Professional Documents
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Action Research at The School Level: Possibilities and Problems
Action Research at The School Level: Possibilities and Problems
Shirley Grundy
To cite this article: Shirley Grundy (1994) Action research at the school level: possibilities and
problems, Educational Action Research, 2:1, 23-37
SHIRLEY GRUNDY
Murdoch University, Australia
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control of knowledge. It is not some outside expert who is seen to be the all
knowing one. Knowledge and action are brought together in the participants.
(iv) By recognising the importance of social and contextual change as well as
change in individual practice, action research challenges assumptions about
the nature of educational reform. As was noted at the beginning of this paper,
traditional assumptions about improvement privilege the role of teachers in
educational improvement, but are either silent on the role of the school as
an entity in its own right or regard the school as the benign organisational
structure for the work of teachers. Action research challenges these
assumptions.
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educational practices are not dependent solely upon the good practices of
individual teachers. The situation in which the work of teachers takes place,
the organisation of the school, was also recognised as having a crucial
impact upon both the work of teachers and the learning of students.
Interestingly, this project also fulfilled the desire expressed by
Stenhouse and discussed above for professional autonomy to be located
within the community of the school. The NSP was grounded in an agreement
between the Education Systems and the Teachers’ Unions that schools
would have the opportunity to suspend established practices and
procedures and experiment with innovative forms of work organisation and
pedagogical practices. In this way the autonomy of schools was not only
being recognised, but actively encouraged as a means of facilitating
educational change.
It is, however, important to understand that this autonomy was
divested to schools, not to individual teachers, and was dependent upon the
participating schools agreeing to use “participative decision making and
co-operative workplace procedures” to investigate alternative forms of work
organisation. In essence, the suspension of established practice and policy
required the conditions upon which action research is grounded:
participation and collaboration.
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making the nation more ‘competitive’. And action research has clearly been
co-opted as a process along the way.
For the educational worker interested in the critical (Carr & Kemmis,
1986) and emancipatory (Grundy, 1987) potential of action research, the
appropriation of the process in a national, ideologically linked project is
problematical. Yet it is also clear from the foregoing description of the
principles within which the NSP was grounded, that the Project was
underpinned by democratic and participative ideals and practices that have
the potential to challenge the taken-for-granted assumptions about the
economic purposes of education. This reflects the spaces that are opened up
within any socio-political agenda for action grounded in alternative values.
Quoting Raymond Williams, Giroux (1981, p. 99) reminds us of this
non-totalising aspect of ideology:
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Conclusion
In this paper I have argued that it is important to recognise the school as a
site of educational reform rather than assuming that the school is simply the
place where teachers carry out their educational work. Much of the current
training and re-training rhetoric, for instance, implies that as long as the
work of each individual teacher can be improved then the quality of
educational provision as a whole can also be improved. Such assumptions
are grounded in outmoded forms of liberalism which no longer provide an
adequate basis for quality education in a postmodern society.
However, a swing of the pendulum to a position which portrays
educational reform as simply a matter of organisational or administrative
restructuring, will also fail. Organisational reform alone will not guarantee
improvement in educational provision any more than will improvement in
the individual pedagogical practices of teachers in isolation from the
organisational structures within which they operate. The provision of quality
education needs to be recognised as a complex interaction between and
among individual, organisational, social and political factors. And action
research provides a process by which school communities can explore those
complex relationships.
I am not particularly concerned, however, that educators in schools
name themselves as doing action research. Quality educational reform is not
dependent upon a particular methodology. Rather, what action research
provides is a set of principles for procedure. One of these principles is clearly
the principle of participation. It is not only experience in schools which has
shown that real change is dependent upon ‘ownership’ of the change, which
is in turn dependent upon participation in the decisions leading to the
change by those most affected by that change. That message comes also
from an abundance of management literature.
Participation brings with it, however, not merely autonomy but also
responsibility. Action research is grounded in principles which allow for both
autonomy and responsibility. These are the commitments to action and
reflection. Action research does not simply mandate the taking of action by
participants to bring about change, it also calls those participants to
account by including the obligation for action to be grounded in and
evaluated through research. Thus change processes which simply say to
schools ‘you choose how you will now organise your school’ are not rational
or justifiable change opportunities unless there is a corresponding obligation
to engage in research related to that change. It is this obligation to link
action to research which was a feature of the National Schools Project.
Such approaches to school improvement are consistent with the
arguments advanced by Stenhouse (1976, pp. 222-3, 143):
I believe that long-term improvement of education through the
utilization of research and development hinges on the creation of
different expectations in the system … The different expectations
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Correspondence
Shirley Grundy, School of Education, Murdoch University, Murdoch, New
South Wales 6150, Australia.
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