The Palgrave International Handbook of Action Research

902 Pages·2017·11.87 MB·English

by  Lonnie L. Rowell

THE PALGRAVE
INTERNATIONAL HANDBOOK
OF ACTION RESEARCH
Edited by Lonnie L. Rowell, Catherine D. Bruce,
Joseph M. Shosh, & Margaret M. Riel
The Palgrave International Handbook of Action
Research
Lonnie L. Rowell • Catherine D. Bruce • Joseph M. Shosh • Margaret M. Riel
Editors
The Palgrave
International
Handbook of Action
Research
Editors
Lonnie L. Rowell Catherine D. Bruce
School of Leadership & Education School of Education
Sciences Trent University
University of San Diego Peterborough, Ontario, Canada
San Diego, California, USA
Margaret M. Riel
Joseph M. Shosh Center for Collaborative Action Research
Education Department Pepperdine University
Moravian College Los Angeles, California, USA
Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, USA
ISBN 978-1-137-44108-9 ISBN 978-1-137-40523-4 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-40523-4
Library of Congress Control Number: 2016956412
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017
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This handbook is dedicated to the ancestors—biological, spiritual, and
intellectual—who have guided the lives and work of all those involved in
the production of this volume. In particular, we wish to acknowledge our
gratitude and abiding affection and respect for the following individuals,
whom we miss but continue to draw inspiration from: Orlando Fals Borda,
Paulo Freire, Eduardo Flores-Kastanis, Myles Horton, Kurt Lewin, and Susan
Noffke. We also dedicate the handbook to the memory of Dr. Martha Farrell
of the Participatory Research in Asia (PRIA) network, based in India, who
was killed in a terrorist attack in Kabul in May 2015 while participating
in meetings to support the education and empowerment of women in
Afghanistan. May we take comfort in knowing that her spirit, along with the
spirits of all those we recognize in this dedication, lives on.
This book is also dedicated to new and future action researchers who continue
to press for social justice around the globe in the wide range of contexts and
challenges that we face in our lives and work. Becoming more aware of the
knowledge one creates and pledging to be more active in finding new ways to
share and build this knowledge together is a transformational process that will
lead us forward.
F
oreword
Picture the lone (and perhaps lonely) natural scientist, guided by an elegant
theory and tightly worded hypothesis, working feverishly in a laboratory to
discover the proper place of a small piece of the grand puzzle of our universe.
As students, many of us recall our first glimpse through a microscope at the
marvels of nature, heretofore unseen by our naked eyes—the building blocks
of cells, the explosion of color tucked away inside a simple violet, or the dis-
gusting little inhabitants of the pond water that cooled us on hot summer days.
As a child overflowing with curiosity and inspired by the little I knew about
microscopes, I yearned for a chemistry set and supplies, a toolkit I could use to
hammer out an early career as a mad scientist. In the meantime, perhaps to my
parents’ dismay, I would begin this scientific journey in our home and then on
our farm, eventually expanding my laboratory into the community. Maybe this
is why I never got that chemistry set.
Luckily, I later found work in another “laboratory,” the wild and wacky
world of human kind, beginning with a short stint with the Cooperative
Extension Service in Kentucky and then in the mid 1960s as an academic in
adult education and later in educational psychology. It seems that my life has
been one long exploration of the mysteries of humans and our interactions.
Looking back at the early years of teaching and research, I now see that I had
not strayed far from the farm, where as a child I explored the ruralness around
me, poking at flora and fauna to see how they would react. In my early univer-
sity career, I researched like my excellent faculty mentors, as they had emulated
their professors before them, and so on. Like my colleagues and their mentors,
and their mentors before them, we were emulating another world of inquiry,
the natural sciences, at least in terms of our methodology. I think we might
have done this to impress our colleagues in the so-called hard sciences, as our
pursuits were perceived as being “soft.” The song of the hard sciences had
lured me in.
After a decade of teaching by transmission, and researching and publishing
in ways that my institution found quite acceptable, I grew increasingly uneasy
vii
viii FOREwORD
with this way of doing my work. After all, I was trained in adult education and
adult learning, and had read much that my mentors had said in the 1960s.
Knowles’ classic works about adult learning come to mind. Ever so slowly, I
began to spend more and more time stepping around my lectern and standing
closer to the students. The invitation I extended to them morphed into dis-
cussion groups, student-directed projects, think-pair-share techniques, and the
like. I call this mode of teaching and learning “teaching by transmission, learn-
ing by sharing.” It isn’t new now, and it wasn’t new then. I had just discovered
that I could do it by walking, literally, in a path I had to make for myself.
I now see how the changes in my way of teaching roughly paralleled how
I chose to do research at the time. These changes happened around the time
that the possibilities of qualitative research began to capture the attention of a
minority of academic researchers, and the postmodernist paradigm change was
well underway, at least in the so-called soft sciences. All this made sense to me
as well, so I began to do more and more qualitative research, most of the time
through the research of my graduate students and by smuggling in a bit here
and there in a couple of funded research projects. But there were upheavals
along the way. Those of us doing and advocating qualitative research, alongside
more widely practiced forms of quantitative research, found ourselves working
up a very steep hill. Our colleagues were not readily accepting of what was per-
ceived as research lacking the rigor of the scientific approach, one that we all
had accepted as the glory route to the truth. The language we used (numbers,
graphs, statistical tools, formal theorizing) was shaped by, and in turn helped
shape, our very form of life, a life naturally defended by the vast majority of
academics. In the meantime, maverick voices of change began to be heard, and
some of them were extolling the virtues of action research. Much is said in this
handbook about these times, and there are detailed accounts of the work and
influence of the likes of Kemmis, McTaggart, Freire, Horton, Fals Borda, and
numerous other thinkers and doers too numerous to mention here. Many of
them worked and some still work in academic institutions; however, the vast
majority of action researchers, some appearing in this book as authors or in
the chapter accounts and cases, were laboring outside of our academic bas-
tions. The spaces that mainly non-academics make in their practices for inquiry
and change are beautifully illustrated by the accounts of experienced action
researchers, especially in the case examples.
There was one more phase of change in my career that lasts to this day. I
first met Myles Horton at Highlander in 1981, when Brenda Bell and I were
asked to write a chapter on Horton and Highlander for Peter Jarvis’ seminal
book Twentieth-Century Thinkers in Adult Education. This proved to be a life-
and career-changing assignment. we finished the chapter, but my work and
friendship with Myles had only begun. Early interviews with Myles revealed
much to me about the history of Highlander and his approach to adult educa-
tion over his long career, including his work in participatory action research.
Several authors of this handbook refer to Horton’s work and his contributions
to action research, so there is no need to elaborate here. Later in the 1980s,
FOREwORD ix
my students, academic colleagues, and I were gifted the opportunity to spend
time with Paulo Friere, who was at Highlander for a week to “talk a book” with
Myles (We Make the Road by Walking). This occasion was the result of a col-
laborative effort between my university and Highlander. Myles, unlike Paulo,
had always stood a respectful distance from experts at universities, as he chose
to work outside the system for a half century. He received his first-ever official
invitation to speak at our university that week.
This final phase of my career was marked by a more collaborative, partici-
pative approach to teaching and learning and to doing action research. I owe
much to Myles for his counsel and for setting an authentic example of what is
possible when we choose to walk even farther from the podium, sitting down
alongside students so that we may learn together. The first two phases of teach-
ing and learning were about my own and other scholars’ experiences, and my
research was mostly on others. However, the last and current stage is all mostly
about collaborative teaching and learning, and my students and I have engaged
in mainly participative action research. The difference in the phases and my
practice lies in what John Shotter calls aboutness knowing versus withness know-
ing. These ways of knowing have their counterpart in what Peter Reason and
colleagues refer to as research on people, versus doing research with people. It
is in this latter sense that additional themes of the Handbook stand out, themes
like networking, globalization, and knowledge democracy.
I am now thinking about how much in common these themes resonate
with constructionist ideas, for example. As Ken Gergen points out, knowledge
is socially constructed. what we have taken for granted for so long is that
learning, and democracy, is all about the individual. But Gergen argues that
learning, and the expression of democracy, is all about relationships. One has
only to reflect on the myriad ways of knowing that abound in our world to
see how each, in its own right, is about two or more people working together
to construct knowledge and ways of going on together. Martin Buber was on
target when he claimed “First, the relationship.” Even in what John Heron
and Peter Reason call first-person action research, of which Judi Marshall’s
self-reflective research is but one example, the biographer/researcher is never
alone in the world, nor can his or her way of knowing be realized without
the presence, however indirectly, of others. The same is true in second-person
action research, where, for example, a classroom teacher chooses to study his or
her students’ responses to changes in teaching techniques, or in third-person
research, where a consultant helps an organization or community study its way
of doing its work. The importance of relationship is not lost on those who do
participatory action research.
This acknowledgment of the role of others in our research helps bring to
light the importance of networking with others, locally as well as globally. But,
this is heavy stuff. I commend the chapter authors who took on the task of
defining knowledge democracy and identifying our historical possibilities of
globalizing our interactions. But I will add this to the authors’ rich descriptions
and accounts: In networking, collaborating, and participating with others in
x FOREwORD
the doing of action research, we all must assume what MacNamee and Gergen
call a “relational responsibility” for what goes on when two or more of us seek
to jointly construct new knowledge. Given the import of this book’s emphasis
on participation at all levels and domains of action research, it seems fitting
to close my part of the effort with a quote borrowed from McNamee and
Gergen’s (1999) work:
we hold relationally responsible actions to be those that sustain and enhance
forms of interchange out of which meaningful action itself is made possible. If
human meaning is generated through relationship, then to be responsible to
relational processes is to favor the possibility of intelligibility itself—of possess-
ing selves, values, and the sense of worth. Isolation represents the negation of
humanity. (pp. 18–19)
Action research is not a chemistry set. And science is not an individual
endeavor. Both are collaborative enterprises, as is action research. Truths, or
multiple truths, are constructed between people jointly engaged in these and
other ways of knowing. Evidence of these claims can be found in some of the
chapters that follow and elsewhere. But this book does a lot more. By bringing
together in one place some of the best thinking about action research in an
imperfect world, the book promises to leave its readers motivated to responsi-
bly engage with others, even though they may have their own different ways of
knowing, in a joint pursuit of a more perfect world.
John M. Peters
reFerences
McNamee, S., & Gergen, K. J. (1999). Relational responsibility: Resources for sustain-
able dialogue. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
P
reFace
The purpose of The Palgrave International Handbook of Action Research is to
present a fairly comprehensive overview and illustrative examples of the work
being done internationally by people affiliated with what we call the global
action research community. This community consists of teachers, youth work-
ers, counselors, nurses, community developers, artists, ecologists, farmers,
settlement-dwellers, students, professors, and intellectual-activists on every
continent and at every edge of the globe. The movement that this commu-
nity sustains and inspires was born of the efforts of intellectual-activists in the
mid-twentieth century. Readers will find reference to key figures of this group
throughout the chapters in the Handbook and we wish to acknowledge them
here: Orlando Fals Borda, Paulo Freire, Myles Horton, and Kurt Lewin. To
these, however, we would add others, less publically identified with action
research in some cases and less widely known in others, but whose work has
added immensely to the development of theory and practice in action research:
John Collier, John Dewey, Stephen M. Corey, and Marja-Liisa Swantz. The
work of these eight people, and many more spread out over the past 100 years,
represents the ground upon which all those who have come afterward have
stood in building the living practice of action research.
Presently, the entry of “action research” into a Google search yields 165 mil-
lion results in .45 seconds. The electronic database Academic Search Premier
yields more than 16,000 references to action research. There are over 40 print
journals that feature action research and many more options for publishing
online. In short, there is a great deal to read about action research if one is
interested. Yet, we are mindful that “we live in a world where there is more and
more information and less and less meaning” (Baudrillard, 1994) and we have
challenged ourselves as editors and authors to consider the meaning of this
proliferation of information about action research in all its varied forms. And
while this is not the first handbook of action research, we see it as different
from other handbooks in the shape of its multi-vocality and in its somewhat
relentless push to the very edges of action research as a form of humanity itself.
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