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Becoming more reflexive as a researcher

Rennie Johnston, Department of Adult Education, University of Southampton

In this paper, I want to focus on two stages in my development as a reflective practitioner and researcher: the transition from being an adult education practitioner to becoming a full-time researcher; and the process of negotiating and creating meanings with sponsors. I will conclude by raising some questions about writing reflexively.

Background

In 1985, after a number of years as an LEA adult educator, I left a well-paid job as Deputy Head at a high profile Community School to become a full-time contract researcher working with unwaged adults, firstly on a joint LEA/Southampton University Replan project sponsored by NIACE and then on an FEU Replan project focusing on curriculum development issues. The projects ran consecutively over 3-4 years and I worked on both with two part-time colleagues and in collaboration with full-time University and LEA staff. I wrote the final reports for both projects which were subsequently published as: ‘Exploring the Educational Needs of Unwaged Adults’, NIACE, 1987, and ‘Negotiating the Curriculum with Unwaged Adults’, FEU, 1989.

A few years later, as part of my PhD, ‘Education with Unwaged Adults as Community Adult Education’ (1991), I undertook a reflexive methodological critique of the work of the two projects. This was, at one level, a retrospective reflection on my work in the projects and, at another, a commentary on the workings of reflexivity, ‘bending back on oneself’ within the research.

The former involved re-viewing the whole context and process of the project action and the construction of the texts, therefore it was bound to be coloured by my subsequent experience and knowledge of adult education theory and practice as a university adult educator. Thus in conducting my reflexive methodological critique I adopted the concept of ‘review’ which Usher and Bryant explain as being a process where ‘..theory is not applied to practice; rather, the process can be conceptualized as one where practice is reviewed (re-viewed) through theory.’[1]

In focusing on the workings of reflexivity within the research, I attempted to surface and problematise pre-understandings, values and research processes not fully acknowledged at the time. Here my starting point was that:

...reflexivity requires explicit recognition of the fact that the social researcher, and the social research itself, are part and parcel of the social world under investigation.[2]

This inevitably involved a focus on personal reflexivity but went beyond this in that it also investigated the theory/practice inter-relationship within the projects and the whole process of negotiating and creating meanings and knowledge.

From practitioner to researcher: reviewing pre-understandings and negotiating meanings with participants

Prior to becoming a contract researcher, I had already come to think of myself as a reflective practitioner, having taken an MEd in Adult Education and Community Development and written articles analysing my developing practice as an adult educator. I also had several years experience of developing educational work with unwaged adults where some of my practice was in action-research mode. It was this background that attracted me towards a community-based action-research project with unwaged adults. Equally it shaped my pre-understandings about adult education with unwaged adults and the whole process of action-research.

My new status and situation as a researcher soon required me to question and review these pre-understandings. My previous work experience had been as a benevolent ‘gatekeeper’ working from different formal educational bases. As a self-identified community adult educator, I had always been anxious to distance myself, both ideologically and physically, from my parent institutions. Nevertheless they did provide me with available resources, a clear educational identity and tacit authority for an educational approach and an educational agenda. In my new situation, as a community-based researcher trying to set up a learning resource base in prolonged contact with unwaged adults, I was to find that my authority for conducting an ‘educational’ approach was no longer so uncontested - it had to be justified and negotiated over time and at length in terms of its relevance to and impact on the total lives of the unwaged adults involved in the project.

Carr and Kemmis make the following point in relation to action-research:

The problems of education are not simply problems of achieving known ends; they are problems of acting educationally in social situations which typically involve competing values and complex interactions between different people who are acting on different understandings of their common situation and on the basis of different values about how the interactions should be conducted.[3]

It was all very well for myself and my educator colleagues to have a shared macro-analysis that educational action alone could not solve the problems of unemployment and that indeed too much concentration on employability and coping ran the risk of becoming involved in ‘education for domestication’. However, in developing our research and credibility with unwaged adults, we also had to work out some authentic way of relating our concerns and our educational agenda to their primary concerns: getting a job and surviving both financially and psychologically. It was as a result of this on-going process of negotiation, that, notwithstanding the explicit educational aims of our project brief, we began to take on board the wider agenda of unwaged adults - jobs, welfare rights, information, social and political activities, re-negotiate our aims and purposes and, in addressing their primary concerns, see more clearly how ‘education ...becomes a methodology rather than a goal.’[4]

Increasingly central to the progress of our research was the idea and process of accountability to the unwaged adults involved. In trying to develop this, I began to realise that I had to re-view my ideas on the nature and dynamic of the action-research process. Our original research approach was intended to be a cyclical process of action, reflection and then (revised) action, very much in the tradition of Halsey’s ‘experimental social administration’[5]. A key feature of this approach was the co-ordination, leadership and ultimate control of a Steering Committee representing the different parties with a stake in the project. While the original research proposal had made an explicit commitment ‘…to involve unemployed and local people as active agents in our research process…’, and even although unwaged adults were represented on the Steering Committee, it gradually became clear that if we genuinely wanted to work participatively, we needed to supplement this cyclical, set-piece and representative approach with a participative approach that was more dynamic, democratic and immediately accountable. Therefore we began to operate decision-making on a wider front, working through a variety of Open Meetings and open working groups.

In this way, we began to move towards a more inter-active and reflexive participatory research strategy and understand more clearly Budd Hall’s identification of participatory research being ‘at the same time an approach of social investigation, an educational process, and a means of taking action’[6]. Gradually, as a result of this new more participatory dimension within the very ‘political’ area of unemployment, I also began to become more reflexive as a researcher, become much more aware of my values and my situatedness, and so understand better that:

...‘significant’ research may put the self at risk ...and that certain kinds of research are likely to be more suited to certain kinds of selves as personalities and/or holders of particular values.[7]

From doing research to writing about it - negotiating and creating textual meanings and outcomes

In examining sponsored research, Morgan identifies a possible conflict between a sponsor’s ‘production-oriented mentality that emphasizes the importance of achieving significant useful results’ and the more tentative and self-doubting understandings of the reflective researcher, so raising questions about the validity and generalisability of the research[8]. This was a resolvable problem in the first, NIACE-sponsored, project, because of the location of the key players within a general liberal adult education tradition and discourse. This allowed sufficient common understanding and flexibility to develop a more participatory approach with greater unwaged involvement and ownership of research processes, meanings and outcomes.

In writing periodic project reports I was aware that my writing did not constitute any ‘objective’ viewpoint but rather was my own construction of events and my own interpretation of ‘a multiplicity of viewpoints.’ The final published report succeeded largely in meeting the objectives of the key stakeholders. It was written in a conventional academic style to meet the political agenda of the sponsors and my own personal desire to be recognised as a researcher and an author; it went through a series of drafts, discussions and amendments in consultation with unwaged and other participants so that it reflected a broad consensus of what had taken place and what the major emergent issues were; and it contributed towards the crucial achievement of continuation funding for the project’s on-going work.

However, greater difficulties emerged in relation to the outcomes and final report of the second, FEU-sponsored, project. The FEU’s research traditions and attitudes were considerably different from the reflective action-research practice favoured by myself and my colleagues, and this, in turn, had a very different impact on the negotiation and creation of meanings before, during and at the end of the project.

Whereas in the first project the greatest tension had arisen in negotiating meanings with participating unwaged adults, here the major problem of meanings was with the sponsor itself. Potential difficulties were apparent from the initial project brief. The language favoured by the FEU emphasised ‘innovation’ and ‘transferability’ and the development of ‘skills’ as opposed to our previous project’s focus on participation and situated outcomes. In keeping with the instrumental research tradition of the FEU, it became increasingly clear that our identified research task was to operationalise aspects of the (given) Conceptual Framework outlined in their recently published and widely-promoted FEU manual, ‘Adult Unemployment and the Curriculum’[9]. Lastly, the only really meaningful outcomes for the FEU were to be generalised and written ones. They were looking for the production of a final report with ‘transferable messages’, mainly for institutional consumption, rather than any further exploration and reflection on the problems of ‘acting educationally’ with unwaged adults in specific local circumstances or indeed positive outcomes for the unwaged adults involved. Thus, in this instance, the envisaged text was already shaping the research.

Throughout the project, differences of approach arose between myself and my colleagues as reflective action-researchers and the FEU as sponsors, in the way we began to develop a critique rather than a mere application of the Watts and Knasel Conceptual Framework and in our preference for community-based rather than institutionally-located project action. Indeed, we were reminded at one stage by the FEU that the initial project brief amounted to a ‘quasi-legal document’.

Eventually an accommodation was reached on the development of project action. However the major area of contention was always likely to be the text of the final report. Each interim report and review became rehearsals for what could and should be said in the final text. In writing this final report, I was conscious of a tension between my awareness at one level that every act of writing is simultaneously an act of censorship and my understanding at another that:

We shouldn’t forever be trying to match the substance and form of an account to the expectations of a given audience. This runs the risk of simply re-producing and re-inforcing existing perspectives, rather than challenging and changing them.[10]

A text was finally agreed and published, but only after a number of negotiations and compromises. In constructing this, I and my colleagues were continually weighing up what we needed to say to be true to our principles and experience of reflective practice at the same time as what it was possible to say, granted that the FEU had ultimate control of the final report. With this in mind, I decided not to proceed with any likening of the FEU’s research approach to Glaser and Strauss’s idea of ‘theoretical capitalism’[11], while standing firm on the language of critical and reflexive practice rather than mere curriculum application.

A final commentary on this whole process of negotiating and creating textual meanings is best left to the foreword to the Final Report written by our supervising FEU Field Officer:

This project … was originally intended to explore the implementation of the contrasting elements of the Watts and Knasel curriculum — ‘Leisure’ and ‘Opportunity Creation’. A sub-text of this examination might have been to examine the fitness of different types of institution (eg adult education and further education) to deliver the different elements of the curriculum. During its life, however, the project developed these original aims and also built on a previous NIACE/REPLAN project to produce what was in effect a critique of the Watts and Knasel framework, as well as creating identifying and monitoring good practice in curriculum development with unemployed adults. In this development, issues connected with institutional types, though considered, became a secondary issue.[12]

Writing reflexively: a postscript

My recent experience of trying to write reflexively has helped me to be more confident and self-critical in acknowledging that:

the notion of reflexivity recognises that texts do not simply and transparently report an independent order of reality. Rather, the texts themselves are implicated in the work of reality-construction.[13]

It has also made me more aware of some of the potential problems in writing reflexively:

  • the dangers of becoming stuck at the level of introspective and ‘confessional’ individual reflexivity, without moving on to engage with the wider research process of negotiating and creating meanings and knowledge
  • the problems of attempting to speak for others, notwithstanding one’s emancipatory intent.

[1] R Usher and I Bryant (1989), Adult Education as Theory, Practice and Research. London: Routledge. p93

[2] M Hammers