With all Due Respect: A Second Look at Action Research

Abstract

I don't care what they say: Action research deserves some respect. Emerging out of work in social psychology, initiated in the 1940s through community programs, and finding apt context in education through the likes of Stephen Corey and John Dewey, research has had a rough ride toward respectability. As a methodology, research in general has been dismissed as soft and impure: derivative, political, situated in praxis, absent theory. A value-laden mode of inquiry, research has ever been controversial, with an historical profile of acceptance and rejection, the latter fueled strongly by positivist ideology (Kemmis & McTaggart, 2005; Reinharz, 1992).With the bedrock shift toward postmodernism in the early 1970s, research began a vigorous, yet continually contentious, path toward esteem. Seeded in human rights activism, social reform movements like civil rights, women's movements, peace and environmental movements, research has proliferated into a richly constituted confluence, including critical emancipatory research, participatory research, feminist research, community-based research, and of particular interest in our field, classroom research, intimately intertwined with all the rest. As a form of change-oriented inquiry, classroom research contends with the same critiques as its sisters, while at the same time, having detractors all its own. From reductionists: Its just what teachers do, the common sense work of the classroom. It's not basic research; it's applied, not theory driven. At worst, it's political. Dismissed: It's colloquial-the inopportune stepchild of the real thing.While understanding that there will not be, nor should there be, singularity of research strategies and goals, these yeasty times of disciplinary transformation in art education evoke a sense of urgency, an anxious predilection for action. As we move with certitude and doubt, clarity and vagueness into the paradigm of visual culture art education, I agree with feminist social researchers, that there is a need for knowledgeable ... not just more knowledge of the problem (Reinharz, 1992, p. 178). In taking what they call the action turn, Reason and Torbert advocate... the purpose of inquiry is not simply or even primarily to contribute to the fund of knowledge in a field, to deconstruct taken-for-granted realities, or even to develop emancipatory theory, but rather to a more direct between intellectual knowledge and moment-to-moment personal and social action, so that inquiry contributes directly to the flourishing of human persons, their communities, and the ecosystems of which they are apart. (2001, p. 2)While vehemently supporting basic research, critique of the status quo, and theory construction, still, I feel that urgency to forge a more direct link between the aggregating scholarship in art education and actionconnected projects anchored within the particularity of classroom contexts. I am for the kind of research that brings to life the sights and sounds, all the little contingent realities that jostle around situating themselves within the work of a classroom. …