Practitioner research in education: A call for a reality check

Abstract

ABSTRACT Practitioner research is often promoted in education for different purposes, usually with the aim of fostering practitioners’ professional development while supporting their identity as practitioner-researchers. Within this landscape, teachers and academics sometimes work together to engage in different forms of collaborative practitioner research. Such endeavours, however, may generate some ethical issues among the academics involved. In this article, we, two university-based academics, reflect on methodological insights by discussing two ethical dilemmas about practitioner research resulting from recent situations: (1) transparency in designing, promoting, doing, and reporting on practitioner research, and (2) the potential co-option of practitioner research initiatives and outcomes. Qua duoethnographic research, this reflective piece adopts an epistolary technique as the shape of the article as it consists of a series of emails exchanged between the authors over a period of time. In so doing, we aim for transparency about how our insights around the ethical issues identified developed organically through written interaction. We concur that it is time for a reality check disposition to disrupt hegemonic onto-epistemic discourses which characterize the ecology of practitioner inquiry.