Action research is a participatory form of inquiry. In simple terms, action research is a process that involves people in directly researching their own social situations. It arises from practical questions, and is characterised by the interlinking of action and reflection in order to investigate and improve practice, solve problems, and develop knowledge (Altrichter, Posch, & Somekh, 1993; Kember, 2000; McNiff & Whitehead, 2005). According to Reason and Bradbury (2001):
Action research is a participatory, democratic process concerned with developing practical knowing in the pursuit of worthwhile human purposes, grounded in a participatory worldview … It seeks to bring together action and reflection, theory and practice, in participation with others, in the pursuit of practical solutions to issues of pressing concern to people, and more generally the flourishing of individual persons and their communities (p. 1).
Action research developed out of the work of Lewin in the 1940s (McNiff, 2002; Reason & Bradbury, 2001; Zeichner, 2001). Lewin developed and applied his theory in a series of community related studies in social psychology. The central tenets of Lewin’s work were the ideas of group decision-making and commitment to improvement. Lewin was aware of the potential of democratic practice for both self- determination and social engineering, and he argued that in order to understand and change social practices, practitioners from the real social world should be included in all stages of an inquiry (Kemmis & McTaggart, 1988; McNiff, 2002). Lewin developed a theory of action research comprising a spiral of steps, each of which is composed of planning, fact-finding (or reconnaissance), execution, and evaluating the result of the action (Lewin, 1946; McNiff, 2002). Lewin’s work focused on organisational cultures, but he did not address wider social and political issues.
In the 1950s, Corey (1949, 1953) brought action research into the field of education. Corey emphasised the importance of educational practitioners conducting their own research in order to improve their actions, and he believed that the possible contribution of action research to the improvement of educational practices had been seriously underestimated. Corey saw action research as a more exact, objective, and scientific form of teachers’ everyday efforts to improve their practice. He believed that rigorous and systematic data collection could produce dependable and
appropriate evidence, which could then be tested against understanding of both classroom culture and educational theory. Corey emphasised the importance of incorporating the ideas, attitudes, and interests of the participants in order to make research projects more meaningful and authentic, and to increase the likelihood of their findings being acted upon (Corey, 1949, 1953). Corey was concerned with issues at the school and classroom level, and he did not consider the implications of political, social, cultural, and systemic influences on teachers and their work.
Stenhouse, in the 1970s, developed the idea of the “teacher as a researcher” (McNiff, 2002; Zeichner, 2001). Stenhouse believed that pedagogical change was dependent on teachers’ capacities for reflection. Through their work in the Humanities Curriculum Project in the 1970s, Stenhouse and Elliott developed the idea of teachers as researchers further, into that of “teachers as action researchers.” The project team attempted to encourage teachers to experiment with teaching strategies and to reflect on the difficulties that they encountered. Their research approach was interpretive, but the researchers had more power in the research process than the teachers they worked with (McNiff, 2002). According to Elliott (1991) it was not possible to satisfactorily resolve the issue of how to facilitate autonomous reflective practice, because the experimental action strategies and self-training procedures had been structured according to the project team’s understanding of pedagogy. As a consequence, the project team developed “an important conceptual distinction between the ‘research role of the outsider’ in relation to the ‘research role of the insider practitioner’ and contrasted the first-order inquiry of the teachers with the second-order inquiry of the central team” (Elliott, 1988, p. 32).
This distinction became a major focus of the action research literature of the 1970s, and was further developed in the Ford Teaching Project. The project had a central team of two academics, Elliott and Adelman, who worked with more than forty teachers in twelve schools in conducting action research into the problems associated with the implementation of inquiry and discovery teaching methods in their classrooms (Elliott, 1991; McNiff, 2002; Zeichner, 2001). Elliott believed that the “teachers’ increasingly active involvement in collecting, sharing, and discussing data changed the pedagogical theories underpinning their practices” (1991, p. 35). Elliott claimed that Lewin’s action research model was limited in that it was based on the
assumption “that a ‘general idea’ could be fixed in advance, that ‘reconnaissance’ is merely fact finding, and that ‘implementation’ is a fairly straightforward process” (Elliott, 1991, p. 70). Elliott believed that the general idea should be allowed to shift, by revision at the beginning of each cycle. He believed that implementation of an action step is not always straightforward, and that it is necessary to monitor the extent to which it has been implemented before an attempt is made to evaluate the effects.
The developing interest in teachers as reflective practitioners in the 1980s was in part underpinned by the work of Schon (1983). Schon’s work related to developing professionalism through reflective practice, and it led to deeper understanding of reflective processes. Schon (1987) perceived difficulties when professional skills become tacit and automatic. He believed that new learning develops only when professionals are able to reflect on their tacit knowledge. As discussed in the previous chapter this requires professionals to be able to engage not only in reflection-on- action, which involves thinking back over practice in a systematic or deliberate way, but also in reflection-in-action, which involves revising personal constructs of teaching and learning while engaged in practice (Schon, 1983, 1987).
During the 1980s Habermas’ theory of critical social science had a strong influence on the development of ideas related to action research (Carr & Kemmis, 1986). In Australia, academics from Deakin University were particularly interested in the critical theory movement and developed a critical-emancipatory approach to action research. Carr and Kemmis’ (1986) Becoming Critical: Education, Knowledge and Action Research remains a highly influential text for educational researchers, and it is regarded as a seminal work in its field. Carr and Kemmis contend that teachers must establish communities of critical action researchers by progressively involving students and other members of school communities in the collaborative enterprise of self-reflection. Kemmis built upon Lewin’s original conceptualisation of action research. He developed a model of the action research process that follows a self- reflective spiral of planning, acting, observing, reflecting, and re-planning, as the basis for understanding how to take action to improve an educational situation (Kemmis & McTaggart, 1988).
3.2.1 The action research process
Action research is generally considered to be a process involving a spiral of self- reflective cycles of:
• Planning a change,
• acting and observing the process and consequences of the change,
• reflecting on these processes and consequences, and then
• re-planning, and so forth (Kemmis & McTaggart, 2000; Kemmis & Wilkinson, 1998).
Most action research projects go through two or more cycles in an iterative process. However, as in the present study, action research is more than a mechanical sequence of steps, and the process is often not as neat as the spiral of cycles might suggest. The stages frequently overlap, and initial plans often become obsolete or redundant in the light of learning from experience. The process is fluid, open, and responsive. The measure of success is not whether the steps in the process have been followed faithfully, but whether there has been development in the participants’ understandings and practice (Kemmis & McTaggart, 2000; Kemmis & Wilkinson, 1998). Action research is frequently an untidy process, because the issues being investigated are often poorly defined. Projects often have many strands that have to be organised and tidied into a linear form. According to Cook (1998) the process of writing up action research transforms “bumbling change supported retrospectively by theories” (p. 99) into something that appears clear and logical in written form.
3.2.2 Types of action research
There is a great deal of literature on action research, in which the classification of various types or approaches differs from author to author. Henry and McTaggart (1996) claim, “action research is a term which is used (and misused) to cover a myriad of activities” (p. 6). A number of authors (e.g., Kemmis & McTaggart, 2000; Hendricks, 2006) discuss several approaches to educational action research, including classroom action research, critical action research, collaborative action research, and participatory action research. Each of these approaches is briefly summarised below.
Classroom action research
Classroom action research involves teachers in collecting data in their own classrooms in order to make judgements about how to improve their own practice. It is associated with the use of qualitative, interpretive methods of inquiry, and has a practical emphasis (Cardno, 2003; Hendricks, 2006; Henry & McTaggart, 1996; Kemmis & McTaggart, 2000). Classroom action research places particular value on the interpretations that teachers make, based on data that they have collected with their own students (Hendricks, 2006).
Critical action research
Critical action research has a commitment to bring together broad social analyses of the use of discourse and power and the collective self-study of practice, in order to initiate action to improve situations. The aim is to reveal the injustices and disempowerment in industrialized societies that are attributable to social class, ethnicity and gender (Cardno, 2003; Hendricks, 2006; Henry & McTaggart, 1996; Kemmis & McTaggart, 2000). Critical action research is undertaken by mixed groups of participants, including university researchers, teachers and principals, and community members, who may seek assistance from others to initiate and sustain changes and improvements. It has been criticised for bringing radical ideology and academic discourse into social settings and for making participants dependent on radical theorists for emancipation and reform (Kemmis & McTaggart, 2000). Although critical emancipatory action research projects are described in a number of publications, (e.g., Kemmis & Grundy, 1997), the degree to which the teachers involved in such projects have actually been engaged at the critical emancipatory level has been questioned (Zeichner, 2001).
Collaborative action research
A number of authors (e.g., Arhar, Holly, & Kasten, 2001; Day, 1999; Elliott, 1991; Grundy, 1998; Hendricks, 2006; MacPherson, Aspland, Elliott, Proudford, Shaw, & Thurlow, 1998; Salzman, Snodgrass, & Mastrobuono, 2002; Wells, 2001) use the term collaborative action research to specifically refer to research partnerships between teachers and teacher educators. Collaborative action research involves teachers and teacher educators conducting research collaboratively in school and classroom settings, investigating real world issues and problems related to school
administration and classroom practice, and providing sustained assistance to teachers in order to improve teaching and student learning (Hendricks, 2006; Zorfass & Keefe Rivero, 2005). One of the goals of collaborative action research is to encourage dialogue between educational stakeholders in different settings (Hendricks, 2006).
Participatory action research
In recent years, in recognition of the practical and theoretical convergences between collaborative action research and the broader participatory research paradigm, researchers have used the term participatory action research to describe their work (Hendricks, 2006; Kemmis & McTaggart, 2000; Kidd & Kral, 2005). Participatory action research is a social and collaborative process that involves researchers and participants working together, developing goals and methods, gathering and analysing data, and implementing the results in ways that raise critical consciousness and promote change in the lives of those involved. It may involve an emphasis on emancipatory change at sociocultural and structural levels (Fals Borda, 1991; Kemmis & McTaggart, 2000; Kidd & Kral, 2005). Participatory action research engages people, either individually or collectively, in examining their own understandings, skills, and values, and the ways in which they interpret themselves and their actions in the social and material world (Kember, 2000; Kemmis & Wilkinson, 1998).
Participatory action research examines changes in organisations, in social relationships, in activities and practices, and in language and discourse. Participants work together to explore the ways in which their practices are shaped by wider cultural, political and economic structures, and deliberately set out to contest and to liberate themselves from the irrational, inefficient, unproductive, unjust, unsatisfying, or alienating (Hendricks, 2006; Kemmis & McTaggart, 2000; Kemmis & Wilkinson, 1998). Habits, customs, precedents, traditions, control structures, and bureaucratic routines are investigated in order to identify the contradictory and the irrational (Kemmis & Wilkinson, 1998). Participatory action research allows teachers to examine their purposes and intentions in teaching, and to develop new knowledge while engaging in the deliberate and systematic study of their own classroom practice. It allows teachers to clarify their individual beliefs and understandings by making their assumptions explicit (Kember, 2000; Kemmis & McTaggart, 1988).
The present study began when I initiated a collaborative action research project with two classroom teachers. I initiated the project, as an outside facilitator, in order to investigate both the effects of the participating teachers’ knowledge, skills, and thinking on their classroom practice, and the effects of classroom-based reflective professional development on that classroom practice. At the beginning the project was predominantly researcher driven, but as the study progressed the participants became more empowered as researchers and more involved in the action research process. By the final action research cycle, when there was a much greater sense of shared participation and ownership, the study had developed into a more participatory action research approach .