Educational action research: the death of meaning? or, The practitioner's response to Utopian discourse

Abstract

SummaryConsciousness of the distance between scientific research traditions in education and classroom practice has now become a presupposition of educational action research. The reasons for this distance are located in, and explained by, the reflexivity of knowledge, which draws attention to the hitherto unacknowledged personal element in knowledge claims: they reflect value‐preferences, hidden agendas and hidden assumptions. Therefore an emphasis has been placed by many recent action researchers on the self of the investigator as an influence not simply on the outcomes, but also the language and techniques of the research. Many see the self as becoming, rightly, the main focus of the action research project, and indeed the main focus of valid educational research as a whole.We give due weight to such insights and argue that they require educational research outside of the action research tradition to display reflexive self‐awareness and also to understand the importance of practitioner‐knowledge in its own right. On the other hand, we argue for a broader approach to educational research, without which the action researcher is bound to remain detached from traditions of thought which can enable her to locate her recommendations for practice within a meaningful long‐term and broad perspective on what the educationalist is striving to achieve.Whilst the fact of reflexivity prevents us from returning to the naïve view that research findings can have the objective status of timeless and more or less context‐free truths, it does not condemn us to a view of knowledge which is no more than a multitude of personal accounts of particular situations. Both extremes being unintelligible, a view of educational research as advance into new knowledge becomes possible in which various methodologies are vital, but in which no particular methodology suffices without the others. In its conclusions, the paper draws upon Paddy Walsh's acclaimed, if demanding, work to support the position that the gap between theory and practice requires such a synthesis of approaches, and that this synthesistic approach must be adopted if the action researcher is to have a chance of assuring anyone that she has made advances in educational practice.