Educational Strategies in Pragmatic Action Research

One of the most important and frequent paths leading people into the practice of action research (AR) has been through the field of education5 in its various contexts. Education, as we use the term here, refers to everything from reforms of the formal school system, from primary to secondary schools, to universities and postgraduate

Feminist Analyses of Inequality and Development in Pragmatic Action Research

In our teaching experience over the past decade, after we have laid out the basic perspectives of AR, students ask about the relationship between feminism and AR. They correctly perceive that feminist views deal with many of the same issues found in AR: a critique of positivism, an analysis of power relations, a respect

Frameworks of Educational Action Research

Though not all AR-relevant educational work deals with adult education, one of the peculiarities of this field is that it seems that the major intellectual syn­theses and setting of the frameworks in use come from adult education rather than from conventional primary and secondary education and higher educa­tion. These larger syntheses serve our purposes

Reforming Education in the North

1. EDUCATIONAL AR IN THE SCHOOLS AND TEACHING PROFESSIONS No practice that is engaged in by hundreds of teachers and university fac­ulty is likely to be homogeneous; under the heading of educational AR, there are many varieties. To summarize the main thrusts, we see this field as center­ing on primary, secondary, and higher education

Adult Education Approaches in Industrialized Countries

As we stated in the introduction to this chapter, the field of educational AR is huge and heterogeneous. In many ways, the theorists and synthesizers in adult education have gathered the many threads into an overall picture that is more synthetic than those provided by educational action researchers, who may have a more limited

1 Comments

Corporate Classrooms

A striking feature of late capitalism is the emergence of the corporate class­room. The trend is for many companies to create their own training and edu­cation systems. Major actors in this field are multinational consulting firms that have their own training facilities, where all newly employed consultants must go to get an understanding of

1 Comments

Adult Education and Community Development

1. COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT In Chapter 10, we covered a major portion of what can be classified as adult education. Community development efforts such as those spearheaded by the Highlander Center, by the various movements centering around people like Belenky, Bond, and Weinstock (1997), Freire (1970), Gaventa (1982), Hall (1975), and Hinsdale, Lewis, and Waller

The Authority of Evaluation

Being visited by an evaluator, accountant, assessor, accreditation reviewer, or any of the many other figures playing a professional evaluation role is usually experienced as being placed in a subordinate position to a person whose pro­fessional role is to review and evaluate you, your program, or your organiza­tion “objectively.” Nearly all of us have

The Emergence of Participatory Evaluation

Whatever else it does, conventional evaluation generally does not aim to make a positive impact on a project while the project is underway, except in cases of interim evaluations of multiyear projects. Generally, it records outcomes for a particular audience of decision makers. Programs to fight poverty, to teach the uneducated to read, or

Modes of Participatory Evaluation

Within the literature on PE, we can identify at least three different approaches. These approaches to participation are built on different epistemological premises and conceptualize participation in different ways. Their on-the-ground praxis in PE is also dissimilar. One line of thinking is represented by Guba and Lincoln’s (1981, 1989) constructivist approaches. A second line

Action Research in Evaluation Practice

Participatory evaluation strategies have a lot in common with the complexity, diversity, and specificity of action research approaches in general. PE, though a form of practice in its own right, builds directly on work from AR, and many of the authors refer directly to particular AR works as part of their intellectual repertoire. AR

Participatory Rural Appraisal in International Development

Linked to a variety of forms of participatory evaluation but occupying a very different institutional position is a collection of approaches that now generally go under the name of “participatory rural appraisal.”1 PRA is an element in overall socioeconomic development programs, mainly in poor countries. These strategies aim to develop more reliable baseline data

Participation and Sustainability

The environmental movement had a significant influence on promoting par­ticipatory approaches. Early development practice did not have a strong sense of the problems of global ecology and strongly emphasized big, energy­intensive infrastructure projects (from which many development agencies and private sector companies derived financial benefit). The emergence of the “small is beautiful” (Schumacher, 1973)

The Specifics of Participatory Rural Appraisal

Though all major social research is a collaborative endeavor, drawing on the experiences, theories, and expertise of generations of researchers, PRA, like Freire’s pedagogy of the oppressed (1970), is strongly associated with the rep­resentations of it made by a single practitioner: Robert Chambers. Though by no means the only practitioner, Chambers has developed the

Critiques of Participatory Rural Appraisal

Criticism of PRA abounds because so many problems surround its practices in the large development agencies. The development establishment, at least on the surface, has welcomed it as a panacea for getting quick input for the design and evaluation of development programs, but it is by no means clear that these agencies much care

Participatory Rural Appraisal and Action Research

Whatever the problems involved in its deployment, there is a clear relationship between PRA, PE more generally, and AR. Local knowledge is valued and is taken as the basis for development program design and implementation. PRA does result in some warrants for action. These approaches also contain a strong critique of urban professionalism as

Central Perspectives of Action Research

As framed by Reason and Bradbury in their opening chapter for the Handbook of Action Research (2001a), AR centers on producing knowledge that is useful to people in everyday life, that increases the well-being of individuals and com­munities in the context of sustainable relationships with the rest of the world, that is emancipatory in

Human Inquiry in Action Research

PETER REASON ON HUMAN INQUIRY One of the most striking characteristics of these forms of inquiry is their ongoing trajectory of development through the steady incorporation of a wide variety of perspectives and practices. The genealogy of Peter Reason’s work stretches back to the late 1970s, and from then to now there is an

Action Inquiry and Self-Reflective Inquiry

Within this array of approaches, there clearly are different kinds of emphases. One such emphasis takes a harder-edged approach to the role of personal inquiry in making AR processes possible. Some of this work is influenced by the work of Argyris (see Chapter 15, “Action Science and Organizational Learning”), but it also owes a

1 Comments

Cooperative Inquiry in Action Research

1. JOHN HERON ON COLLABORATIVE INQUIRY John Heron is a collaborator as well as a friendly critic of Peter Reason (he set up the New Paradigm Research Group in London in 1978 with Reason and John Rowan). He is also a prolific writer and practitioner in his own right. While Heron’s work has much