Action Research in Education

Mary McAteer

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781446290521
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Research in Education

?This structured and accessible book, with excellent case studies, will give confidence to anyone embarking on an action research project?
-Professor Ken Jones, Dean of Humanities, Swansea Metropolitan University

?Masterly in its lucidity, this text contextualises Action Research in the fiedl of Education Practice; and is therefore a valuable resource in both professional learning and improved professional practice?
-Effie Maclellan, Research Professor in Education, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow

?An engaging, clearly written, and helpfully structured articulation of how AR can be implemented and practised in order to make a difference within educational contexts?
-Dr Stephen Parker, University of Worcester

?Will assist practitioner researchers to develop a profound and critical understanding of this approach?
-Professor Marion Jones, Liverpool John Moores University

This hands-on and user-friendly book uses illustrative case studies to demonstrate and explore the potential for change in real social situations. This book seeks to assert the academic integrity of action research and to de-mystify the process.

Each chapter includes:

- a ?how to? section based on concrete examples and dilemmas

- commentary that relates examples to the broader field

- a discussion of the underlying theoretical approach

- discussion and exploration of quality issues

- discussion of ethical and pragmatic decision-making

The mix of theoretical grounding and focus on real issues will be of benefit to Master?s level or advanced undergraduate students on Education and Research Methods courses or those undertaking Action Research as part of professional development activities.

Mary McAteer is Director of the Mathematics Specialist Teacher (MaST) programme at Edge Hill University

Research Methods in Education series:

Each book in this series maps the territory of a key research approach or topic in order to help readers progress from beginner to advanced researcher.

Each book aims to provide a definitive, market-leading overview and to present a blend of theory and practice with a critical edge. All titles in the series are written for Master?s-level students anywhere and are intended to be useful to the many diverse constituencies interested in research on education and related areas.

Other books in the series:

- Using Case Study in Education Research

-Qualitative Research in Education, Atkins and Wallace

- Ethnography in Education, Mills and Morton

SECTION 1

GETTING TO KNOW ACTION RESEARCH

CHAPTER 1

WHAT IS THIS THING CALLED ACTION RESEARCH?

The changing context of educational practice

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Reflecting on and learning from our practice is perhaps the most natural and innate process in the business of being human. For a young child it is a completely instinctive process, so that the subtle changes in position which promote improved balance become innately understood and developed in any toddler in the early days of learning to walk or get around. Likewise, the processes of communication become honed and polished as we listen to our own voice and those of others, reviewing and refining our own in order to improve our communication practice. Gaining mobility and communication skills are highly situated, contextualised activities, and develop in different ways according to that contextualised need. If we take ‘learning to talk’ as an example, we can see that even within a relatively small geographical area, variations of syntax, accent, sophistication and extent of vocabulary and so forth are clearly evident. These variations will arise, in general, as a result of the beginning talker trying to find the best way of communicating within their own particular context.

The fact is, a small child learns a great deal about how to make its own way into the world without being formally taught, instinctively reflects on practice trying to make it better, and has a fairly egocentric worldview. It really is ‘all about me’ for a young child. It could be said perhaps that the developing infant instinctively understands the nature and potency of action research.

For many teachers or other education practitioners, however, action research, presented to them through the academic processes of their initial and continuing education, can prove quite a philosophical challenge. Somewhere between infancy and adulthood, we subvert (and occasionally lose) our naive understandings of the world, and become entangled in the processes and procedures of a more formal learning environment. As schooling becomes more ritualised and routinised, we begin to look to those rituals and routines as sources of learning, rather than organisational strategies for it. The tendency to ask how to do something, rather than explore the nature of that something, is, in a way, a pragmatic response to the reality and busy-ness of life. The corollary of this, though, is that it can be an inhibitory response in terms of learning. Without such a questioning approach, our engagement with concepts and processes can remain at a relatively superficial level.

Recent changes in education

Reflecting on the past 30 years in terms of school management, government policies and initiatives, we can see that there has been a significant change in ways in which schools are managed. The introduction of a national curriculum following the 1988 Education Reform Act, paved the way for a raft of associated policies and procedures, from guides to pedagogy, assessment and record-keeping, to classroom management, differentiation and, indeed, school management. The transition to this more heavily prescribed and bureaucratised approach to education was challenging for many teachers in its early stages, and in particular for those who had worked for a significant number of years under a much more flexible regime. For many, it represented a loss of autonomy and the erosion of both the place and the value of their ‘professional judgement’. In the words of Hutchinson and Whitehouse, the education reforms did ‘not brook any questioning’ (1999: 153).

While subsequent reviews have made changes in the content and scope of curriculum legislation, the increase in bureaucracy continues to impact strongly on our concept of what contemporary schooling looks like and how it is organised. Alongside this growth in bureaucracy there was also the development of a new language. Learning styles, the threepart lesson, curriculum delivery, assessment for learning, best practice, scaffolding and a raft of other new terms became part of the educational vocabulary. Words like ‘value added’, ‘accountability’, ‘buy in’ and ‘stakeholders’ were further additions and, for many teachers, suggestive of a change in both the focus and the values of contemporary education. Once only associated with marketisation and commercial venture, they became subsumed into the language of educational processes, bringing with them a feeling that education was being commodified in a way that was hitherto unknown for many teachers, and heralded significant philosophical challenges. The very art of teaching seemed to be under attack. In secondary schools, there were concerns about how teachers would cope with pupils suddenly facing the demands of a ‘balanced curriculum’, where they were forced to do subjects from within each of five curricular areas until the age of 16. In primary schools, the introduction of compulsory science and technology was perhaps the biggest area of anxiety for teachers.

The highly prescriptive programmes of study with their complex levels and statements of attainment suggested to teachers that the main function of teaching now was to ensure that all children reached these levels, and that the appropriate boxes were ticked in order to demonstrate that. Effective teachers would deliver the appropriate content to pupils (described by one of my colleagues at the time as the ‘deliverology’ model of education) and prepare them for assessment tasks which had become more standardised, thus enabling the establishment of school league tables so that schools could be compared, like for like, against each other. These tables allowed parents also to choose schools for their children, making judgements on the basis of the school’s measured performance. The ‘free market’ model of education had clearly arrived.

Changing schools, changing teachers

Alongside curricular and organisational changes there was also a growing expectation that teachers would engage in continuing professional development throughout their career. From the early 1980s, part-time, in-service Bachelor of Education (BEd) programmes, which enabled all teachers to hold graduate-level qualifications, became increasingly popular as the proportion of graduate-qualified teachers joined the profession, and nongraduates felt the need to upgrade their qualifications, and thereby their job and promotion prospects. (Prior to that time, teacher training enabled holders of the earlier Certificate of Education to teach in primary and secondary schools.) It was not long before there was a demand for master’s level professional development programmes, and most university faculties of education developed diploma and master’s programmes to meet this demand. While this provision was very much driven by individual teacher needs and desires, it did much to embed the notion of postgraduate professional development into the culture of schools and settings. The mid-1990s saw a change in the funding arrangements for such provision, and a subsequent move towards partnership arrangements between universities and other providers to ensure that the provision matched need on a more organisational than individual level. The notion of school-driven professional development through postgraduate programmes was consolidated by then, and subsequent funding arrangements were, in the main, centred on postgraduate, award-bearing provision.

Initiatives in England, such as the introduction of funded Postgraduate Professional Development (PPD) opportunities by the (then) Training and Development Agency (TDA) from 2006 to 2011, the Master’s in Teaching and Learning introduced in 2008 and the newly introduced National Scholarship Scheme for Professional Development, all suggested that award-bearing, master’s-level provision was a valued and valuable option. The Chartered Teacher Pathway in Scotland, and the current development in Wales of a Master’s in Educational Practice similarly attest to the desirability and the potency of highly contextualised professional development. Their designation as master’s-level courses, rather than traditional in-service training (INSET) programmes which tended to train teachers in the use of specific resources or approaches (normally being completed in one-day or halfday sessions) suggest that academic rigour is a valuable feature.

While there have been recent changes in legislation and funding in England (the PPD funding stream has now been discontinued), there is still a focus on high-quality professional development for practising teachers (often linked to a specific subject or pedagogic focus). The introduction of the National Scholarship Scheme in 2011, which called for applicants who wanted to ‘use this money for Master’s level development, or other highly valuable opportunities, such as subject specific seminars’, was as a direct result of the 2010 Schools White Paper, ‘The Importance of Teaching’. Master’s-level professional development continues to be a central strand in educational initiatives and policy-making.

Rooting these programmes and initiatives in practitioner research means that, at present, most schools in the UK will have some form of small-scale practitioner research project in place. Similar experiences are to be found in a range of countries, from Australia to North America, with journals such as Educational Action Research, Action Research, Reflective Practice regularly featuring articles which have arisen from these projects. A range of networks exists to provide support for action researchers, and conferences such as the annual Collaborative Action Research Network (CARN) actively encourage presentation from such work. While it is clear that all such projects have the potential to support practitioners and their schools, and are often branded as ‘action research’ in an all-encompassing way, it is important that we clarify what is and, probably more importantly, what is not action research.

The relationship between practitioner research and action research

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For most teachers and other educational practitioners, Initial Teacher Education (ITE) and continuing professional development (CPD) work offer opportunities to engage in practitioner research. In addition to research experiences embedded in programmes of (academic) study, they also form part of other professional development, in-service courses. The National College offers opportunities for English teachers, aspiring and in-post school leaders to undertake recognised development programmes, many of which incorporate practitioner research elements. Similarly, the International Leadership and Management Program offers practitioner-research based programmes for school and college leaders in international schools.

The term ‘action research’ is often used in relation to the projects teachers undertake as part of these professional development programmes, regardless of whether their work is of an action research nature or not. At one level, this broad-brush understanding of action research can be seen as a pragmatic approach which serves the purpose of engaging people in activities that do explore and seek to understand practice and its impact. At another level, however, the potential for such project work to be inaccurately described and lacking in the intellectual rigour of a specific framework does no service to the programmes themselves, the participants nor, indeed, to the public face of action research and other practitioner research approaches. In a climate where deeply encultured approaches to understanding ‘research’ as a scientific process underpinned by numbers and percentages have led to a view of more narrative and naturalistic approaches to research as being ‘not real research’ and descriptions of such research approaches in a language which is at best, loose and, at worst, inaccurate, their public acceptance is made more problematic and their validity suspect. For this reason, this chapter seeks to articulate the provenance and nature of action research, and to clarify its formulation as a specific, rigorous and methodologically appropriate form of practice-based research. All practitioner research requires its participants to ‘to engage with both “theoretical” and “practical” knowledge moving seamlessly between the two’ (Groundwater-Smith and Mockler, 2006: 107), but action research makes a further demand. It requires not only the critical reflection on practice and theory–practice conversation, but also it designates ongoing and evolving action as part of that process. We will develop this later in the chapter, and throughout the book, but first a brief look at the nature of ‘research’ itself, and where practitioner research and action research fit into this.

The research continuum

It is perhaps helpful to start by taking a brief look at the nature of research and its manifestations. ‘Research’ may be thought of as a continuum of approaches, with scientific, or positivistic, research at one end, and the more naturalistic and interpretive approaches at the other. An example of scientific research is that which is carried out in medical drug trials, where the notion of ‘objectivity’ is embedded in the philosophy, and where the design of the project will normally involve some form of blind testing and/or control group, with the findings used to generate a generalisable ‘truth’. Thus, trials suggest that 98 per cent of all patients will achieve a significant reduction of symptoms when taking drug X. Likewise, figures suggesting that only 1 per cent of those taking the drug are likely to suffer any unpleasant side effects, and of these side effects, none has been found to be medically worrying, can be used to assure us of its safety. Results such as this can inform the decision of a company to launch the drug, and brand it as safe. Similarly, engineering science may seek to produce a set of experimental results which can then be generalised. Repeated tests on particular materials allow engineers to choose specific materials and dimensions for specialist uses, knowing that they have proof of their efficacy in such uses. Proof is a word that is often found in scientific experimentation and research. I am not saying here of course that purely exploratory scientific research does not take place. What I am saying is that much experimental science and research is of the type that discovers ‘truths’ and seeks to ‘prove’. It can be described, therefore, as belonging to the positivistic research paradigm. In other words, its underpinning philosophy is that knowledge is derived from the interrogation and verification of empirical data.

At the other end of this continuum of research approaches we find the more naturalistic and interpretive approaches. This end of the continuum is sometimes described as ‘anti-positivistic’ (although I often feel that is a confrontational term, and prefer ‘non-positivistic’) and is generally understood as the set of research approaches which includes phenomenological, ethnomethodological and biographical approaches. Practitioner research is located at this end of the continuum. The term is broad in scope, and covers a range of approaches which tend to be characterised by a desire to explore, explain or describe practice. Data collected tends to be more qualitative than quantitative in nature, and the resultant report will often seek to identify key features of the practice, particular insights into practice, or recommendations for future practice. The practitioner case study is a good example of this type of research. Habermas, writing in 1970, suggests a tripartite typology of knowledge: empirical and analytical; hermeneutic (interpretive or explanatory) and historical; and critical knowledge. Practitioner research is usually thought of as residing in the hermeneutic and historical category. In newly identifying ‘critical knowledge’ as a valid category, Habermas paved the way for those researchers and theorists who felt that other paradigms did not fully address the need to either critique ide...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Frontmatter
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• About the author
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction and overview
• Section 1 Getting to Know Action Research
• Section 2 Doing Action Research
• Section 3 Sharing Action Research
• References
• Index