Stephen Kemmis Robin McTaggart - The Action Research Planner

Springer Science+Business Media Singapore 2014

Stephen Kemmis 1

Abstract

This chapter begins by describing the thirty-five year history of how this book came to be. It outlines the overall structure of the book and what each chapter is intended to achieve. The authors define critical participatory action research as a collaborative commitment to engaging in iterative cycles of planning, acting, observing, and reflecting to address untoward consequences of social practices, often rooted in global concerns (that is, concerns connected to social movements such as protecting the environment, or advocating for womens rights). The chapter illustrates what it means to engage in critical participatory action research by presenting Recycling at Braxton High School , one of five examples that recur throughout the book. Critical participatory action research is presented as a crucial contribution to the field of action research that includes a number of different types of action research done for unique purposes by individuals in varied contexts. Further, critical participatory action research requires extension of the roles of researcher-practitioner and theorist-practitioner, and expansion of the conceptual basis of practices and theories of practice.

Keywords

The Action Research Planner series has a long history . This is the sixth of a series that began in 1979 with a modestly produced version for education students at Deakin University in Geelong Australia. A course was offered as part of an upgrading Bachelor of Education degree designed for practising teachers. The intention was to encourage teachers to conduct small action research projects, or preferably, to participate in larger ones, and to report regularly on their action research work and reading throughout the year through a course journal . Each student was also expected to write a critical review of another students work, and on an aspect of the action research literature. The early Planners were somewhat restricted by their need to guide assessment tasks required by a course. Nevertheless, the Planners became popular and were used in many projects in several professional fields and community projects outside Deakin University, with varying degrees of success.

As the Planners began to be used by a wider readership and without the support of other readings prescribed for the Deakin Action Research course, we re-worked the text to give a little more theoretical background and to take account of the growing literature discussing more critical approaches to action research, including Carr and Kemmis () . These chapters described significant reconsideration of the concepts of educational practice, research practice, and participation. This twenty-first century thinking shapes the intention of this version of The Action Research Planner with its new sub-title Doing Critical Participatory Action Research .

Doing Critical Participatory Action Research provides a summary of the conceptual analysis that emerged in the contributions Kemmis and McTaggart made to the SAGE Handbooks of Qualitative Research . Our recent theoretical analyses, especially of the nature of practices and the way they are held in place by practice architectures , have also expanded the conceptual furniture of critical participatory action research, as we understand it. These analyses aim to provide critical participatory action researchers with a richer language of and about practice, to throw light on the pre-conditions that shape current practices, often invisibly. In Chap. ) , we outline the theory of practice architectures . This Planner also provides detailed guidance about how people can participate in critical participatory action research using an extended theory of critical participatory action research.

Reading beyond this version of the Planner is needed to reach a more elaborated understanding of the rationale for action research as a practice-changing practice (Kemmis , p. 169) . However, unlike Lewin, we now think that it is more helpful to think about theory not just as texts but as dynamic and changing, and as constituted in practices of theor ising that orient us to the world in distinctive waysso we continue to ask, Are we seeing things as they really are?

In the literature, the term action research covers a diverse range of approaches to enquiry, always linked in some way to changing a social practice . The Reason and Bradbury () provide short overviews of some common approaches to action research and include a more detailed critique of different forms of action research. Continuing critique of those other approaches and reflection on our own work in the 1990s has led to our revised and more comprehensive view of critical participatory action research.

In this edition of the Planner , we have moved beyond thinking of action research as an approach to research and change which is best represented as a self-reflective spiral of cycles of planning, acting and observing, reflecting and then re-planning in successive cycles of improvement. We re-affirm that the purpose of critical participatory action research is to change social practices, including research practice itself, to make them more rational and reasonable, more productive and sustainable, and more just and inclusive.

The Planner is structured in five chapters:

The aim of Chap. , we present a new view of participation, which we define by reference to Jrgen Habermass (1987) theory of communicative action , and especially his (1996) views about public spheres and communicative space . This conceptualisation outlines the way participation can be used to establish the legitimacy and validity of knowledge claims and action aimed at making social practices more rational and reasonable, more productive and sustainable, and more just and inclusive.

Chapter ) notion of site ontologies seeing practices as shaped but not determined by the places where they happen. The theory of practice architectures can also help us to understand critical participatory action research as a practice.

Chapter distils our new understandings of critical participatory action research into a guide for participating in such an initiative. It is only through active participation that readers can develop a meaningful understanding of the previous chapters and an authentic grasp of the theory and practice of critical participatory action researchand, we might add, an opportunity to make their own practices more rational, sustainable and just.