Locating Teachers' Vision as Part of the System: Troubling the Participatory Rationale of "Action" + "Research"

• In Event: 28.022 - How the Sciences of Curriculum Became Reasonable: Their Emergence in Postwar Years and Its (Dis)Continuity

Abstract

The emergence of action research has offered an “exciting new beginning” (McKernan, 1991, p. 3) in curriculum reform and teacher education. The importance and contribution of action research, it was argued, comes from the shifted teachers’ role from a mere “consumer” of given curriculum to an active “knowledge producer” for the change of the classroom practices (Shumsky, 1958, p. 25). It continues today with its participatory rationale, for example, a youth participatory action research (Li, Kenzy, Underwood, & Severson, 2015), an ecological community engagement (Trickett & Beehler, 2017). It is to “situate” the self-studies of participants “to make a contribution to the knowledge” (Zeichner, 2007, p. 40) of schooling, teacher education, and curriculum development. The assumption is that the knowledge produced by the participant would change the practices better than any other prescribed curriculum reform agendas.

This paper historically re-evaluates the emergence of action research as a production of a rationale to make a new vision of teachers through participatory politics; that is, for teachers’ eyes to “see” their own teaching as an origin of change whose outcomes should be relocated. The participatory rationale of action research that encourages teachers’ active role in the processes of change - which is taken-for-granted from the contemporary standpoint - entails particular epistemological assumptions of observation and temporality, which this paper will show as its multiple couplings with classroom research, educational and social change, and teacher developments. This paper aims to reveal those epistemological assumptions that made teacher as the agency of change, to identify and solve the problems through the methods of action research.

I bring what is now called “Cold War social science” (Solovey & Cravens, 2012; see also Heims, 1993) to challenge the participatory observational rationales of action research. Social scientists in the postwar periods, including Kurt Lewin who originally suggested the action research as a member of Cybernetics Group (Heims, 1991), rationalized the “research methodologies” and got involved in the development of new “action-oriented initiatives” (Solovey & Cravens, 2012, p. 2; emphasis added). By re-thinking the participatory observational rationales of action research through the threads of cybernetics that provided a new theory of observation and feedback for systematic change (i.e., Brand, Bateson, & Mead, 1976; von Foerster, 1972), the paper discusses how teachers learned to systematically see their teaching as an object of observation and the target of change, shifting the teacher’s positionality as a participant observer who is not “outside” of the system but “within” the system. The paper further argues for the time elements of action research – “the tension between retrospective understanding and prospective action” (Carr & Kemmis, 1986) – that make the teacher “systematically develop” (Stenhouse, 1975), both for the “research”-purpose of classroom practice and the “action”-purpose of the change. By interrogating the literatures of educational action research in the 1970s-80s, this paper complicates the “democratic participation” (Cartwright & Zander, 1953) of teachers in action research as the effects of cybernetics and systems thought, which is much hidden by the participatory rationale in the name of “action”+“research.”

Author

• Sun Young Lee, Wichita State University