Participatory Action Research (Kemmis & McTaggart, 2000)

I feel that these authors start with a possible critical perspective that the only valid research is research that is about 'social improvement' (although they may only raise this issues to explore and confront it - time will tell). They identify a number of AR traditions:

• Participatory Research
• Critical Action Research
• Classroom Action Research
• Action Learning
• Action Science
• Soft Systems Approaches
• Industrial Action Research

I note however that they do not mention 'Collaborative Action Research' (CAR) as a separate tradition (although they do refer to CAR later (p.272).

K&T argue that PAR and CAR are emancipatory, responding to traditional research practices taht were seen as normalising or domesticating (representing 'central agency' and often removed from local concerns and interests). As such, PAR & CAR can be deemed 'political'.

K&T provide insight into five tradtions of 'practice':

1. individual behaviour
2. social behavior
3. intentions, meanings and values
4. language, discourse and tradions,
5. change and evolution

K&T poist that a dialectical appraoch is one where opposing dichotomies are blended and transcended: individual-social and objective-subjective :- does this imply some form of blended epistemology?

I feel that K&T Reflexive-dialetical position (5): practice as Reflexive, to be studies dialectically clearly positions PAR & CAR:

The fifth view of practice understands that it is "political". It understands that to study practice is to change it, that the process of studying it is also "political," and that its own standpoint is liable to change through the process of action-that it is a process of enlightenment about the standpoint from which one studies practice as well as about the practice itself.

This view of practice challenges the dichotomies or dualisms that separate the first four views from one another: the dualisms df the individual versus the social and the objective versus the subjective. It attempts to see each of these dimensions not in tetms of polar opposites, but in terms of the mutuality and relationship between these different aspects of things. Thus it sees the individual and the social, and the objective and the subjective.

The significance of the word 'connections' deserves special notice:

The study of a practice as complex as the practice of education is a study of connections-of many different kinds of communicative, productive, and organizational relationships among people in socially, historically, and discursively constituted media of language (discourse), work, . and power-all of which must be understood dynamically and relationally. And we should recognize that there are research approaches that aim to explore these connections and relationships by participating in them and, through changing the forms in which people participate in them, to change the practice, the way it is understood, and the situations in which the practice is conducted. At its best, such a research tradition aims to help people understand themselves both as "objective" forces impinging on others and as subjects who have intentions and commitments they share with others, and both as people who act in ways framed by discourses formed beyond anyone of us individually and as people who make meaning for ourselves in communication with the others alongside whom we stand, and whose fates-one way or another-we share.

Methods and Techniques

Knowledge-Constitutive Interests

The Action Research Spiral

Participatory action research is:

1. a social process
2. participatory
3. practical and collaborative
4. emancipatory
5. critical
6. recursive (reflexive, dialetical)
7. transcends both theory and practice