Abstract
Abstract During my (Hafiz) childhood in Bangladesh, I experienced the negative impact of the educational system. My experiences initiated a process of conscientization leading to values-driven activism through the establishment of Education for Development and Sustainability (EDS), a child-friendly community of practice, with Trine and Alamin. In encounters with Erling and Sigrid, we became aware that our activities were in accordance with action research based on cooperative inquiry (Heron & Reason, 2008). From that point of departure, we developed our own collaborative living theory. In this paper, we explore the research question “How did we become action researchers and what is our driving force?” by using Stoller’s (1989) autobiographical narrative method to analyse selected, lived experiences. Sharing lived experiences and engaging in activism with each other and the EDS children became the base for our conscientization, radical empiricism and contemplating involvement in EDS. Value based activism can create empathic relations and emotions through shared engagement for social justice and the realization that we create a shared reality. Hence, conducting action research with children/youth is in our experience a key to sustainable development. However, to increase the transparency and validity of our research, we needed to explore how our experiences and actions have influenced our values, emotions and decisions to conduct research, our research topic and the research in itself. Therefore, we have engaged co-researchers and participants to critically question the research practice and made it open for discussion and comments in order to see alternative ways of interpreting situations and processes.
Highlights
In my (Hafizur Rahman, called Hafiz) childhood, I experienced social injustice towards children and economically poor people
When encountering the professors Erling Krogh and Sigrid Marie Gjøtterud, we became aware that our research was in accordance with action research based on cooperative inquiry (Heron & Reason, 2008) where we developed our cooperative living theory (Whitehead & McNiff, 2006; Gjøtterud & Krogh, 2012)
We are driven by a strong sense of social justice, evolved through contemplating involvement, conscientization and radical empiricism through our situated practice in Education for Development and Sustainability (EDS)
Summary
In my (Hafizur Rahman, called Hafiz) childhood, I experienced social injustice towards children (myself and others) and economically poor people. We can enhance our consciousness by becoming aware of own and others’ lived experiences, and the structural and cultural conditions underlying lived experiences in line with radical empiricism and conscientization (Freire 1970; Jackson 1989) and by contemplating involvement including all human senses (Krogh 2017), where researchers participate in the everyday activities in the research field and interact with the participants This may enhance shared experiences, emotional understanding and mutual respect which may promote the socially shared understanding that we can decide, undertake and evaluate actions (Krogh, 2017). We make analytical generalizations (Yin, 2014) by using our story as a case from which we generate theory on the development of our action research and scientific standpoint
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