Interlude

    I found McNiff’s piece to be very interesting in both its composition (as representative of her point about narrative) and her critique of the primacy of social science research and its influence on action research conducted by educators. This past fall, I took a course on inquiry (TE 808) in which I conducted my own action research and wrote a research paper. At the beginning of the process, I approached the task with more of a social science mindset, hoping my implemented strategies would provide a certain result. It took reading more about action research (texts such as The Power of Questions, Falk and Blumenreich, 2005) and continued prompting from my professor to focus on the process of inquiry and not be so outcome oriented in order to shift my mindset. I think that many teachers are conditioned in their preparation programs (and often then in their professional lives) to believe that theory is meant to be absorbed and applied more than critiqued and that personal experience only has validity within one’s own classroom. McNiff (2012) articulates these ideas when she states:

    “A special emphasis is laid in these stories about how the criteria and standards of judgment for assessing the quality of the research, often to do with the statistical analysis of results to show the potentials of the research for generalizability and replicability, are firmly established and are used to demonstrate the validity of the account and, thus, legitimize the status of the research and the researcher. I am concerned about how these stories can act as a force of centralized control, shutting out less powerful voices and forming a grand narrative that excludes local narratives. 

    Second, I am concerned about the way action research itself has been colonized and reconfigured in some quarters to fit into the dominant social sciences framework, a situation that denies the values of social justice and democratic forms of life that underpin action research and distorts its potentials for social change. The stories that communicate this kind of instrumental action research adopt the same criteria and standards of judgment as the traditional social sciences. They assume an air of the legitimate force of instruction so that the more personalized narrative form through which practitioners' educational theories tend to be communicated is frequently delegitimized and threatened. The hegemonizing power of the stories of performance management fit well within political contexts such as the United States, whose dominant policy research stories are about the implementation of actions to ensure specific end results, with substantial funding for those who conform and penalty points for those who do not” (pg. 4).

    If action research is centralized, colonized, and reconfigured “to fit the dominant social sciences framework” and its quality and legitimacy are judged by “statistical analysis of results to show the potentials of the research for generalizability and replicability," then where does that leave the individual teacher's voice expressing her "local narrative," her unique experience in the classroom? I think that there was and is such a fierce debate about the use of statistical, quantifiable data in the evaluation of teachers and students that qualitative data has been underdiscussed and devalued. One thing I really appreciate about McNiff's approach is that she articulates a clearer way for teachers to value the qualitative data of inquiry-based action research, the reflection on that data, and the act of teacher's sharing their narratives: by comparing it to one's the writer's espoused educational values. I don't think I fully understand what McNiff and the scholars she references are saying about the concept of "validity," but the claim about teachers seeing the value of action research for their school but not seeing the need to improve their own research capabilities and do quality theorizing resonates with me. I think it comes down to the individual's self-inquiry not being valued as much as statistical analysis is, both in the educational field and in life in general.

    This piece has made me really consider my own values and the need to articulate them in explicit terms in order for them to be realized in my teaching. That is some of the work that I plan to do in evaluation of the various data I will review for my concluding post. I think that the test of values that McNiff proposes are a good place to start:

    The first test is grounded in Polanyi's (1958) idea of having faith in the rightness of one's capacity for personal knowledge, bearing in mind that one's personal knowledge may be mistaken—for example, it may be rooted in self-delusion. The second test is grounded in the researcher's willingness to engage with criteria such as those suggested by Habermas (1987, 2003), that the claim be made in honesty, sincerity, and truthfulness and with an awareness that it is made within a normative context. These ideas have to be relevant to practitioners if they wish to re-create their professional identities as practical theorists and not only as practitioners acting as data that external researchers can use (pg. 13).

 

I hope to approach this task with self-belief and awareness of my own fallibility and reflect on my values with "honesty, sincerity and truthfulness." I also hope to achieve the greater agency and professional growth that McNiff speaks of. As I pursue this task, I think my biggest questions are about how much data to gather, what sources of data I should be using beyond my own reflection posts, and how to give my letter an "internal validity" by measuring it against my educational values. I think inherent in these questions is also the question of how much should the way I live my life outside of the classroom, my personal values, and the way I make meaning of the world inform my curriculum? I see myself being oriented in that question, and am made uncomfortable by it. I think I will have to navigate the introspection necessary to have a clear response for this concluding post alongside my desire not to center myself in my curriculum and practice.