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Action research: Limits and Possibilities in Teacher Education
Maria Amélia Santoro FRANCO[*]
Verbena Moreira Soares de Sousa LISITA[**]
Paper presented at the European Conference on Educational Research, University of Crete, 22-25 September 2004
Research as an educative instrument does not exist disconnected from the political context, as it is tied to social purposes and values. Neither research nor education is an arbitrary idea, as their proposals result from a concept of education and from the work that they put into action. Therefore, one must ask: education for whom? For what? – Both guide the understanding of the educational processes. Without an effort to answer them, one is at the risk of treating research and educative issues in a naturalized manner, as if they were not performing in a field that is mined with ideologies and commitments.
(Maria Isabel da Cunha, 2003)
Abstract : This paper discusses the possibilities of action research in teacher education. To do so, it analyzes the nature of this work, emphasizing the need for an education that works towards teacher intellectual autonomy. Confronted with this understanding, action research is approached in its educative-emancipatory dimension, supporting concepts that make reference to the need and to the possibility to form the researcher professor. In this regard, it discusses how action research can produce practice subject “empowerment,” allowing the objective and subjective conditions necessary to build one’s intellectual autonomy. Considering the institutional and social context of the teaching practice, the paper also discusses the hurdles found in the path towards substantiating this proposal. This work is theoretical, based on recent investigational studies in the area of educating teachers and on the critical and reflexive analysis of previous investigations the authors carried out in continued teacher education.
Keywords: action research; teacher education;empowerment
Document type /origin: Conference paper presented at the European Conference on Educational Research, University of Crete, September,22-25, session 3A: Papers.Network10.
Proposal Number: P20040000093
Introduction:
On the nature of the educators’ work and on the need for research in teacher education
Any project intended to educate teachers presupposes a concept of the role of the educator’s profession. Teachers are education professionals. What is the nature of this work? What does it mean to educate the teacher to perform the teaching profession? These are questions that different projects and educational perspectives have tried to answer, interposing technical rationality, particularly since Schön, in the 1980’s, demonstrated the insufficient nature of this university professional’s educational paradigm.[1]
This rationality does not suffice for the understanding of the educator’s work because teaching is a human social practice dominated by complexity, uncertainty, instability, singularity, and conflicts of values (Gómez, 1998). The knowledge educators use in their work is more than a mere set of theoretical propositions. It implies in an understanding of how to perform that encompasses emotional, affective, moral, and ethical aspects. It deals with a knowledge that is ingrained in the person who has the profession of teaching, whose main resource and means of performance is the person him/herself, with their vicissitudes and forms of understanding, feelings, and life experiences. We would actually say that successful education in this profession depends more on sensibility to understand human issues than on dominating scientific propositions. Furthermore, technical rationality is pragmatic, not contemplating the political or moral issues involved in the purposes and objectives of every professional activity that aims at human education (Habermas, 1971).[2]
Teaching is a social practice that seeks to substantiate educational assumptions. Understanding it from this perspective means: a) considering the institutional context it is inserted in and under which it constitutes itself as a practice that occurs in society; b) acknowledging it as a public process, inserted in a tradition that requires meaning; c) understanding that it is concrete people that take-on the commitment to and the ambition of teaching, based on a tradition of its practice, interpreting the meaning and the purpose of context in its performance (Contreras, 1994).
From this point of view, teaching is also a moral and ethical practice that depends largely on the judgment of the person who undertakes it insofar as the meaning and the consequences of his/her practice is concerned. As a moral practice, teaching is a possibility to substantiate the values and intentions proposed by the society where it occurs. In its ethical dimension, teaching presupposes a critical attitude concerning these same values and intentions. This critical attitude is fundamental for an understanding of teaching as a human social practice that does not merely seek to reproduce the current social values and practices – marked by inequality and social injustice – rather to transform it into a more humanistic, just, and respectable social practice.
This understanding brings up the need to work towards educating teachers as professionals who carry out work that is intellectual in nature, with moral and ethical implications that demand an autonomous posture, one that is understood as a permanent construction process for personal and collective emancipation of the current limitations that exist in the institutional and social teaching conditions. This teacher education aspiration is based on the idea of the educator as a critical intellectual, as formulated by Contreras (2002) and based on a critical review of Schön’s (2000) reflexive professor concept, and on Giroux’s (1997) teacher as an intellectual transformer idea, as supported by Smyth (1991), and Carr & Kemmis’ (1988) critical reflection notion.
The author proposes consideration be given to the issue of building teacher autonomy first and foremost as a professional claim and, secondly as an educative demand. In other words, considering it as being intellectual work which, if carried out based on external prescriptions, depending on someone else's knowledge, loses its autonomy and is dehumanized. The idea is that, ultimately, the responsibility for teaching in complex, singular, conflictive, and uncertain situations is the teacher’s, and that this responsibility can only be exercised with independence of judgment, based on one’s own intentions and values.
Nonetheless, independence of judgment does not mean marking territory, or turning teaching into unilateral teacher decision-making. Understanding teaching as a social practice implies in inserting it in a wider performance context involving cultural, historical, ideological, and other factors. It means understanding it, also, as a public professional practice performed in the relationship with others. Thus, the idea of autonomy as a process in construction depends on it being constituted in the relationship with the people implied in the educative practice, based on understanding and cooperation.
The fact that there may be autonomy among the people involved in the educative practice does not mean this is the fruit of balanced positions. The idea of autonomy as emancipation requires a critical distancing regarding the interests and demands of those involved. We don’t live in a merely plural society, rather in one that is divided into social classes, with unequal material and cultural conditions of existence. Thus, building autonomy supposes a position regarding the transformation in the current conditions that distort and limit educative practice, including interests and conflicts that permeate the relations that occur in teaching.
Finally, this idea of autonomy implies in the awareness of the incomplete nature of our values and intentions, as well as of us as human being. While autonomy requires commitment to values that express certain intentions and interests, it is not possible to reduce it to a sole and unified position, accepted as universal truth, even if it is in the field of those who defend values directed towards the common good and social justice. For this, exercising autonomy in the relationship with others presupposes paying attention to them and to us as incomplete and imperfect human beings.
If autonomy is not a present quality, rather a process, in which it is necessary for the people who participate in the process to have objective and subjective conditions to build it, it is important to work in order for teachers to feel they are active subjects in this process. This is what several authors who are critical of the education area have been denominating as empowerment, i.e., as a process of building the power of those who participate in education; power is understood here as the awareness of oneself as the subject of the praxis.
It is based on these ideas that the need for critical action research in educating teachers will be argued.
On the concept of using critical action research to articulate teacher education
The critical concept of action research, based on the critical theory, seeks to reach emancipatory objectives through reason. Habermas (1987), when developing the proposal of a critical social science, understood that emancipation can only be possible through the mediation of a critical theory that allows individuals the conditions to become aware of the limitations and distortions of their conditions of existence. The means to reach these intentions is ideological criticism, as proposed by Marx. In this regard, the proposal of a critical social science is to unveil the limitations and distortions of reality, making it a little more visible to those who affect them.
To achieve this objective, the critical action research proposals (Grundy, 1982; Carr and Kemmis, 1988), based on Habermas, condition their performance to a systematic reflection on the practice and on the theoretical analysis of how the institutional and social contexts limit the subjects’ performance. The goal is having this understanding process transform the non-reflexive practice into praxis, i.e., into socially committed and theoretically founded action, which may transform the theory that informed it (Contreras, 1994).
From this perspective, it is expected that performing action research will become a process through which the participants can develop a style of critical questioning regarding their practices, aiming at transforming them. According to the Carr and Kemmis proposal, critical action research is a form of self-reflexive investigation that participants in social situations undertake aiming at improving the rationality and the justice in their own practices, their understanding of them, and the situations in which they occur (1988, p. 174).
According to these and other authors[3], the following are the basic conditions to develop action research in this perspective:
a)research that integrates both researchers and participants formatively, committed to the emancipation process of all subjects who participate in it and connected to social commitments with the collectivity;
b)a form of research that induces, motivates and potentializes the subjects’ cognitive and affective mechanisms towards taking-on, with autonomy their self-educating process;
c)research that works with the dialectic complexity of the educational process; this implies in creative flexibility; which evolves according to the unpredictability of the context; which offers space to the unforeseen, and to the new and emerging, while also offering the possibility of intelligibility of concepts that emerge in the process;
d)research that allows teachers, who are in the process of getting their education, to learn to dialogue with themselves, giving them direction and meaning in their personal development; to learn to dialogue with the teaching practice, whether their own or their colleagues’ and, in this dialogue, to build a critical and reflexive view regarding them; to also learn to dialogue with the contexts of their practice, contexts that condition their profession.
With these characteristics, one can notice that the purpose of critical action research is not limited to producing data and theories about the educative activity. The intention is, fundamentally, to allow the participants a meta-theoretical cognition supported by reflection and based on a socio-historical context (Kincheloe, 1997). This understanding, however, does not mean making knowledge production a secondary process in this type of research. On the contrary, for dealing with knowledge that is strongly connected to transforming reality, it must be produced in a strict, systematic, and ethical manner (Contreras, 1994).
On the possibilities and on the limitations of critical action research in training for educator autonomy
Based on our experience with research in educating teachers, we highlight three action research possibilities in forming educator autonomy: a) the contribution to the empowerment processes for teachers, considered subjects of knowledge and of transformation in the practice; b) the articulation of theory in practice and of practice as the possibility to build theory; c) the production of knowledge as an educative reality through the integration of scientific and practical knowledge.
a) Action research as a subject “empowerment” instrument towards the effective consideration of teachers as subjects of knowledge
Tardif (2002: 243) analyzes, based on his experience and research abut the educator profession, in several countries, that teachers will only be acknowledged as subjects of knowledge when they are granted the status of true actors, replacing the current status of technicians who reproduce and execute educative reforms conceived based on a bureaucratic logic in which measures and prescriptions come from top to bottom. The author claims that, in most countries, teachers rank last in the decision-making mechanism and in the power structure hierarchical sphere that governs school systems.
In Brazil, this reality is present in all school levels, particularly regarding elementary school educators. The power these teachers have to influence their schools’ life, the structure of the curriculum they work with, as well as the teaching and administrative organizational structure that affects their daily work is quite reduced, often null[4].
How would it be possible to build conditions for teachers to feel as the subject of their own work, as the actors of their practices, encouraged to put their knowledge into motion, with power to decide and create in complex situations? This is a task those who teach educators need to confront. We have noticed that ever so often, continued education courses aimed at educators haven’t always been able to achieve relevant results towards enabling the participants to turn their practices into spaces of knowledge transformation and recreation.
In this regard, Tardif (2002:238-239) proposes conceptual and practical changes for the research practices currently in effect:
a)work towards having teachers no longer being seen as research objects, rather considered as subjects of knowledge;
b)invest in the elaboration of new research practices that consider teachers as collaborators or co-researchers, giving them space in research devices;
c)not aim to produce merely research about teaching and teachers, rather research in teaching and with teachers;
d)work for teachers to consider themselves as producers of knowledge and to learn to reformulate their own discourse, perspectives, interests, and individual or collective needs in language with certain objectification.
It will be aiming at finding mechanisms to achieve the needs that have been brought-up that we will emphasis the issue of empowerment. As explained before, educator autonomy is not a quality that is present individually, in each subject, rather a process that gradually ensures the teacher may take over his/her social responsibility for teaching in complex situations that were built historically and are impaired ideologically. This can only be done with a subject who considers him/herself as an actor in his/her history, an empowered subject, enabled to exercise the power that comes from his/her practice.
The issue at hand is: how will the teachers, by and large educated within the presuppositions of a technical rationality, know how to invert the epistemology that governs their practices and become subjects who are critical of a new practical conception?
Secondly, how will the teachers, inserted in a sociopolitical context that depreciates their profession on a daily basis, immersed in a hegemonic model of a liberal representative democracy (Santos, 2002: 46) that disrespects the role of social mobilization and collective action, be able to break away from such conditioning factors and become historical subjects committed to an emancipatory political praxis?
Finally, how will teachers, historically stripped of their role as active participants, largely inserted in processes of pauperization of their profession (Cunha, 1999), find strength and paths to constitute themselves as social actors, critical and committed to a new life and world concept?
Suojanem (1999), who has published a paper called “action research as an empowerment strategy,” claims the creative and transforming exercise of a professional practice can only be exercised by subjects who believe they control their lives and decisions, allowing them to feel encouraged to change, review, and transform. Empowering, to the author, is the act of building skills, seeking personal and collective development, apprehending and increasing power of knowledge and control – which incorporates itself by exercising cooperation – sharing knowledge, and collective work. This means to commit oneself to common objectives, taking-on risks and demonstrating initiative, creativity, and an ethical attitude that comes from the social commitment one takes-on collectively.
Candau (2000: 11) when referring to the work of education on human rights, claims that “all work of Education in Human Rights must begin by ‘empowering’ these subjects to build an affirmative process for their identities, whether personal or ethnic, whether their genre or social identity, but building a positive identity is fundamental in Human Right education processes.”
We believe Candau’s consideration may be generalized to the overall process of teacher education: teachers, or future teachers, must review and take-on, in the collective, the identity of their social and professional role, reaffirming the dignity of their work and the potentialities of a praxis that is committed to the collective. To accept oneself as the subject of knowledge, the teacher must first and foremost, and in a concomitant manner, accept oneself as a historical subject.
Studies[5] show that educator knowledge is composed of a multiplicity of dimensions, among which the highlight goes to: professional training knowledge; disciplinary knowledge; curricular knowledge; and the knowledge of experience. However, one must consider that such different types of knowledge organize, inter-cross, mobilize, and reformulate themselves through the capacity of the interrogative, open-minded, critical and creative subject. In this regard, one may say that the subject, to integrate and potentialize such knowledge in his/her professional practice, needs to be empowered; capable of maintaining dialogue and contact with him/herself; with availability to take advantage of the criticism and of the collective to recompose and update such knowledge.