Finding a voice - thinking with others: a conception of action research
Educational Action Research, 6 (1):
53 - 68 (1998)Zusammenfassung
The main theme of this article is that action research is about
seeking a voice with which to speak one’s experience and one’s ability to learn
from that experience. It is also about helping others (our students, our patients,
our clients) to find their own voices. Action research is decentralising the
production of knowledge. To begin with, the theme is given a historical context
by presenting a general contrast between pluralism and managerialism, and the
next section articulates the nature of action research by contrasting
‘participatory’ with ‘hierarchical’ structures of knowledge. The next phase of the
argument is that an ‘educational’ model of action research (emphasising
continuous self-questioning) does not mean that action research lacks ‘criteria’.
The final section makes some suggestions about action research’s inherent
criteria by showing how the overall purpose of ‘finding a voice’ and of ‘thinking
with others’ requires a particular formulation of the main phases of the inquiry
process.