Whose knowledge, Which scope of action? Reflections on Teacher Action Research in Australia

• In Event: “To Know Is Not Enough”: Action Research as the Core of Educational Research

Abstract

Whose Knowledge, Which Scope of Action?
Reflections on Teacher Action Research in Neoliberal Times

The paper has two purposes:
i) to analyse a large-scale partnership project between a group of schools in a high poverty region and a university team of researchers, funded by the Australian Research Council and known more colloquially as RPiN (Redesigning Pedagogies in the North). Here the main focus is to examine the scope of the changes developed in school and teacher action research projects against the aspiration for action research to improve practice, increase understanding of the practice, and change the context which frames the practice.
ii) To explore the contextual framing of the schools and university as it was implicated in teacher and university partner expections and scope of action, aiming to understand the extent to which the context, steeped in neoliberal mangerialism, market ideology and competitive individualism, shaped the ways in which the project unfolded.
Framed in traditions of critical action research (Carr & Kemmis, 1986), and drawing on feminist and participatory action research (Wadsworth, 2010), the paper takes up the challenge of understanding how local action is inextricably connected to context, and how the contemporary policy (un)settlements in education (Rizvi & Lingard, 2010) provide opportunities and constraints for local aciton research projects. RPiN worked at two inter-related levels of action research, the university researchers’ projects relating to facilitating school and teacher pedagogical and curriculum innovation and the projects of individual and small groups of teachers across 10 schools. Data from the project, approved by the university’s Human Ethics Research committee, produced masses of largely qualitative data, including examples of student and teacher work, video and other representations of findings and processes, accumulated over the three years of its operation.
The paper analyses one of the published outcomes, a book collection of teacher and university chapters on teacher research projects. The author, one of the team of university researchers in the project, finds that while many of the projects show strong social justice values, evidence on curriculum and pedagogical innovation in making the community curricular, the scope of the projects was significantly curtailed by the current teacher work intensification, and rarely went beyond the individual teacher’s classroom, even to affect the school, let alone the region as originally expected. Questions about the internalisation of the current climate for schools policy and teachers’ work are raised, suggesting strategies and tactics for action research projects and their framing that require greater focus on explicit political literacy in the researchers at both the university and the school levels if action research is to widen its scope of change in the service of social justice and educational innovation.

Carr, W & Kemmis, S (1986) Becoming critical: Education, knowledge and action research. Lewes: Falmer Press
Rizvi, F. & Lingard, R. (2010) Globalizing education policy. London: Routledge.
Wadsworth, Y. (2010) Building in research and evaluation: Human inquiry for living systems. Crows Nest NSW, Australia: Allen & Unwin

Author

• Marie T. Brennan, Victoria University