Taking Action Research to New Levels

• In Event: Is Emancipatory Action Research in Schools Possible? Continuing the Conversation

Abstract

For over three decades, critical theorists have theorized action research using Habermas’s work on knowledge interests (Carr and Kemmis, 1986, Habermas, 1971), essentially arguing that action research should seek to move beyond the technical and practical levels to the emancipatory level that deals with issues of power and oppression. Others have criticized this notion of emancipatory action research for existing more in theory than in practice and for its lack of practicality or “workability” (Elliott, 2005; Johansson and Lindhult, 2008; Kinsler, 2010)
In this paper, I will argue that making action research emancipatory would mean to rethink the very notion of moving “upward” from one level to the next (ie. From technical and practical to emancipatory). Rather we need to take action research to new levels. By taking it “to new levels,” we mean deepening the reflection beyond narrating personal and professional experience to problematizing our experience in ways that allow us to make significant shifts in our perspectives and understandings. In this sense “new levels” means finding a deeper level that exists beneath the surface of our experience.
But by taking action research to new levels, I also mean engaging in learning and reflection that takes us beyond our classrooms and schools and into the larger world of communities, social and educational policy, and political economy. It means understanding that our everyday common sense world is actually constituted by outside forces. This means we not only need to deepen our understanding, but also expand our understanding to new levels beyond what Paulo Freire (1970) called our “limit situations” or the self-imposed horizons of what we think we can change in our lives, our professional practices, our organizations, and our society.
This paper will discuss a current participatory action research project the author is engaged in and how school practitioners engage in emancipatory action research. It will also argue that emancipatory action research has to be participatory and that this requires opening up micropolitical spaces (even though they may be temporary) in which authentic participation and inquiry can take place. This is a tall order in the current governance climate and focus on implementing the common core, but is increasingly being accomplished by practitioners who can “fly under the radar.”

Author

• Gary L. Anderson, New York University