Facilitating Practitioner Research

Developing Transformational Partnerships

Susan Groundwater-Smith, Jane Mitchell, Nicole Mockler, Petra Ponte, Karin Ronnerman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136631924
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Facilitating Practitioner Research: Developing transformational partnerships addresses the complex dilemmas and issues that arise in practitioner inquiry. It recognises that facilitating practitioner research is far more than providing advice about method adoption, important as that contribution is; or even modelling research practices and drawing

Chapter 1

Introduction

Can it be kindness not to tell what you see and a blessing to be blind. And the best aid to human happiness that has ever been invented is a blanket of soft white lies.

(Swift, 1988, quoted by Cameros, undated)

Graham Swift, Booker Prize winner, defies his readers who elect to look long and hard at the human condition, and aims instead for them to bury themselves under a ‘blanket of soft white lies’. It is the intention of this book to take the less comfortable road and pull the covers back on what counts as facilitation of practitioner research within partnership arrangements, how it works and for whom. Such research conducted in partnership, also named as ‘action research’ and ‘teacher inquiry’, refers to collaborative knowledge building by practitioners in the university and the field as they together systematically investigate issues and challenges that matter to them. The authors choose to deal with the need to fortify understandings of facilitation that come about as the result of an intense scrutiny of educational work. Such scrutiny can result in constructive practical theorising that directly addresses the dilemmas, tensions and contradictions that are faced daily by practitioners in both schools and universities as they address some of these challenging issues in education. It will argue for a mutually supportive relationship between those in the field and those in academia; a relationship that is generative of new professional knowledge that has the capacity to loosen the ties of unreflective routines. We believe that the text should contribute to the mutually constitutive and potentially transformative nature of developing understandings that can evolve in different and varying sites each with its own constraints and challenges by way of a dialogic enterprise that values but also challenges each participant's experience and knowledge.

Our purpose, then, is to develop a form of practical theorising that allows the emergence of a more nuanced and complex framing of facilitation, taking it beyond the commonplace understanding of providing assistance to the field and moving it into the realm of transformative partnerships between the academy and the field of practice, with all of the challenges and uncertainties that such a relationship entails. We are mindful of the orientation in our work towards the relationship between the academy and school education but claim that those engaged in health and social care will find resonances to their own circumstances.

Facilitating research with practitioners can be all too easily read as a process that is transactional; that is the provision of resources and skills to be handed on from one party to another. We argue instead for a reciprocal relationship that recognises that the boundaries between the actors are of a far more permeable nature than has been hitherto recognised. Mailer, Simich, Jacobson and Wise (2008: 305) define reciprocity as ‘an ongoing process of exchange with the aim of establishing and maintaining equality between parties’, a definition that serves our purposes well. We see that there is much greater depth and complexity attached to the notion of partnerships, that are currently too readily constructed merely as a combinatorial exercise that can mask status and power asymmetries. We are mindful of the position taken up by Yappa (1998), a cultural geographer, who suggests that the academy views the community as the domain of the problem and the university as the domain of the solution. We see that such a position adopts a deficit model of practice, rather than seeking to recognise professional assets and capacities. We see invention and intervention as available to all who are engaged in an bona-fide professional partnership, while at the same time acknowledging that if partnerships are to be truly transformative then they require what we call in this publication an informed understanding of: substance, politics, sustainability, professional learning and communicability. We will argue in the next chapters that such an understanding of these five perspectives can best be achieved through dialogue and debate.

Thus this is a text that serves to clarify and elucidate the functions of partnership within the context of research with field-based practitioners and to explore the ways in which that research can be facilitated. Its perspective is that of the academic practitioner, which of course is not a singular one, but it also recognises the multiplicity and complexity of roles that are taken by those working in contexts beyond the university. To serve these ends the book is divided into eight chapters: this introduction, which creates the rationale for the book, whose object is to examine the strategies and mores of facilitated practitioner research based within the concept of a mutual transformational relationship. A set of five chapters follow, each of which will specifically focus upon an identified perspective and develop it by using a case study as a form of illumination and to act as a touchstone for discussion. The seventh chapter will attend to matters related to the nature of the facilitation of practitioner research with respect to the development of professional knowledge. Finally, the conclusion will draw together the implications for both academic and teacher professional learning and more broadly, in an international context, a recognition of the substantial contribution made to practice by those working in these varying sites of endeavour.

In writing this book we acknowledge that the contrasting terms ‘transactional’ and ‘transformational’ are ones that have been used, in particular, in contexts of leadership discussions. Burns (1978) in his influential work on leadership saw transactional leadership as an exchange process between leaders and followers; it is one that is short term and pragmatic while transformational leadership pays greater attention to a concern for the moral purposes of the enterprise seeking to meet a collective purpose designed to ‘produce social change and that will satisfy followers’ authentic needs’ (p. 4). The coining of the distinction, then, lies with Burns and it may be seen that he has characterised leadership within a leaders/followers framework. Bass (1990) takes the work further and pleads for the transformative leader to transcend the mere ‘how’ something might be undertaken to explore more closely ‘why’ it should be done. Stewart (2006) in her discussion of the work of, among others, Burns and Bass draws upon Evers and Lakomski (1996) who argue that leadership, as it is conceptualised in the literature, is not helpful in meeting the challenges of the current educational system. They suggest

Schools can be thought of as being made up of intricate nets of complex interrelationships that criss-cross formal positions of authority and power and carry knowledge and expertise in all directions, not just downwards as suggested by [transformational] leadership (p. 72).

Furthermore, they posit that transformational models rely too heavily on the transformational skills of the leader; instead, the organisation should develop feedback loops to learn from its mistakes. This certainly accords with the position that we take in relation to partnerships between universities and the field in the facilitation of practitioner research. However, partnerships and organisations have significant differences, for while organisations have established parameters that derive from their purposes, partnerships are more organic and fluid in their nature. We see, therefore, that our discussion is one that reformulates these leadership arguments in the context of democratic partnership, moving from the partnerships and partnership roles being based upon practical arrangements, important as these are, to ones that can serve an emancipatory function. In this context we eschew the view of the leader in hierarchical terms, preferring a stance where those in the partnership are engaged in an ongoing process of negotiation and re-negotiation in the interests of being fair and just to all who participate in the enterprise.

We see that establishing partnerships for the purposes of facilitation is a process that requires thoughtful attention. We believe that the motivations are multiple and may, indeed, be contradictory. Are they formed for legitimation purposes? Are they formed to enable the realisation of goals that have been established by others? Are they formed upon an expectation that a set of practices can be codified and developed as ‘one size fits all’ solutions? In this chapter we elaborate our motivations as well as our conceptual frameworks. In the chapters that follow we go into those motivations and concepts with particular attention to the ways in which initiatives are taken, the expectations upon which they are based and the sites within which they are developed. More immediately, we wish here to make explicit the theoretical concepts upon which our notion of transformational facilitation rests, namely those associated with praxis.

Facilitation of research in partnerships as praxis

Praxis is the concept we use to critically explore the facilitation of research in transformative partnerships. It is also used to explore the conditions in which these partnerships construct – intersubjectively – practical knowledge about educational practice in the field; these are conditions for participative meaning making, critical dialogue and change. By saying that we use praxis as a concept, we are claiming that knowledge construction in transformative partnerships as well as the facilitation of these partnerships can be seen as social action. We are also claiming that such social action can basically be analysed and criticised in terms of its ‘substance’ or, in other words, in terms of fundamental normative ideas about what is morally just or unjust. These ideas always have a dialectical relationship with the cultural, social and political contexts in which human beings act. In Chapter 2 we will explore this in depth. In this introduction we present the argument that praxis as a concept for the understanding of moral action always consists of three components: understanding of ‘what is’ (What is actually happening?); understanding of ‘what ought to be’ (Where should that lead?) and understanding of how to transform ‘what is’ into ‘what ought to be’. Reflection on these three components is central to the construction of knowledge in transformative partnerships. The aim is to develop a praxis theory that is practical; that is to say a theory that should ‘not abstract itself from the intended practice’ (Gadotti, 1996), but commit itself to

educate individuals as a point on the horizon but never a finished process because education is really an unending process … Education is at the same time promise and project.

(ibid.: 7)

Many who see the concept of praxis as central to the endeavours of education have drawn upon the wisdom of Aristotle, including: Carr and Kemmis (1986), in their seminal and oft-quoted work Becoming Critical; Oancea and Furlong in their discussion of quality criteria in educational research (2008) and Ax and Ponte (2008) whose work is discussed in this section. Bons and Van Ophuijsen (1999) summarise Aristotle's definition of praxis as

‘action’ referring, in a general sense to all intentional activities, by which people can reach a particular goal through their own efforts. More specifically, the term refers to rational action based on a conscious choice … and action is defined as the product of observation, desires, and intellect or reason…. The inclusion of reason means that action in the narrow sense is the preserve of adults, who are most complete when they are engaged in action and who achieve ‘happiness’ through action.

(ibid.: 340, translation by the authors)

Aristotle's concept of praxis could be interpreted as psychological. He starts from the premise that human beings are inclined ‘to do good’ thanks to their natural capacity for reason. Praxis is the purposeful and self-accountable action of the individual who is ‘trying to do good’ in order to reach happiness. In his view there is also ‘non-praxis’, that is ‘not trying to do good’. Enlightment philosophers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries renewed the interest in praxis. In his moral philosophy, however, we see that Kant does not use praxis so much as a psychological but as an epistemological category. He sees praxis as intentional and rational action with which normative judgements should be validated: ‘How can I validate this moral claim as just or unjust?’ This is deliberative rationality that in his view is obtained through pure reasoning by individuals. Deliberative rationality was reformulated by critical theory in the twentieth century, when praxis became a framework for sociological critique and critical educational theories (Freire, 1972; Gadotti, 1996; Ax and Ponte, 2008; Ponte and Ax, 2009, 2011). As a framework for critique it had major implications for the development of practical theory, and indeed has been highly influential in formulating our understanding of facilitation as a transformative act.

To support our position, we put forward three arguments. First, in contrast to Aristotle's idea that a social situation can be defined as praxis or not praxis, we suggest that every concrete social situation has mores – and so by definition can be critically evaluated through the lens of praxis, no matter what the nature of the action is. According to Gadotti (1996: xvii),

The kind of education that copies models, that wishes to reproduce models, does not stop being praxis, but is limited to a reiterative, imitative, and bureacratized praxis. Quite different from this, transforming praxis is essentially creative, daring, critical, and reflective.

Second, this critical understanding of praxis as framework supposes deliberative rationality but, unlike Kant, Habermas sees deliberative rationality as obtained by communicative action; the construction of practical theories is not an individual, but an intersubjective endeavour. Third, in understanding the relationship between human action (in our case: facilitation of practitioner research in transformative partnerships) and the cultural, social and political contexts in which human action takes place, praxis does not refer only to individual psychological intentions ‘to do good’ (as in the Aristotelian definition), but also to social – sometimes unintended, hidden or manipulative – consequences in terms of social equity, justice and solidarity.

The praxis concept offers us a useful framework, therefore, but this still leaves unanswered the question of whether facilitation in research partnerships should be interpreted mainly from the standpoint of practitioners who are capable of acting autonomously and rationally, or mainly from the cultural, social and political contexts in which they act. The first standpoint is represented by lifeworld as seen in the phenomenological theory of Schutz (Schutz and Luckmann, 1989), the second by the system theory of Luhmann (1995). However, our understanding of ...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Facilitating Practitioner Research
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures and tables
• Preface
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Substance
• 3 Politics
• 4 Sustainability
• 5 Professional learning
• 6 Communicability
• 7 Constructing transformative professional knowledge
• 8 Facilitation of transformative research partnerships: bundling concepts, perspectives and experiences
• Index