for the development of the theory and practice of action research; ALAR—The Action Learning/Action Research Journal, focusing largely on community contexts of action research; the International Journal of Action Research, providing a similar orientation to action research in online form; Educational Action Research, likewise providing an online service now encompassing professional areas other than education; and other online journals that include Action Research International, AR Expeditions, and the Canadian Journal of Action Research.

Reference resources for action research may be found in the canonical Handbook of Action Research (Reason & Bradbury, 2007), which explores the philosophical and theoretical underpinnings of action research as well as 6667provides case studies from a number of fields; the forthcoming Encyclopedia of Action Research (Coghlan & Brydon-Miller, in press); and the Sage Handbook of Educational Action Research (Noffke & Somekh, 2009). Other general texts include those by McNiff and Whitehead (2009, 2011); Whitehead and McNiff (2006); and Fals-Borda and Rahman (1991); as well as an action research planner by Kemmis and McTaggart (1999). McTaggart (1997) describes the application of action research in an international context, while Heron (1997) provides a detailed and practical guide to cooperative inquiry, one of the many variants of the action research “family.” Tyler (2006) and Reeb (2007) present community-focused approaches to action research, and Schmuck (2006) presents action research as a tool for social change.

Education is perhaps the most prolific source of action research resources, with a body of literature covering a wide range of educational issues. Some of this is in response to government-imposed testing regimes and provides rather simplistic procedures for using action research to seek out and test the “silver bullet” teaching techniques that will result in higher test scores. These appear to be largely futile, failing to engage the participatory and cyclical processes of inquiry that are the hallmark of standard approaches to action research. More sophisticated and effective approaches may be found, however, in a wide range of sources. Holly, Arhar, and Kasten (2008) show how action research can be used for curriculum purposes and incorporate case studies in classroom contexts. Mills (2013) positions action research as a fundamental component of teaching, alongside curriculum development, assessment, and classroom management, and Stringer (2004) applies action research more broadly to classroom teaching, student research, and work with families and communities. A nonexhaustive list of other reputable education sources includes Noffke and Stevenson (1995); McNiff, Lomax, and Whitehead (2003); Hendricks (2011); McNiff and Whitehead (2006); and Sagor (2004).

There is a considerable increase in resources for the health sciences, with offerings that now cover a number of professional fields and community contexts. Minkler and Wallerstein (2008), Winter and Munn-Giddings (2001), and Stringer and Genat (2004) present detailed procedures and case studies of action research in community and social care contexts. Hart and Bond (1995), Morton-Cooper (2000), and Koch and Kralich (2006) provide practical guidance for the use of action research in health care practice, and Benner (1994) 6768provides a phenomenological perspective on research health issues consonant with action research. The increased interest in using action research in nursing is evident in the literature, which includes offerings from Bellman (2003); Bellman, Bywood, and Dale (2003); Williamson, Bellman, and Webster (2012); and Koshy, Koshy, and Waterman (2011), complementing an earlier contribution by Morton-Cooper (2000).

In other fields, Stringer and Dwyer (2005) ; French, Reynolds, and Swan (2001) ; Fortune, McCallion, and Briar-Lawson (2010) ; and Kagan, Burton, and Siddiquee (2008) present action research processes particularly relevant to social workers, therapists, psychologists, and other human service professionals. An increasing range of literature also focuses more generally on the conduct of action research in organizational settings, including offerings from Coghlan and Brannick (2009) , McMurray and Pace (2006) , and Whitehead and McNiff (2006) .

These citations, however, provide only a sample of the literature on action research. It continues to proliferate and is complemented by an increasingly large array of websites and social media resources.

IN THE COMPANY OF FRIENDS

In this chapter, I have spoken of the dimension of power in research. For some, the move to empower people is seen as a set of divisive, confrontational interactions and activities that enable one person or group to wrest control from another. The communitarian ethic embedded in action research, however, suggests a more consensual approach to investigation requiring participants to enact the working principles discussed in Chapter 2 . The position of the researcher changes from one of controller, advocate, or activist to one of facilitator. The researcher's role is not to push particular agendas but to neutralize power differentials in the setting so that the interests of the powerful do not take precedence over those of other participants. Interactions and activities must, however, allay the fears of people in positions of power, generating trust that enables them to feel sufficiently at ease to release some of their control over events. Their acquiescence is an essential feature of action research. They should feel that their institutional or organizational responsibilities, or their place and status in the context, are not threatened by the research activities.

6869

Procedures must also generate trust within less powerful groups, so that groups are willing to participate in arenas in which previously they have been mistreated or demeaned. The reward for all groups is that they acquire ends or goals that otherwise would not have been possible for either, working by themselves.

The power-broker role of the researcher is exercised with the intent of facilitating change in the power dynamics of the situation. The result is not so much a transfer of power from one group to another—although that often occurs—as a change in the nature of power relations. Power is still exercised but in a different way. A teacher in a classroom does not relinquish the responsibility of facilitating students’ education. The teacher can, however, choose to provide significant decision-making opportunities to students regarding the organization of the class, the curriculum, the timetable, and so on. Social workers and health professionals may similarly engage client groups in the process of formulating or restructuring the ways in which programs and services are organized and administered. This is not news for the business world, which has long recognized the need to take account of the experiences and perspectives of customers and clients.

Improved service delivery and problem resolution are not the only goals of these types of activities. Action research seeks to formulate ways of living and working together that enhance the life experiences of the participants. It provides ways of working that counter the impact of the current overemphasis on the technical and the bureaucratic and enables the formulation of procedures that take into account essentially human features—that speak to issues of emotion, value, and identity. To engage the more creative and caring features of human interaction increases the likelihood of greater “ownership” and more sustainable outcomes that have an enduring effect on people's work and community lives.

Ultimately, however, the routines of action research suggest ways of working that enable a harmonious and productive sense of social life. The end product is, if anything, peace of mind or the chance to participate in the pursuit of happiness. It is a movement away from competitive, power-driven, conflict-ridden organizational processes toward more cooperative, consensual wa A colleague once suggested that education could be defined as “the search for truth in the company of friends.” Although “truth” may elude us, action research might, in a similar vein, be defined as “the search for understanding in the company of friends.”

6970

REFLECTION AND ACTION

Social theories seek to provide frameworks of concepts that assist us to develop a coherent understanding of the way people organize and live out their social lives. Over time, however, the complexity and diversity of social theory has threatened to undo this seemingly simple project. Complex theories, based in sometimes highly technical philosophical language, overlaid by multifaceted interpretive schema, seem not to provide a clear basis for understanding social life. While extended reading can assist in this process, the best way to build an understanding of theories of social life is to engage in dialogue on issues as they arise and in educational or professional settings to continue to extend the clarity that comes with a good set of theories. The following activities may assist in this process:

· 1.Reflect on the issues presented in this chapter.

· 2.Identify concepts or issues that you find most interesting or informative.

· 3.State how or why you find them interesting or informative. How are they meaningful for you?

· 4.Are there sections of the chapter that are uninformative or unclear or that do not seem relevant to your understanding of action research?

· 5.Are there other theoretical positions that might usefully have been included that would extend people's understanding of action research?

· 6.Summarize the main points made in this chapter. State the strengths and weaknesses of the chapter, from your perspective.

ys of living.

NOTE

1.

The notion of a “script” is drawn from those used for plays or films. Not only does a script carefully define what takes place, but it also delineates what will be said and how things will be done.

7071

Box 2.2 The Theory Behind the Practice

Purpose

To understand the way theory relates to the practice of action research

Content

Theory in action research has a different position and purpose than theory in quantitative studies.

Theory and Practice

The outcomes of action research are increased clarity and understanding that provide the basis for resolving the problem on which the study focused.

The Legitimacy of Action Research

The legitimacy of action research comes not from the criteria associated with quantitative research but from its ability to be successfully applied to problems and issues in people's everyday lives.

Power and Control

Postmodern perspectives show how attempts to control people's lives are confounded by the creative, complex, and dynamic construction of social life and behavior. This points to the need for more flexible, democratic, and creative ways of conceiving and organizing human activity.

The Next Generation

Action research suggests the need to liberate and empower people through collaborative and caring processes of investigation and action.

Representing People's Experience

Action research seeks to produce empathetic, evocative accounts that embody the significant experiences embedded in people's everyday lives and lead to greater understanding of the social realities within which people enact their social lives.

7172

Scripts for Professional and Social Practices

The outcomes of action research provide “scripts” to guide new ways for enacting events and activities.

What We Learn From the Literature

A large body of literature provides diverse perspectives on the nature of action research, processes for enacting processes of inquiry, and its application to professional, organizational, and community settings.

In the Company of Friends

The end product of action research is a harmonious and productive sense of social life. It seeks to move people to cooperative, consensual ways of living that provide peace of mind and contribute to the pursuit of happiness.

5

Designing the Plane While Flying It

Proposing and Doing the Dissertation

Action research has been relegated by some to a lesser status—something that can inform practice but not an approach that contributes to a larger knowledge base (Anderson & Herr, 1999). At the same time, one of the explicit goals of dissertation research is this contribution to knowledge generation or, at least, an academic conversation. This dualism is reasserted when we distinguish between degrees for practitioners and those for future academics and researchers. Knowledge generation is a core element in these distinctions, which are especially prevalent currently in education (Perry, 2012), but exist in other fields as well. We note these distinctions since they form the larger context in which students approach an action research dissertation—a process with action-oriented applications in the local context but with an expectation for a larger contribution to knowledge generation as well. In essence, action research dissertations are a possible refutation of these artificial dualisms. And some would make the claim that action research, because of its blend of expert and local knowledges, may offer more valid and convincing results than other forms of research (Brydon-Miller, Greenwood, & Maguire, 2003).

So while students choosing action research may face a sense of being “second-class citizens” in the academic research community, we illustrate in Chapter 6 the growth and variety of action research dissertations and a slow but steady growth in their perceived legitimacy, in some sectors. This is despite the fact that many universities have yet to offer actual action research classes at the doctoral level (Gibbon, 2002) and some faculty remain skeptical that it is a form of “real” research. Students have begun to document for themselves and the larger research communities what they see as the benefits of an action research approach to the dissertation. For example, van der Meulen (2011) makes the case that action research is a “possible way to mitigate academic isolation and alienation” (p. 1291), a key cause of high attrition in doctoral programs. She highlights involvement and participation in a local community as a less estranged experience for students conducting their research.

The title of this book suggests that it is intended as a guide for students and faculty. We include the latter in recognition that for many faculty, action research has not necessarily been an area of study or a research pursuit. But for doctoral students, one of the first steps in their dissertation work is forming a committee of faculty to guide them. In fact, a student’s proposal and dissertation are, initially, aimed at this small audience of faculty. While it may be ideal to have as a mentor a dissertation chair who is steeped in action research, or even one who initiates a large action research project that students can be a part of, as was the case for Lynne Mock (see Chapter 6 ), that may not be within the realm of possibilities for many students.

Maguire (1993) suggests that doctoral students seek out faculty who are at least open to action research if not fully conversant with it. The goal in this case would be to work together in threading a way through the action research dissertation process rather than obstructing or distorting it. Faculty are also members of the academic research community and, as such, may have to deal with their own mixed feelings regarding action research. Or they may feel out of their depth if they are not themselves action researchers. Our own experience is that faculty can be open to the process while also feeling uneasy as students make their way through it. The evolutionary nature of action research means there are multiple, ongoing decisions to be made, and faculty need to make their peace with both allowing the research to unfold while continuing to monitor and guide it. This assumes a different role for a faculty advisor and can be experienced as a lot of responsibility without necessarily much control.

It is important then that both faculty and the doctoral student assess the levels of support for an action research dissertation. In some contexts, it may be commonplace, and in others, a novelty. If the latter, supports toward successfully pursuing this approach can still be put in place. For example, students sometimes add an outside member to a dissertation committee, drawing on action research expertise from another department or university. We also welcome the development of cyber communities that students may find to be supportive contexts for their work (e.g., see the Action Research Network for the Americas site: https://sites.google.com/site/arna connect or ActionResearch.net at http://www.actionresearch.net ). Doctoral students can examine dissertation studies produced within their own context, to see what others who have come before them were able to do and with whom. If the local “read” is not as rich as hoped for in terms of action research, students can push beyond the confines of their own universities and look to these larger action research communities. Our point is that when embarking on an action research dissertation, the initial work is one of finding supports for the process, locally and beyond.

A dissertation is written with a particular audience in mind and in a field of study that implies certain conventions of writing and research. A dissertation is, in part, students locating themselves within these research communities. At the same time, the broader conversation about research is a robust one. Dissertations are key contributions to the ongoing development of action research methodology and methods. For example, students are experimenting with combining action research with other forms of research. Both Blanchard (2011) and Kuby (2010) situated their studies as blending autoethnography and practitioner research. Hild (2007) melded appreciative inquiry and action research in his dissertation exploring how to engage Inupiaq values in land management processes. These attempts to create blends of research under the action research umbrella add to the robust development of this genre of research.

For some doctoral students, the research questions being asked demand an action research approach. For others, action research simply resonates as an approach to research that is generative for them and the kind of researcher they want to become, and the questions they pose reflect this stance. For many students, much of this is intertwined with an ethical stance toward research and the generation of knowledge.

Linda Abrams (2013), in describing why she chose participatory action research (PAR) for her study with mentor teachers, writes,

My primary goal in designing my study is to ensure the voice, equity, and integrity of the participants (Groundwater-Smith, 2010). I begin my discussion of the methodology and methods with an ethical stance because those principles are the ones that brought me to my doctoral studies and this dissertation topic. During the 24 years I was a high school teacher, I felt unrepresented in the public discourse about teachers and believed that academic credentials would grant me entry into a cadre of education experts; thus I would have a seat at the table. Once I entered the doctoral program, I felt even further marginalized because I was no longer a teacher and not yet a scholar. Being positioned in that no-man’s-land between educational institutions caused an existential crisis that is slowly resolving as I find my way into a community of education scholars who provide a safe holding place for teachers/teacher educators like me—those who see the potential of engaging teachers in researching their practice and including them as co-participants and co-researchers in academic research. These education scholars envision a future of “empowered scholar teachers” (Kincheloe, 2012, p. 18) who “challenge common assumptions about knowers, knowing, and knowledge for the improvement of teaching and learning that are operating in schools in these acutely conservative times” (Cochran-Smith & Lyttle, 2009b, p. 39). My decision about how to conduct my study actually preceded the development of my research questions. I tried to imagine doing a more traditional dissertation study, but my commitment to improving practice by “working the dialectic” (Cochran-Smith, 2009a, 2009b; Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 1999) between research and practice drove the decisions that are discussed below. (p. 47)

Whether it is the demand of the type of question being asked or the locating of self as researcher, we find that action research continues to appeal to many of us. While it may be a less common approach in some universities, we do not consider this a “deal breaker” for a student as much as an invitation to get supports in place to pursue the research that is theirs to do.

POSSIBILITIES OF A PILOT STUDY

Experience with research prior to embarking on a dissertation is a good idea for any doctoral student, but we think it can be particularly helpful to students considering an action research approach since it is among the more complex research undertakings. Action research typically demands that students play multiple roles—those of researcher, actor, and collaborator, to name a few. Practice in juggling these multiple identities and in documenting the decisions made while wearing various “hats” can give students a flavor of what they are in for and whether, in reality, it is an approach they want to pursue for their dissertations.

Ideally, graduate students should begin to “pilot” an action research study while still taking coursework. We place pilot in quotes because, unlike traditional research, it is often hard to distinguish a pilot study from the real thing. In action research, a pilot study is likely to simply be early cycles of research in an ongoing research spiral. It may be useful, however, to use the language of pilot studies in a dissertation proposal. Because action research is labor intensive and because it takes time to build the relationships and structures needed, it may be difficult to start from scratch at the dissertation proposal stage. For those doing action research in their own sites, the problem is less severe, but it is even more likely that such easy access to one’s site would ensure laying groundwork for the research prior to completing doctoral coursework. One thing is certain: Action research seldom fits neatly into the one mythical dissertation year that follows coursework. Doing a series of pilot studies in preparation for the dissertation can increase the chances of finishing in a timely manner.

This piloting lets the doctoral student try on research questions and methodologies; the initial data gathering and analysis can help guide the ongoing direction of the overall research. This pilot material can all be seen as part of the action research process, and the results of these pilots can be part of both the proposal and the dissertation. In essence, a doctoral student is saying, “I did this and this is where it has taken me thus far. This is what I learned.” The proposed research for the dissertation can be an outgrowth of this earlier work, nested in what became clearer through the piloting. This can include a trying on of methodological approaches, the data analysis, how to deal with one’s own positionality, and so forth. But the dissertation research must add a new piece to what the student has already done and come to know. In other words, we want to make clear that the pilot studies do not add up to the actual dissertation, but rather set the stage for it or are simply a piece of the overall dissertation research.

THE DISSERTATION PROPOSAL

As we think about the dissertation proposal for an action research study, it holds in common elements that are similar to other types of research. We generally sketch these out below while trying to weave in particular considerations for action researchers. Overall, our sense is that the structure of action research dissertation proposals will most closely resemble those crafted by qualitative researchers. As in qualitative research, the design is emergent, and the proposal is typically written in first-person voice. While quantitative dissertation proposals commonly have the first three chapters written in virtually a final form, both qualitative and action research proposals begin the research with a clear direction but with the anticipation that as data-gathering and analysis proceed, the process will continue to be crafted rather than totally set a priori. This means that the various component parts presented in the proposal are the researcher’s current best thinking of how to set a process in motion while also making clear that it will continue to emerge. As such, then, the proposal is a more tentative document but with a commitment to carefully documenting ongoing decision making and directions taken. Action researchers are committed to a spiraling synergism of action and understanding. The work of the dissertation proposal is one of outlining the fluidity of the process of inquiry. It also situates the research question in relevant literature but with a promise that there will be a continuing process of reading to inform the inquiry process. It makes the case that the research is an important undertaking and will make a contribution to the local context, the field and the literature.

But we are also aware that there are conventions in some universities for students to write the first three chapters of their dissertation for the proposal without distinguishing among varying research approaches. Our stance is that with action research, there is an expectation that the proposal is a beginning but that much will change from the beginning to the end of the research process. We do not see this then as a static document or even a particularly lengthy one, but we are also aware that the writing is taking place in a local university context that could impinge on the document being produced. Below, we briefly discuss what we see as the elements of the proposal, but throughout this chapter, we contrast the proposal and dissertation processes so a number of these issues are addressed throughout.

INTRODUCING THE PROPOSED INQUIRY

We return to Reason and Marshall’s (2001) thinking that action research is “for me, for us, and for them.” If we carry this thinking into the crafting of a proposal, it means that we are writing with multiple audiences in mind. As action researchers, we work under the assumption that we are “in” the research, that we are both researchers and actors. There is no pretense of the neutral or objective observer, but rather, from the beginning, we lay claim to the reality that we are “setting in action” research to address a local context and concern and that we are actively involved in the problem-solving process. This obviously has implications for the “voice” used in the proposal writing and why first-person voice is indicated.

The introduction to an action research proposal is designed to signal to the reader why an issue is important to be studied but also why it is important to us as the researchers and the orchestrators of the inquiry. It is not uncommon for students to start with a personal narrative to bring the reader into their lived experience of an issue. But students also need to push beyond this, to link their proposal to puzzles in the larger community of inquiry and how this study can uniquely contribute to our understanding. Readers need to grasp why the issue is important to the researcher herself but move the argument for carrying it out beyond the initial personal concern to the academic community in which the issue resides. So, early on, we are signaling that the proposed study is important for us but also for those beyond our local contexts. This signaling takes place, in part, in the literature review section of the proposal.

SITUATING THE STUDY IN RELEVANT LITERATURE

A good action research dissertation proposal will provide sufficient literature to frame the initial research question but with the assumption that the review of the literature will continue as the research is carried out. The initial literature review reveals to the reader how the researcher is thinking about the area for inquiry and relevant research that informs that thinking. Doctoral students come to the proposal having concluded a sustained amount of time immersed in literature read in courses as well as in preparation for their own research. In this sense, they are expected to show their familiarity with current stances and debates while also locating themselves via the work they draw on for their own research.

While entering the study in a too open-ended fashion is an invitation to chaos, letting the literature provide too narrow a focus is also a problem. Overreliance on the lens that the literature provides on the problem under study can keep the researcher from seeing things that do not conform to expectations that the literature set up. So, the balance is in reading enough initially to ground the proposed study while holding the expectation that an ongoing search for relevant literature is part of the process as the analysis takes the researcher into areas previously unforeseen.

METHODOLOGICAL CONSIDERATIONS

Depending on a committee’s familiarity with action research, students may need to first bring them into a broader understanding of the approach, enough so that the individual study can be located within this larger context. It is important to convey the emergent and ongoing nature of action research, while also making clear that there are certain research conventions that are typically part of the process. Some students rely on familiar images such as the action research spiral conveyed by Kemmis and McTaggart (1987) in which they describe a spiral of self-reflective cycles made up of an ongoing cycle of plan, act and observe, reflect (including ongoing reading), and then continue with a revised plan based on ongoing actions and observations. While described as steps in a cycle, Kemmis and McTaggart make clear that these stages often overlap, and initial planning may quickly become obsolete as learning informs the development of the question and the process. In addition, action research studies are typically co-constructions, developed in collaboration with others, in a setting over which the researcher may have little control.

The reality of how a study evolves is often not in keeping with the initial planning or vision a researcher has proposed. In writing about the inquiry group she formed for her dissertation study, Andrus (2013) writes,

I initiated the IG (inquiry group) with a full awareness that it would be an undertaking co-constructed by myself and the teacher-participants, but I also had certain hopes and expectations of how it might work. I did extensive reading on teacher learning communities, collaborative inquiry, and participatory action research (PAR) in schools . . . and thought that ideally the teachers would collectively choose one or two research questions and use their classrooms to test theories and gather knowledge for group discussion and evaluation. I thought the group would discuss readings on topics we chose together and that the teachers would observe one another’s classrooms for data collection and further collaborative knowledge generation. I also hoped that the teachers would be interested in keeping research journals about the process to facilitate reflection and which might serve as another source of data for my study. (pp. 133–134)

In her dissertation, Andrus contrasts the initial vision with the actual evolution of the research. Frequent schedule changes on the part of the school and other professional commitments on the part of her teacher-participants dramatically impacted her study. She quickly realized that she faced ongoing, difficult methodological decisions in the face of this lived reality:

I was becoming worried, however, that the limited time we had to meet would make undertaking a full-scale research project with cycles of questioning, altering practice and evaluating outcomes difficult or impossible. After the second meeting I wrote a research memo about my concerns:

I realized today while I was reading the Bray book on collaborative inquiry and waiting for the meeting to start that my expectations are kind of low. The combination of having such a short amount of time to meet (roughly 45 minutes once a month) and working with teachers who aren’t yet completely invested or even necessarily understand what all this is about, is making me worry about accomplishing a great deal this year. I want to spend a whole session talking about what this group can be and guidelines and about what our question will be, but I don’t have time for that! Today only 6 teachers showed up and at least two didn’t do the reading. I feel like I have to make this as easy as possible for them and ask as little as possible—and that doesn’t sound like a great recipe for doing hard work and really exploring things in detail and getting things done. (pp. 135–136)

Koshy et al. (2011) observe that the research process is likely to be more fluid, open, and responsive than the notion of action research spirals or stages implies. In our experience, action research can not be reduced to steps or stages. Rather, the process requires the ongoing attention of the researcher to constant methodological decisions in the face of complexity. So, the task for students and their committees is to hold both truths at once, that is, that there is a delineated process for action research but that it is commonly messy and not as predictable as models may suggest. When writing the methodology section of the proposal, then, a student wants to convey the principles of action research and indicate the fluidity and emergent nature of the process but also live with the expectation that the actual research will continue to evolve and be shaped by the realities of the context.

DATA ANALYSIS AND REPRESENTATION

Action researchers are proposing to document what can seem like a moving train where they are both passengers as well as part of the train crew. Much as with a train ride, researchers are capturing the process as well as narrating an ultimate destination. To further complicate the picture, because ongoing action is involved, researchers are called on to make meaning and then take action that will intervene in the site and test the questions being explored. This meaning making often feels partial but the process demands considered action to be further set in motion and studied. Qualitative researchers often refer to ongoing data analysis but in action research, there is virtually no choice since it is imperative for the process.

In terms of proposing an approach to data analysis, this is closely tied to a commitment to documenting this ongoing consideration of the data at hand and the thinking involved in the decisions made. Researchers will ultimately have a description of the process taken and the kind of reasoning involved in choosing one set of actions over another. This is one part of the analysis, but there is also the revisiting of the data set overall, when data gathering is concluded. What, overall, was learned from the action research process, and how might it inform the larger research conversation? Throughout this process, it is likely that action researchers will use some data-analysis procedures common to qualitative inquiry, such as various types of data coding (Saldana, 2009), discourse and content analysis (Fairclough, 1992; Gee, 1999), and even qualitative data-analysis software as a way to organize and analyze data. While qualitative data analysis typically requires ongoing memoing about developing theoretical, personal, and methodological issues, action researchers tend to draw most heavily on this ongoing memoing or journaling due to the action orientation and fast paced nature of action research.

Key in the proposal is careful attention to this ongoing documentation process and putting methods in place to capture it. Some form of journaling is imperative for the action researcher as a way to document ongoing thinking, decisions, and actions. This is done from a position of involved actor, so the researcher is busily carrying out multiple roles, all of which she will want to reflect on throughout but also when the research concludes. Data analysis essentially will require this kind of careful documentation through a research journal. We also find that action researchers are so close to and involved in the process, that journaling is a way of stepping back into ongoing analysis. Some action researchers build into their design a person who will function as a “critical friend” who can provide alternative interpretations.

Action research dissertations are sometimes critiqued as writing about process rather than “findings.” Indeed, a narrative style is not unusual in the write-up. These rich descriptions of local practices are valuable and meet criteria for possible transferability to other settings. At the same time, we encourage researchers to also step back and write up findings from a stance of dialoguing with extant literature and research, to pull out how the findings of this study contribute to these conversations as well. This typically involves a more meta view of the data and perhaps a different approach to organization and analysis that goes across the descriptive cycles of action research.

WHERE DO ACTION RESEARCH QUESTIONS COME FROM?

Action researchers should expect that their research questions will cut across and introduce the possibilities for change on multiple levels. For the action researcher, this can be an intimate undertaking, consistent and congruent with ways we see ourselves in the world and the things that are important to us. For example, in stating her belief that the research we do cannot be disconnected from our values and philosophy, Maguire (1993) writes of her own dissertation research, “I started out looking for ways to make my dissertation research more congruent with my beliefs about empowerment and social justice” (p. 176). She chose to do PAR as a way of integrating her interests, values, and beliefs. Whereas some research approaches have suggested that researchers keep their passions and themselves out of the process, we are suggesting that the questions we pursue in action research are often related to our own quandaries and passions.

The motivation to research may arise from existential commitments in students’ lives; they are committed to work with issues of race or gender, to manage in ways that are collaborative and inquiring, to address the crisis of ecological sustainability. Often they know intuitively or tacitly what it is they want to research, but their definition of the project is typically too loose, too formal, too presented for outside consumption to really take off. The project needs to touch their heart in some way if it is to sustain them. (Reason & Marshall, 2001, p. 415)

We would infer from this that action research questions often start with the students or have big implications for them as beings-in-the-world. They can expect, then, in the process, an interrogation of themselves resulting in change. In some of the following sections, we will address how issues play out differently for those students who are insiders—usually practitioners—to the setting under study than for those who are outsiders working in collaboration with insiders.

INSIDER ACTION RESEARCH

There is often a sense, in insider action research, that there is not a clear beginning or, for that matter, ending of the research. Research questions are often formalized versions of puzzles that practitioners have been struggling with for some time and perhaps even acting on in terms of problem solving. The decision to do more systematic inquiry on a puzzling issue is one of asking, “What issue or problem am I really trying to solve?” “How might data shed light on this?” It is, in essence, a stepping back a bit from what is often a daily struggle or puzzle to gain perspective through systematic inquiry. It is also a way of unearthing other dimensions of an issue that are currently out of awareness or not realized (Johnson & Avelar La Salle, 2010). Formalizing the puzzles of practice into research is a way of working better rather than doing more of the same only harder. What we are suggesting, then, is that many action research questions come out of a frustration, a practice puzzle, or a contradiction in a workplace (this is what we say we do, but do we?); often, these are things a practitioner has been giving thought to for some time. The research question most often addresses something the practitioner wants to do better or understand more clearly. Battaglia (1995) believes that for practitioners who do action research, the questions themselves become part of a general attitude of inquiry.

I now believe that Action Research is as much a process of asking questions about one’s practice as it is deciding what to do about solutions. Action Research enables you to live your questions; in a way, they become the focal point of your thinking. My questions took on an almost mantra-like quality; they seemed to seep into my thinking and conversation, creep into my reading and writing when I’d least expect. They also kept me focused. I appreciate how professionally healthy it might be to adopt an “Action Research mentality” whereby one is always thinking about or attempting to polish another facet of the work one does. Perhaps, then, Action Research is an attitude or becomes an attitude that is brought to one’s practice. (p. 89)

A research question can also be generated by an outside assessment of how well or poorly an agency, school, or bureaucracy is performing. Assessments of this kind often reflect standards that originate outside of the work site itself, with schools or agencies or bureaucracies being held accountable to a standard perhaps imposed via state or federal mandates or a funding source. (For example, see the discussion of dissertations by Dyke and Street in Chapter 6 .) In cases such as these, the action research question can reflect a more collective puzzle. Examples of this would include the faculty of a school being curious as to how they might raise student achievement levels or a juvenile detention facility wanting to reduce its rate of recidivism. Sometimes, an intervention has already been put into place, based on workers’ professional opinions and problem solving or via an assessing outside entity, and the agency is now wondering whether the intervention is working or how it might be refined. In these cases, we distinguish between a program “evaluation” and the action research process. In the case of the latter, we are suggesting that individuals, organizations and institutions embrace “inquiry as stance” (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2009) whereby they seek to constantly improve their practices and programs via inquiry and data gathering. In these cases, the inquiry process is an ongoing one, with the data feeding back into the programs on a continual basis rather than a static, one time or annual evaluation. Conversely, perhaps a group of professionals in a site may want to challenge outside judgments or the imposition of standards that seem incongruent to best practices; action research of this type may involve collectively developing an alternative which more accurately reflects their work (Herr & Anderson, 2008).

All of these are examples in which more than one person “owns” the question. It reflects collective curiosity regarding a part of the organization’s functioning. One person, perhaps the doctoral student, may take the lead in instigating the inquiry, or it may be set in motion through a small team of interested people or stakeholders. An established committee or work unit already in place may be charged with coordinating the research effort. An alternate route could be an invitation to an outsider with research expertise to collaborate on the inquiry effort.

While action research is often best done collaboratively, dissertations are typically individual undertakings. A doctoral student may have an individual question within a larger, collective inquiry or produce the written account of the collective action research effort, taking responsibility for a systematic accounting and questioning of the research process. Because a doctoral student is invested in both the actions implemented to solve a workplace issue as well as in producing an artifact to satisfy dissertation requirements, it is not uncommon for a doctoral student to take responsibility for producing a document that goes beyond that of workplace knowledge. The dissertation that comes out of this kind of collective inquiry is a more public document, prepared for dissemination beyond the site and with aims beyond local knowledge. Issues to be considered in such an undertaking are the following: Who owns the data? Are all the stakeholders comfortable with the public dissemination of the data? Does the doctoral student need his or her own individual research piece within the larger, collective study? In terms of this last question, it is a common arrangement for a doctoral student to create an individual piece or study within the larger inquiry; in this kind of situation, the doctoral student typically has access to the larger data set, collectively gathered, while also pursuing an individual version of the research question.

As with much of action research, we see this issue of who owns the data as an ongoing conversation and negotiation as the research evolves. At the same time, we would encourage doctoral students to initially work out agreements with other stakeholders regarding the use of data and its dissemination for the dissertation. To work toward clear agreements initially and then to continue to revisit the working understanding serves as a protection for the doctoral student and other stakeholders against any later confusion regarding intellectual property rights. Putting in writing these early agreements makes them explicit. The writing up of these agreements also teases out areas that might not have initially been considered or those that are not as clear as one thought. Again, action research is a complex process, and the threading through of intellectual property rights is no exception. The goal is to have as upfront, clear working agreements and relationships as possible early on in the process, but we also anticipate that these agreements may be revisited as the research unfolds.

Even if a doctoral student starts with what seems to be an individual puzzle or concern, the posing of a research question in an institutional context or workplace typically spills beyond the individual. Others may become interested in the issue or feel threatened by the study (Herr, 1999d). When taking into account the context for the research question, it is not really possible to anticipate the direction the inquiry will take or the kinds of interests it will threaten or attract. Still, it is a good idea for individual insider researchers to consider the politics of their own context and who—including themselves—they may be putting at risk through their inquiry. Action research takes place in local contexts at given points in sociohistorical time, and the researcher will want to assess the risks in asking particular questions. This is important to consider because, once the action research is set in motion, the researcher should not assume its spiraling is under the researcher’s control. One unique aspect of doing insider action research is that we are initiating research in a setting where we already have relationships; it may also be a place where we intend to stay for a long period of time, even if the research ends. Given these realities, insider researchers may ask themselves what research questions they want to take on and what feels too politically volatile to tackle at a given point in time. Insider action researchers often have the luxury of time to invest in the change process in that they remain in their sites. From this lens, the dissertation is likely to represent just a piece in what could be an evolving undertaking over a considerable span of time.

We are suggesting that these realities factor into the decision to pursue one research question over another as the researcher juggles possible trade-offs and complexities. Depending on the context, the researcher, in considering possible questions for inquiry, may deliberately put a question on a back burner to be considered at another time. Or, conversely, an issue may strike at the core of a researcher’s ethics, or “bottom line,” and, from that vantage point, beg to be interrogated through inquiry; in such cases, the researcher may decide to pursue a question because it is ethically difficult not to, even if it seems risky for the researcher professionally or personally (Anderson et al., 2007).

OUTSIDER ACTION RESEARCH

This same sense of ethics or values may drive outside researchers to pursue action research because they want to not only generate knowledge, but also make a contribution to the setting they study. This activist stance may come out of a critique of the status quo and a desire to interrupt it; or a student may be driven by a theoretical stance, such as feminism or critical theory, that lends itself to an activist research stance. Students may first come to embrace action research as a way to avoid exploiting a population for research purposes (research on rather than with), and then decide on dissertation topics that lend themselves to that approach. Or, perhaps students are clear that they want their research to give back to the participants of the study, not just be beneficial for them and their dissertation, and action research is a viable way to do this. In explaining her choice of PAR for her community health dissertation with women in Nepal, Gibbon (2002) reflects,

It becomes important that my research is not only about pursuing a career and adding knowledge to the world. My research needs to be with and for women and not merely by or about them (Maguire, 2001; Reason & Marshall, 1987). . . . It has been important for me to merge my critical thinking in everyday life with the knowledge learned through study to enable a union of theory and practice that can inform my research. I am passionately concerned with, as hooks (1994) said, “the desire to write in a way that makes my ideas accessible to the world beyond academy” (p. 2). The path that I have gone down has led to certain tensions between my personal development and my development as a cooperative researcher. This has not occurred in isolation; it can be likened to strands of a rope that are entwined. It is necessary to constantly reflect on what is meant by research, the reasons research is being undertaken, and the relationship between the researcher and the researched. Research in the real world has to incorporate issues of difference, complexity, and diversity. There will always be underlying tensions that need to be taken into account. (p. 549)

Students may want to piggyback on things they are already doing, places they have access to, or larger projects offered to them through faculty grants or through their own professional expertise. At the same time, convenient opportunities may seem like a pragmatic solution to producing a dissertation but may compromise one’s passions or professional direction. Many graduate students have opportunities to participate in faculty research and grants, and these can often serve as a vehicle for dissertation research; the question for doctoral students is whether these opportunities match their own professional goals for their own research.

It is not uncommon for students to initiate an intervention themselves and study it for the purposes of doing research as well as improving or impacting a setting. For example, when Andrus (2013) invited teachers in a single-sex girls’ school into a study group for her dissertation research, she makes clear, “The goal was always also, however, to provide a space to think about how the school was addressing issues related to gender and girls’ education” (p. 134).

ISSUES OF DESIGN AND METHODOLOGY

In naturalistic inquiry, there is a sense that the methodology may evolve as it is implemented in the field, depending on the conditions that greet the researcher as the study is being implemented. With action research and the assumption of the research spiral, this premise of an evolving methodology is a virtual given. While the steps of the action research spiral may remain the same—that is, iterative cycles of plan-act-observe-reflect (Lewin, 1948)—these are broad categories or steps that will be translated into actions in the field. For example, as a researcher gains insight into the puzzle being studied, the next step may be to broaden the scope of the data gathering, something not previously anticipated by the researcher; this could be a step that now makes sense, derived from the researcher’s reflection and understanding from the previous round of data gathering, analysis, and actions taken.

A dissertation committee must then give a student a degree of latitude in terms of the evolution of the methodology and where successive cycles of plan-act-observe-reflect take the research. While the methodology section of the dissertation proposal is the researcher’s best guess as to what will transpire in the field, in the dissertation, the doctoral student is writing up the actual evolution of the research. It is not uncommon, given these realities, that doctoral students will significantly rewrite what was originally written in the methodology section of the proposal for the dissertation. For the dissertation, students are writing a close account of what they actually did and the reasoning behind the methodological decisions they made.

Earlier, we warned against a flawed approach to action research, what we called the outsider within, where the fact that the doctoral student is both a researcher and an actor/participant in the research is ignored; doctoral students in these cases are, in essence, asked to take themselves out of the research and pretend that they are not part of the action or activity. Because it is our strong belief that this leads to a problematic and inappropriate framing of the research, we suggest that as the doctoral student is laying out the proposal, a key piece of this work is to think through the doctoral student’s multiple roles in the project—as researcher, as insider, perhaps as employee or facilitator, and so forth.

We suggest that this complexity of roles be brought into the research from the beginning and acknowledged rather than being rendered invisible. In the methodology section of the proposal, this complexity of roles is often addressed in a section regarding the researcher’s positionality; by this, we mean addressing the following: Who is the researcher to the research process? What is the researcher bringing in terms of roles, values, beliefs, and experiences? Is the researcher an insider to the research? An outsider? Somewhere on the continuum? Who is the researcher in terms of hierarchy and status? How do these multiple positions impact the research design and process? We suggest spending time making sense of these questions as they apply to the proposed research, and see this interrogation and documentation of self as the beginning of an ongoing task to be carried out throughout the research process.

Action research is characterized by its use of autobiographical data. If, for example, the research question is about their own professional practice or personal experience, researchers are clearly required to study themselves (Tenni, Smyth, & Boucher, 2003) or, if a researcher is the facilitator or instigator of a change process, part of the research documentation is the researcher’s roles, actions, and decisions. Because of this lived complex reality, keeping a research journal is a vital piece of any action research methodology; it is a chronicle of research decisions; a record of one’s own thoughts, feelings, and impressions; as well as a document reflecting the increased understanding that comes with the action research process. Beyond these, it is important to keep track of the ethical decisions made throughout the research process. As Reason and Bradbury (2001) suggest, “[T]he primary ‘rule’ in Action Research practice is to be aware of the choices one is making and their consequences” (p. xxvii); this “rule,” we would suggest, can at least in part be served by the keeping of a research journal that systematically records choices and their consequences for one’s self and others.

Chairs and committee members must be comfortable acknowledging the student’s multiple roles and suggesting appropriate epistemological and methodological approaches for the study, given this reality. Whereas, for example, action research may share with qualitative research some of the same data gathering techniques (interviews, content analysis of documents, etc.), this is not to be confused with being able to lift wholesale all the conventions of one research approach into another (e.g., consider validity criteria, as discussed in Chapter 4 ). Reason and Marshall (2001) suggest that in guiding the action research dissertation, faculty are asked to meet the student on multiple levels, not the least of which is the personal; professors are asked to help hold and honor the issues that emerge out of a student’s critical subjectivity with the idea that this material can be drawn into the creative process of the research. Action research is a messy, somewhat unpredictable process, and a key part of the inquiry is a recording of decisions made in the face of this messiness. Because of this, doctoral students often feel vulnerable about capturing all of this in detail for their dissertation committee members to read and—so they fear—judge. In the face of this vulnerability, students will need reassurance from their committee members that the “perfect” dissertation research is the one where a good faith effort and commitment to the learning process is paramount as the intricacies of action research are attempted for perhaps the first time by the researcher. Because students may also need or request active guidance as they make their way in an unfolding process, dissertation chairs should anticipate that supervising an action research dissertation is likely to be more intense and relational than it is for more traditional dissertations.

Because action researchers are so involved in the research process at multiple levels and in multiple roles, it is common for action researchers to utilize critical friends (Anderson et al., 2007), or a validation team, and write this into the research process. These are usually peers or colleagues, rather than dissertation committee members, willing to debrief with the researcher, collaboratively make meaning, as well as pose questions regarding how it is that a researcher “knows” what it is he or she knows. Critical friends often push researchers to another level of understanding because they ask researchers to make explicit what they may understand on a more tacit level. Action researchers, because of the intensity and longevity of the research process, can use critical friends as vital sounding boards, to help them step back or out of the research enough to more thoroughly understand what it is they are seeing and doing.

DESIGNING INSIDER ACTION RESEARCH

Even if the proposed research has the endorsement of the institution for which one works or is affiliated with, it is the rare situation in which the primary job of a doctoral student is to be an action researcher. In other words, most insider action researchers are doing the inquiry while continuing to carry the rest of their workloads. Few of us get released or paid to additionally pursue our research, even if it benefits the institutions for which we work. Because of this lived reality, the methodological approach to the data gathering needs to be researcher friendly; by this, we mean realistically doable, given the contexts and demands of our jobs.

In designing the action research project, one way to begin is to ask what is already known about the question or puzzle that is the focus of the inquiry. Institutions accumulate quite a paper trail, documenting through memos, statistical data, policy guides, external regulations, and the like—all of which can be analyzed in relationship to many of our research questions. Organizational mission statements are public documents and can also be utilized in comparing actual practices with an institution’s stated aims. An action researcher will want to first explore what data have already been generated that have relevance to the proposed inquiry. In addition, it is good to take a look at what limits, or bounds, possible interventions and inquiry. For example, decisions may have been made at other levels (e.g., World Bank, federal, or state) that put in place parameters or interventions that must be utilized to some degree. At the same time, there is often some latitude in these, and part of the task of the action researcher is to assess the “givens” and the “wiggle room.” All of this information helps frame the inquiry and provides the broad outline within which the action research takes place.

Not all the data that a researcher uses have to be newly generated when the inquiry is formally initiated. Remember, we stated earlier that insider action research often feels like it has no clear beginning, meaning it often has been embedded in the problem solving of a practitioner or institution for some time; now that the problem solving is being moved to the level of explicit research, the researcher will want to nest the methodological approach within data that have already been gathered or are available. So, the first question for the insider action researcher is this: What data are already available that have relevance for my study? The researcher can draw on both local knowledge, generated explicitly within the site of the study, as well as bigger data sets that document trends that might have relevance for the study getting under way. These are data for the researcher to access but not necessarily to generate.

A second question to ask is, What data are possible through the daily routines of work, things that the researcher does as part of the job? Since the research role is most often one that is in addition to the other things we do on the job, insider action researchers will want to take a hard look at the tasks they do, the routines they carry out, that can become part of data gathering if formally brought to that level of systematization. For example, record keeping in its various forms is always good to explore for its data-generating properties. Because time for research is always somewhat limited, the researcher will want to see where it is possible to piggyback on what the job requires and what can be simultaneously used as part of the data set. The following is Jackie Delong’s (2002) description of her database, gathered over a six-year period largely as part of her job. Delong was a superintendent of a school district in Canada when she wrote her dissertation under the supervision of Jack Whitehead at Bath University in England. Her dissertation, along with several others, is available on Whitehead’s website.

The research database, which includes some quantitative but, primarily, qualitative data, is extensive. It includes journals expressed as e-mails, case studies, audio and videotapes, transcripts of meetings and interviews, meeting minutes, surveys, reports and policy and procedure documents, print, video and electronic publications—mine and other’s, film and digital photographs, and validation responses and meetings. Over the six years, I have kept journals, daily and often more than once a day, of my activities and reflections by means of e-mails to Jack Whitehead. This was part of the dialogical process. I also have records of e-mails to other academics and professionals that serve to show the progress of various directions in my work and life. I have found that I need an audience for my thoughts as well as a respondent.

Over several months late in 2000, I read and reviewed and sifted and reflected on my collection of data spread over an old pool table extended via other surfaces. Visiting and revisiting the data has been essential to understanding because it is “difficult for the Action Researcher to grasp everything at once and data may need to be revisited in the light of new experiences” (James, 1999). I re-read and reflected on my narratives of school board amalgamation, supporting Action Research projects, creating the masters program in partnership with Brock University, my published writings and validation papers, my performance evaluations and looked with new eyes at the hundreds of photos I’d taken over the six years. (p. 283)

Having answered the questions—What data already exist, and what data do daily work routines generate?—the researcher can then begin to ask what data gathering needs to be explicitly added or generated for this particular research. This is the place where the researcher is choosing what can be realistically added to a workday in the name of the action research. While we are encouraging action researchers to be somewhat pragmatic in their data-gathering approaches, and are cognizant of the time constraints full-time employees face, at the same time, we firmly believe that good action research is also a relief in that the data generated—and the analysis—can help in working better. Action research, then, can be a trade-off of sorts, trading in daily practices that are not yielding as positive a result as hoped in the name of improved practices generated by the data.

Data analysis begins immediately and guides further data gathering and decision making. One tension for the insider researcher is that decisions for action must sometimes be made before the researcher has reached a thorough understanding of the data; this is particularly true if the research question is a collaborative one or one where decisions will be made by a designated group in the setting. In such cases, the researcher must choose whether to speak out based on what is already known through the research, albeit an unfinished analysis, or miss the opportunity entirely to influence the direction of unfolding practices and decisions. The realities and timelines of the practice setting often collide with the researcher’s desire for more time for reflection and meaning making. To be able to freeze-frame the whole endeavor while further analysis is pursued is not often a luxury offered to the action researcher; in part, one’s task is to speak out of what one has discovered thus far while holding the awareness that the data and analysis have more to offer than what one has currently had the chance to thoroughly explore. There are multiple layers to the data-analysis process: the initial meaning making, including some decisions regarding directions for interventions or actions; and then a revisiting of the data for a more thorough, holistic understanding. The latter analysis takes the researcher beyond the initial level of understanding. The following quote from Delong’s (2002) methodology chapter illustrates this holistic approach to data.

In my work, whether it be delegating a task to someone or committing to the process of accomplishing a task through a committee or project management team, I have to trust the process. I have frequently advised groups who are undertaking practitioner research to just let the action-reflection process, the journaling and dialogue with critical friends, and the writing and sharing happen, to trust the process. Amazing how difficult it is to take your own advice. I now know that I can trust the process. The actual writing, reflecting, dialoguing, revising, and revising again, has created my knowing. At the beginning of writing, I had masses of research data, a messy rummage of thoughts and ideas, confusion and chaos, and an excruciating need for order and clarity.

You would laugh if you could see the family/recreation room that I converted to a writing centre for the writing of this thesis. . . . There is no order or clarity here. The reason it works for me is that I am a holistic thinker and need the picture of the whole before I can deal with the pieces. It is one of the reasons I struggled with the learning of math in high school from very sequential teachers. I was thirty-five years old and an occasional teacher teaching classes of business math when I realized this. So having chart paper on the walls with timelines and themes and all my research data, books, publications and photos spread out visibly was an essential environment for me to write.

I wrote the thesis the same way that I live and work—with intensity. With the exception of short breaks such as walks, conversations with my friends and children, I usually wrote for eight to ten hours a day, weekends and holidays. I found an hour here and there was not productive. Because of the random nature of my thinking processes (Delong & Wideman, 1996), I usually worked on three or four documents on the computer screen at once plus the references page and the parking lot, and pulled a new one up as I found a connection to another. I would move back and forth between my data, the literature, thinking, writing, and revising.

I did not separate the literature search into a separate compartment as in the traditional academic search but engaged with the academic research as it came into the subject of the writing or triggered some critical judgments in my data analysis, synthesis and evaluation. . . . My train of thought being what it is, more like a moving target than a straight line, I kept a section at the end of each document called “Parking Lot.” As a new idea, memory, image, or connection would wash though my mind, I would “park” it in the parking lot and come back to it later. This process was similar to what Ron Wideman and I came up with as we worked on the book Action Research: School Improvement Through Research-Based Professionalism (1998b), only in that case to retain my random thoughts and to keep us on task I used post-it notes stuck on the table. This process of parking an idea or process is reflected in my life. When a project is not working, I park it until the constellation of factors that will make it come together emerge. (pp. 287–289)

DESIGNING OUTSIDER ACTION RESEARCH

Being an outsider in the action research process can still imply a wide range in terms of the researcher’s positionality and stance toward the research. Much depends on whether relationships are already established or the researcher is working to newly access possible participants, and the kinds of relationships the researcher seeks to establish. In Chapter 3 , drawing on the work of Cornwall (1996), we outlined a range of possible relationships between the outside researcher and the potential participants in the research. These relationships vary along a continuum in terms of who sets the agenda for the research and who are in decision-making roles. For researchers to locate themselves, we pose questions such as, Whose research question is it and where did it come from? How did the researcher come to be involved? Did the researcher initiate the research, or was he or she invited to participate by a local group? What kind of relationships does the researcher want to cultivate with others involved in the process? What are the goals of the research in terms of actions derived from it or as part of the process?

The answers to the questions posed above have repercussions in terms of the direction of the research methodology. As we discuss in Chapter 7 , doctoral students often go into their studies with a goal of being collaborative and sharing power. In our experience, the actual day-to-day negotiation of leadership and collaboration is one of the key challenges in the action research process. Students feel the pressure to guide the process without taking over in such a way that collaboration is jeopardized. If, for example, a researcher conceives of the research question and then designs an intervention with a group, the research question may not be organic to the group itself; in this case, the group cooperates with the researcher, contributing data, while also being involved in a process that could have repercussions for them. The researcher remains very much in charge of the research and change process and is working to cultivate goodwill with the group in the hope of their participation; at the same time, the researcher has something to offer the group in terms of the benefits to them from their participation. Variations on this could be where a researcher conceives of an intervention, such as participation in a support group, but works to cultivate joint leadership and design with the participants (e.g., see Maguire, 1993). These examples assume the researcher is not organic to the group under study, but is offering services or an intervention to them, perhaps for mutual benefit. Data gathering in these cases is documentation of the process and the outcomes. In addition, as stated previously, the researcher will want to keep track, through a researcher’s journal, of the various decisions made, self-reflections, and so forth. Data analysis takes place throughout the data-gathering process and informs the ongoing intervention.

As we have discussed previously, it is not uncommon for doctoral students to be part of a larger research or evaluation effort, perhaps funded by a grant or community group. Students, such as Mock (1999), discussed in Chapter 6 , often delineate a study within the larger study that is their piece for the dissertation research. In cases such as these, the doctoral student will want to have a sense of the overall data-gathering process and see how much of that is helpful for their dissertation piece; this will also let them get a sense of what other data they will specifically want to pursue. Students will also want to negotiate agreements early on as to the use of the larger data set and their access to it for dissertation and publication purposes; this is particularly important when students are perhaps employed for the larger research initiative—that is, as part of their jobs, they are to gather data that contributes to the larger project.

An outside researcher may be invited to participate in an initiative that insiders want to set in motion and study; often, the outsider offers expertise in research methods that the local community may or may not see as its expertise. In these kinds of studies, there are many variations of the working relationships: Insiders and outsiders both develop the research questions and the data-gathering methodologies; one group may have more say than the other or both have equal say; and the research addresses the goals of both or of the local group. See Chapter 3 and Bartunek and Louis (1996) for a fuller accounting of these possibilities.

A careful negotiating and establishing of trusted relationships is probably the key ingredient in building a research endeavor that works for all involved. For the researcher wanting to use this kind of arrangement for dissertation purposes, it is imperative that issues such as who owns the data and who can disseminate findings and conclusions be negotiated upfront and early on. This is even more complicated if the doctoral student is being employed as an outside consultant for purposes of conducting the research. Ideally, the “research addresses the goals of both parties” (Bartunek & Louis, 1996, p. 25)—that is, it serves the needs of the community seeking the action research, and doctoral students see a melding of these goals with those of their own research.

Early on in the working relationship, time primarily must go to framing the focus of the research and agreeing on the research questions. This is done on at least two levels: listening intently to community concerns and issues that will be addressed through the action research, and then, in this context, framing the doctoral student’s research questions. These may or may not be the same. For example, doctoral students assisting with the action research of others may be interested in documenting the realities of forging these kinds of working relationships. This study, then, is a study within the larger action research and may depend primarily on the researcher’s journal and the gathering of others’ impressions of how the working together evolved. Or, perhaps a doctoral student is working with a community to assess the needs of youth and the effectiveness of community organizations and interventions already in place. Within this large research agenda, it is possible to delineate a strand of study of particular interest to the doctoral student, perhaps through focusing on a particular population—girls or a certain age group or parents’ concerns. The data gathered will address both the larger action research study as well as the piece that is the focus for the student’s dissertation. Methodologically, then, doctoral students are helping to design the larger research endeavor as well as their own dissertation research.

THE LITERATURE REVIEW: LITERATURE IN DIALOGUE WITH THE DATA

In action research, there is a conceptual framework that guides the data gathering and analysis, as well as a conceptual framework embedded in one’s particular approach to action research. The former is guided by the literature that has been reviewed and the latter by the knowledge interests of the research (Habermas, 1971) discussed in Chapter 2 . Usually, these frameworks will be compatible in the sense that more utilitarian, functionalist theoretical frameworks usually follow from a technical knowledge interest. More constructivist, interactionist frameworks follow from a practical knowledge interest. And an emancipatory knowledge interest will usually lead to neo-Marxist, feminist, and critical race theories. Most PAR has an emancipatory knowledge interest, whereas, for instance, much action research aimed at organizational development has some combination of a technical and practical knowledge interest. But in the latter, our experience is that part of the work with organizational development is to gather data previously unacknowledged or unrecognized, which has the potential to expose how seemingly neutral practices privilege some and disenfranchise others (Anderson et al., 2007; Johnson & Avelar La Salle, 2010). Given this, apparent practical knowledge interests are reconsidered and the literature is realigned with these more emancipatory aims.

We made the case earlier that the methodology will continue to develop and shift as the researcher pursues the spirals of action research. We suggest that the literature drawn on for the study will develop as the researcher grows into a deeper understanding of the issues under study. Typically, action research is pursued with iterative cycles of plan-act-observe-reflect (Lewin, 1948); this process is done in relation to a larger body of literature that helps illuminate the findings, deepen the understanding, and perhaps suggest directions for the next iteration. We see a dialogue of sorts taking place between the researcher’s growing observations and data, and what others have written and understood about similar questions or contexts. The end result should be that the data analysis is pushed by relevant literature, and the literature should be extended through the contribution of this action research. This latter point is important to underscore, because action research has often been seen as solely a contribution to local knowledge and practice rather than to the knowledge bases of the various disciplines.

Researchers should expect that as the cycles of research illuminate the issues being studied, new literature will be incorporated as part of this growing understanding. We find that, typically, there is a sense of unearthing the real issues or questions for study, and this often leads researchers to read in directions that they had not previously anticipated. Analysis of the data should be ongoing, as should the review of the literature. As with the methodology section, the literature review from the proposal phase is expected to shift and change when written up for the dissertation.

WRITING THE DISSERTATION

While much of action research can be collaborative, signified by intense, ongoing relationships, the actual writing of a dissertation—action research or otherwise—is typically an individual undertaking. It is also not unusual that the same participants who are quite involved in the decision making and meaning making throughout the research process, who have posed questions that are of vital interest to them, may not be interested in writing up the project for public dissemination or as a contribution to the larger literature. This occurs partly because the rewards for the hard work of writing and disseminating the knowledge gained through the inquiry more typically follow an academic career than that of a practitioner or community member; specifically, in the case of writing up dissertation research, the motive for the doctoral student is clear, while not so obvious for other participants in the inquiry process. What is not uncommon, though, is a form of member checking (Lincoln & Guba, 1985), where doctoral students present back to the research community the understandings they have come to in the research process. This is commonly done as an ongoing process throughout the research, based on an ongoing analysis that can help guide future actions and research decisions. It is easily folded into the ongoing reflective component of action research, where one is assessing where the efforts thus far have taken the research. While member checking is not to be understood necessarily as gaining community approval, at the same time, it recognizes that the process is a collective endeavor. The final written product can only be enriched and made more complex by accounting for varying perspectives based on stakeholders’ various positions in the research endeavor. Ultimately, though, it is the doctoral student’s understanding that is presented and defended to the academic community.

Because of the ongoing nature of action research, it may not be possible to write up the whole undertaking, but rather just a piece of the understanding or intervention that has come about through the inquiry. The doctoral student may be well aware that the inquiry continues to unfold but may make the decision to write up just a part of it for the dissertation. It is not that the research is finished; rather, the doctoral student bounds it for purposes of the dissertation. This results in a document that is essentially an accounting of the research thus far.

Battaglia (1995), a staff developer for a large, inner-city school district in western New York, discusses her struggles with writing her dissertation and subsequent publications from it.

About midway through this project, I wrote a journal entry where I described Action Research as being “confused, but on a higher level and about more important things!” As I documented the events and the thinking of this project in preparation for publication, I realized that there was much truth in that statement. As I write, I find that my attempt to distill experience into words is frustrating, difficult, trying, and agonizing. One fails more than one succeeds. The words that come and offer themselves as expressions never quite seem to capture my experiences. The experiences always seem just beyond the reach of words. And yet, words are the tools we use as the primary means of expressing experience. It is a challenge, and one that I know is never completely met. My words are, therefore, always provisional, incomplete, partial. (p. 90)

Many students find that they echo Battaglia’s sentiments. It is difficult to step back from a project with which one has been intricately involved and now distill these experiences into some kind of manageable form for the page. Issues of representation are challenging since the document needs to present the researcher’s experiences, involvement and changes as well as those of others and the site. In contrast with other dissertation research, the action researcher is writing from an “us” perspective rather than about “them.”

Some have asked whether action research studies have findings, since reports of action research often tend to focus more on process. Students should not be surprised to have committee members unfamiliar with action research ask, “So, what are your findings?” Here, the implication is often that they want a concise explanation presented as propositional knowledge of the findings. The idea that knowledge—even in the social sciences—converges on findings has been challenged repeatedly. Lindblom (1995) argues that social science research “often moves toward divergence rather than convergence, toward identifying a bevy of possible scenarios rather than one or a few propositions that social scientists might judge to have won a degree of acceptability” (p. 172). This appears to be especially true for action research and has important implications for how findings are reported in dissertations. We are suggesting that solid action research leads to a deepened understanding of the question posed as well as to more sophisticated questions. The findings should demonstrate this kind of deepened understanding, but how the researcher wants to represent them is more open. As the researcher is immersed in the analysis of the data, he or she simultaneously wants to be asking what is the most effective means of representing what has been found. The researcher also wants to take into account the audience for the findings (practitioners, policy makers, etc.) and a style of representation that speaks to those being addressed. Qualitative researchers, especially those who do qualitative evaluation studies, have perfected ways to report findings to decision makers that both preserves some sense of the thick description of the setting and provides useful findings (see Patton, 1996, 2001).

Because of the link in action research between the generation of knowledge and social change, many researchers have turned to alternative mediums for the dissemination of knowledge beyond the immediate site. For instance, increasingly, action research dissertations include a video component. Asten (1993) provides an example of such a dissertation.

This dissertation is an interrelated filmed/written ethnographic study of four lesbian families living in American society. The purpose of this research is to examine intimate relationships within lesbian families. There are two parts to the study: (1) the production of an ethnographic film through participant observation and feminist participatory research; and (2) a written analysis/report to accompany the film. This study considers lesbian families from an insider’s point of view, and asks several different questions. How are relationships within a lesbian family formed and how do they function? How is “family” defined for these particular four lesbian families? What are the special concerns and/or problems for lesbian families? What are the positive things each person gains from growing up in a lesbian family? What shapes do motherhood and parenthood take in a lesbian family? There are four ethnographic stories within the video. The first story examines a single lesbian mother and her two teenage children. The focus of this story is on the relationship between the mother and her children, the ex-partners and how they have impacted the children, and the children’s view on growing up with a lesbian parent. The second story examines the co-parent and her interactions with the children, her partner and the ex-husband. The third story examines the relationships between the biological mother, her oldest daughter and the mother’s partner. The fourth story examines the couple’s relationship, how they feel about each other and their motherhood, their relationship with their daughter, and the concept of a child having two moms. Finally, this study demonstrates how the use of video can be integrated with the written word to produce scholarly material, so that a visual as well as a written language for lesbian families can begin to take shape. (p. 4)

The participatory study described in the next chapter (Mock, 1999) also included a video component. Researchers and community members created videos of interviews with community leaders to use internally for future professional development. The use of videos will require additional permissions from participants and institutional research board (IRB) approval.

DEFENDING THE DISSERTATION

The dissertation defense is an important ritual of academic life that varies somewhat from campus to campus. Most dissertation defenses are open to the public, and therefore it is appropriate for the participants of a dissertation study to attend. Some believe that a dissertation defense is strictly an academic exercise between the student and his or her dissertation committee and not a participatory venue. They argue that there are other, more appropriate forums for sharing or negotiating findings with participants of action research studies. Some participants might attend for moral support, but would not want to participate in the questions or discussion.

Another view is that the defense of the dissertation is a good litmus test of how participatory the research has been or, at least, to what extent participants feel they are portrayed evenhandedly. Even students who have had minimal collaboration with participants should have engaged in member checking throughout the research process and certainly well before a dissertation defense—that is, participants should be presented with the study’s findings and have an opportunity to provide feedback.

In more participatory studies, the findings are seldom a surprise to participants. In fact, participants who have attended dissertation defenses have been known to jump to the student’s defense if he or she is questioned harshly by committee members. In such cases, participants feel a sense of ownership in the dissertation even if they did not participate in the written product. Once again, the decision of how to structure the defense of an action research dissertation will depend on how participatory the study was and how open the dissertation committee is to having participants formally involved in the process. Some committees view the defense of the dissertation as largely a celebration that occurs once everyone has agreed it is in final form. Others see the defense as providing final feedback with the real possibility that major revisions may yet need to be done. The local culture of the university and committee concerning the function of the defense will also determine how it is structured. Typically, faculty set aside between one and two hours for a dissertation defense, and thus an elaborate participatory panel, while desirable, may not be practical in many cases. Scheduling the defense becomes problematic as not only faculty but also participants must be available at the same time. Such a panel would be an excellent way to demonstrate democratic validity as well as provide a venue that is congruent with the spirit of most action research approaches, and should be pursued where feasible.

UNIT 5

Top of Form