Reflexive Musings and Current Contingencies: Creating New Spaces as Critical Professional Action Researchers

• In Event: Creating Spaces in Schools for the Critical Professional: Action Research as Principled Resistance

Abstract

Theoretical Framework: I re-visit an action-research six-year collaboration, initiated in 1986, among five other teacher-researchers and myself. That action-research venture explored intricacies and complexities of attempting to become “emancipatory-oriented” action-researchers engaged in “research as praxis,” as we also pondered “what it means to do research in an unjust world” (Lather, 1986, p. 257). I then interpret possible implications, drawn from particular action-research commitments, processes and framings to which that specific research collaborative attended, which might support current educators’ desires to resist rampant audit-culture accountability measures that have infected all educative contexts and endeavors. To do this retrospective work in order to inform possible iterations of “principled resistance” to current neo-liberal market-driven pressures and constraints on educators and students, I engage in a “self-reflexivity of discomfort” – that is, an “uncomfortable reflexivity -- a reflexivity that seeks to know while at the same time situates this knowing as tenuous” (Pillow, 2003, p. 188).
Objectives: I employ a stance of “uncomfortable reflexivity” as I “re-view” those education contexts, dominant discourses and practices in which that specific elongated action research project was situated. I then draw contrasts with current audit culture pressures to provide measureable and therefore supposedly indisputable evidence-based versions of “action-research effectiveness.” Further, I consider how possible resistances to such neo-liberal framings within current action-research collaborative endeavors might find support in employing the notion of “research as praxis 2.0” (Lather, 2010). This is a “reinscribed praxis,” one where “we are not so sure of ourselves and where we see this not knowing as our best chance for a different sort of doing, . . . where we try to be accountable to . . . the complexities of research for social justice . . . .” (p. 15).
Mode of Inquiry: Theorizing via those poststructurally inflected “reflexivities of discomfort” as well as that reinscribed version of “research as practice,” I will conceptualize some possible forms and strategies of “principled resistance” that action-researchers might employ.
Conclusion: Primarily concerned with a notion of “accountability” as ethical educational engagement with others, I draw from what I now interpret as tentative gestures toward such that emanated from that six-year action-research collaborative. I frame these as possible incentives for creating new “spaces” for educators’ and students’ action-researching of those very complexities of living and working toward social justice in spite of the current rage for only measureable forms of “accountability.”
Scholarly Significance: For years, many practitioner-researchers have noted that action research is an ambiguous and untidy business, especially as situated in U. S. as well as worldwide school-university partnerships and professional development endeavors. However, that metaphor currently twists into education-as-business-associated promises of products and processes that will speed up, clean up, and produce measureable evidence of “successful” research efforts. But any pre-formed and prescribed action-research packages foreclose any felt-needs among educators to even attempt looking “inquiringly and wonderingly on the world in which one lives” (Greene, 1973, p.267). Theorizing possible spaces where “principled resistances” might flourish may contribute to unforeseeable, yet potent action-research alliances.

Author

• Janet L. Miller, Teachers College, Columbia University