Action research orientation

Action research was a formative influence in my engagement as a practitioner researcher. It is an orientation rather than a method in itself, embracing extensive, flexible, eclectic and multifaceted methods. Action research (Reason, 2003b) is congruent with the pragmatic framing of this inquiry:

“it is an approach to human inquiry concerned with developing practical

knowing through participatory, democratic process in the pursuit of worthwhile human purposes, drawing on many ways of knowing in an emergent, development fashion.” [sic] (Reason, 2003b, p.108)

Action research can be situated within a range of theoretical and philosophical perspectives including technical scientific and positivist, collaborative and interpretivist, and critical and emancipatory (Whitelaw et al., 2003). Through the metamorphosis of this inquiry I gravitated towards the latter. The emancipatory potential to empower participants through the process of constructing and using their own knowledge has its antecedents in the work of critical theorists, in particular Habermas’s theory of communicative action (Kemmis, 2001). The historical origins of action research are traced back to the social psychologist Lewin and his social change process in tackling discriminatory racial practices in the 1940s (Carr and Kemmis, 1986, Hart and Bond, 1995).

Early drafts of my doctoral research proposal envisaged a collaborative inquiry with other homeopaths. With funding from the University of Westminster’s Educational Initiative Centre, I set up an educational action research project in collaboration with homeopathy clinic tutors at the University of Westminster. We set out to investigate our shared clinic based teaching as a peer supervision group using action learning (Supervision through Action Research (STAR). STAR (2002-2005) enabled me to develop facilitation and action research skills. As an arena for critical dialogue between homeopaths, STAR provided the opportunity to inquire into the nature of professional knowledge and with the permission of participants, a source of professional experiential data. The clinic tutors are experienced homeopaths and as teachers able to articulate theories in practice. Opportunistic sampling, congruent with action research, was used to inquire into existing practice to bring about change through the research process.

Action learning sets (Johnson 2003, McGill & Beaty 1995, Pedlar 1992) of up to four clinic tutors, collaborated together over a number of sessions. Each clinic tutor had the opportunity, through observation, reflection and sharing with others, to make sense of an experience from practice based teaching, with the intention of transforming practice (Kolb, 1984, Pedlar, 1992, McGill and Beaty, 1995). The process employs double-loop learning to challenge the assumptions and ‘givens’ of daily teaching practice. This creates the potential for new understanding of the discipline, of self and personal values (Argyris and Schön, 1974). Narrated experiences from the University Polyclinic provided foci for shared inquiry into practice. As experienced reflective practitioners, a spiral structure of inquiry was familiar territory. Each cycle consisted of phases of planning, action and evaluation of that action and its impact. Data was generated through recording dialogue in group debriefing sessions, identifying emergent themes and sharing reflective writing. To analyse group debriefing transcripts I initially experimented with phenomenology (Husserl, 1970, van Manen, 1990, Munhall, 1994) and this was revealing about how knowledge and experience are constituted. The phenomenological notion of adopting an ‘objective stance’ by bracketing out my own experiences was unsustainable. In bracketing I tried to ignore my own experiences as a teacher and homeopath. This was inconsistent with placing my experiences centre stage in a reflexive inquiry. In abandoning the phenomenological approach, I adopted a simple model of thematic analysis to inform the cycles of reflection and action (Denscombe, 2007).

Before completing this section, I evaluate the STAR experience. You may consider this to be out of place in a ‘methods’ chapter, but as experience of action research has a formative role, it is important to explain how this has shaped the inquiry. The most significant learning arose from grappling with how to conceptualise and inquire into tacit knowledge. Initially I was looking to expose what is embedded in routine daily practice. Gradually conceptualisation shifted to

STAR (2002-2005) objectives:

 to create a structured opportunity for reflection to inquire into shared practice in the teaching clinic

 to integrate reflective awareness into our practice based teaching

 to support peer learning and sharing of expertise

perceiving a constitutive role of language in generating our view of reality and sense of identity. Taking this perspective enables me not to look at homeopathic practice as a reality existing somewhere out there, but to examine how it is created through the homeopaths’ reflective engagement and dialogue within a supervisory framework.

Whilst action researchers are critical of the passive role created for research subjects in other research approaches, we must question whether we achieved a participatory inquiry (Whitelaw et al., 2003). Relinquishing the power invested in the role of researcher is difficult. Despite the researcher’s best intentions, inequalities persist in the perception of the other participants. I was caught in a fix between what I perceived to be colleagues’ expectations of a more proactive facilitator and not wishing to contaminate the experiential data from a phenomenological view point. As the facilitator and originator of the project, the group looked to me for direction and to facilitate the group dynamics. I was reluctant to take on these roles, and this seemed to have a negative impact on the empowerment of the group. Whilst we all contributed reflective writing, I am cognisant that in co-ordinating the textual representation of STAR I took on the role as narrator. This could only be a partial representation of the collective experience.

Arguably action research has an idealist rhetoric and the literature does not support its claims to a transformatory and unique approach (Whitelaw et al., 2003). There is an assumption that the inquiry process generates developmental and educational benefit. Clinic tutors, collectively and individually, identified ways that the STAR experience had contributed to personal learning and changed practice. But was participation in STAR a transformatory experience? On a personal note, STAR represented my metamorphosis into the research role, particularly as it created a co-research environment that is more typical of research than the sole endeavour of my doctoral studies. Whilst the clinic tutors’ accounts give examples of transformed practice (see Analysis of professional experiential data sections in Part two), these were unavoidably influenced by the perceived expectations of the facilitator.

To complete this section, I invite you to explore links between action research and reflexivity. Rolfe (1998) uses the term “reflexive action research” to describe the practitioner researcher’s participation in their own inquiry. This is a problem orientated approach facilitating personal learning with each cycle informing the next. I place greater emphasis on multiple perspectives, multiple narratives and an unfolding inquiry. To cultivate the critical edge, I experiment with participant observation at seminars, conferences and continuing professional development workshops (see Professional experiential data in Part two of the thesis). This is informed by Marshall’s (2001) self-reflective inquiry process.

6.3.2 Critical discourse analysis

Whilst action research and reflexivity are most influential within the analytical strategies, critical discourse analysis plays a more subtle role. Discourse analysis is a generic term spanning a range of analytical approaches across academic disciplines as diverse as linguistics, semiotics, cultural studies, social psychology and social research. It offers an examination of

“how institutions and individual subjects are formed, produced, given meaning, constructed and represented through particular configurations of knowledge” (Freshwater, 2007, p.111).

There is no intention to navigate its competing and contested literature (Fairclough, 1992, Widdowson, 2004), nor to examine one of its methodological approaches in any depth. Our interaction is limited to drawing on a number of the conceptual devices used with the aim of showing how these are used to enhance reflexivity. This section offers a superficial dialogue with critical discourse analysis, in particular interaction with Widdowson’s (2004) critique of critical discourse analysis.

Critical discourse analysis provides an analytical framework appropriate for the foregrounding of textual sources in this inquiry. The term ‘text’ is generally used to indicate a whole range of word based records. In this inquiry texts include reflective writing, transcripts, research papers, books and leaflets. The most significant sources of data are professional homeopathic experiences narrated in reflective accounts, fictional dialogue and participant observation field notes. The use of the term ‘text’ is based on appreciating that language does not merely reflect reality but has a constitutive role in generating perspectives and identities. Critical discourse analysis is congruent with the social constructionist view of practice as social practice and context bound, and not dependent on empirical correspondence with notions of objectivity (Burr, 1995). Like all modes of data collection, reflective writing frames and creates experiences. Reflective writing has its own codes and rhetoric, and creates practice knowledge amidst many competing articulations. We revisit reflective writing as a source of creating knowledge in the next chapter.

The field of critical discourse analysis and the use of the term ‘discourse’ are interdisciplinary and open to a range of context-dependent interpretations. The term ‘discourse’ can be defined as a

“set of rules or assumptions for organising and interpreting the subject matter of an academic discipline or field of study” (Freshwater, 2007, p.111).(Freshwater, 2007)

Discourses are characterised by distinctive language, symbols and means of dissemination (Freshwater and Rolfe, 2004, p.29). The term ‘discourse’ has been strongly influenced by the philosopher Michel Foucault’s concept of the “discourse of power”, to describe the covert functioning of authority through social practices (Foucault, 1977, Cheek, 2004). Power and ideology are expressed through the hierarchies of discourses, creating historically and culturally specific subject positions and notions of individualism, that carry certain rights to speak and specification on what can be spoken. Dominant discourses create the norm and by default, define the deviant (Freshwater and Rolfe, 2004). A clear example is the dominance of biomedical discourse in shaping our experiences of illness and our role as patients. The authority of discourse is manifested through:

“language use anchored in an institutional context, expressing a fairly structured understanding or a line of reasoning with active, productive effects on the phenomenon it claims to understand ‘neutrally’’’

A key perspective in critical discourse analysis is ‘deconstructing’ the text, where the authority of the reader takes precedence over the expertise of the author (Barthes, 1977, Derrida, 1978). This involves examining texts to reveal how individual subjects or institutions are located in relation to language, ideology and power. There is no fixed meaning to be ‘read off’ the text, but rather the text is open to multiple activities to include; what is going on in the margins, hidden agenda, hints at what was unintended, assumptions, contradictions, what is absent or obscured, tensions, slippage between concepts, speculating on reasons why, and uncertainties. Deconstruction is not confined to the text itself and considers intertextual and contextual relationships. Deconstruction pays particular attention to the way that multiple meanings are used selectively to steer the text in a specific direction. Deconstruction is a process of turning things upside down, whereby the oppressed becomes dominant. This is significant for homeopathic practice, as it is located on the margins of healthcare and subject to repeated attempts by voices of authority within the medical profession to define homeopathy outside the boundaries of acceptable medical practice.

To explore in more depth how critical discourse analysis enriches the reflexivity of this inquiry, I turn to Widdowson’s (2004) critique of critical discourse analysis. Widdowson writes with brevity and clarity that is often absent from the dense literature of critical discourse analysis, but this is not the only reason for selecting his text. He emphasises the workings of discourse through texts and the role of contextual issues. I also detect a degree of pragmatism informing his approach that loosely fits with the emerging philosophical framing of this inquiry.

Let us start by considering the linguistic components of texts. Widdowson (2004, p.14) proposes that a sentence is ‘the overt linguistic trace of a process of negotiating the passage of intended meaning’. By referring to “negotiated” and “intended” Widdowson draws attention to the social role of language. A pragmatic view point is evident in his description of text that “exists as a symptom of pragmatic intent” (Widdowson, 2004, p.14). He describes the relationship between text and discourse as “a text can only be meaningful as a text when we recognise it as a product of the discourse process” (Widdowson, 2004, p.34). Internal co-textual relations within a text can be differentiated from external contextual relations that are brought to bear in creating meaning of the text. Terms ‘pretext’, ‘pretexual assumptions’ and ‘pretextual purpose’ (2004, p.87) are used to convey that the way we read a text is inevitably informed by our social purpose and shared values. He argues that analysis is always selective and partial, as it is impossible to pay attention to all textual features and the complex of co-textual features. He criticises the tendency in discourse analysis to offer a single, all embracing interpretation of the text, without acknowledgement of the text’s context and the motivations for conducting the analysis.

Widdowson distances himself from critical discourse analysts who concentrate on semantic understanding by arguing that:

“Interpretation is the process of deriving a discourse from a text and will always be a function of the relationship between text, context and pretext.

Any text has the semantic potential to mean many things, and which meaning gets pragmatically realised depends on how these other factors come into play.”(Widdowson, 2004, p.35)

To reiterate, Widdowson assists me towards reflexivity by drawing attention to the workings of discourse through text, how contextual and pretextual factors influence our interpretations, and the inevitability of offering partial interpretations.