Abstract
This chapter celebrates Susan Groundwater-Smith as a self-reflective practitioner who has not merely been an advocate for practitioner inquiry but has also been an exemplary model of the self-reflective practitioner. It uses the six elements (elaborated in the chapter) of a new definition of critical participatory action research as a framework for exploring Susan’s contributions to reflective practice in education and teacher education. It argues that profound commitments evidenced in her life and work over 30 years demonstrate that she is at least an accidental, if not a deliberate, practitioner of this form of action research. The six elements concern (1) practice, praxis and effective-historical consciousness, (2) critical and self-critical reflection, (3) communicative space, (4) exploratory action, (5) having a practical aim, and (6) having an emancipatory aim. The chapter concludes that, as a teacher, as a teacher educator, as an advocate for the disadvantaged, as a researcher, and as an advocate for education, she exemplifies the virtues of the self-reflective practitioner.
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Notes
- 1.
Schatzki (1996, 2002) argues that practices are ‘the site of the social’—features of ‘human coexistence’, and that they cannot be understood solely by understanding the intentional actions of individual persons. He argues that practices are social in nature—that they are collectively formed through social action in history, and differently inflected in particular places and times. If this is so, it follows that practices must be understood in terms of action and interaction in groups and collectivities as well as in terms of the action of individuals. Further, if action research is to grasp practice in its social as well as its individual features, then it will best be undertaken as both an individual and a collective process by those whose action and interactions constitute the practice. Moreover, to embrace the perspectives of those involved from the subject or participant perspective, each in relation to the others involved, action research cannot but involve those who are participants in the practice as participants in the research process, preferably from the inception of an action research initiative to its conclusion, preferably as the agents of the research (not as ‘objects’ or only as observers), and preferably together, as collective agents. This kind of involvement of participants in the research process has been an aspiration characteristic of action research since its beginnings (see e.g. Lewin 1952).
Advocates of understanding social life and work from the perspective of ‘communities of practice’ similarly emphasise the ‘situated knowledge’ of those involved (e.g. Lave and Wenger 1991; Wenger 1998). It follows from these insights that the study of practices entails taking into account the interlocking perspectives of those whose activities collectively constitute the practice.
It is not clear, however, whose activities in fact constitute a practice—only those involved in it at the moment, in this particular location, or those who have been and will be involved in and affected by it across the whole history of the practice, wherever they are? Given that the boundaries of the groups or collectivities involved in particular practices are frequently permeable and blurred, it might be better not to think of action research in terms of ‘projects’ with ‘members’, but instead in terms of ‘initiatives’ involving numbers of people who, at different times and in different locations may take different roles in reflecting on the practice and its formation and transformation (e.g. speaker, hearer, observer, actor, absentee). Such a view of critical participatory action research in public spheres has been advocated by Kemmis and McTaggart (2000, 2005) and Kemmis (2005, 2006), based on Habermas’ writings on communicative action and public discourse in public spheres (Habermas 1984, 1987a, b, 1996, 2003c), on the view that, because practices are collectively formed, a rich understanding of social practices, and legitimate transformation of the practices, practitioners and practice settings involved, can only be achieved through open, fluid and collective discussion and will formation. This view gains further impetus from Habermas’ recognition that there is no single steering centre (and no self-regulating ‘macro-subject’) that can, on its own, instigate change in contemporary Western society (Habermas 2003c), but that change occurs as a result of diverse, often conflicting forces—that is, through contestation. The implication for action research, in order to enact constructive change, is that it should not only pursue self-realisation for individuals and organisations, but that it should also facilitate public debate among those involved in and affected by particular practices (Kemmis and McTaggart 2005).
- 2.
Effective historical consciousness (Gadamer 1975, pp. 267–269) is the ideal state in which an individual interprets a situation, taking into account its historical context, along with and alongside an interpretation of the historicality (the historical embeddedness of their own views in history) of their own beliefs (what Gadamer called their ‘prejudices’). This dialectic of consciousness and self-consciousness, though clearly difficult to achieve, is essential in reaching a rich interpretation of history and one’s own place in it—and especially for action researchers who aim to be self-conscious agents in history (particularly the situations and settings in which they act). Such understanding and self-understanding are intrinsic to praxis (see Carr 2006; on praxis, also see below).
Habermas (for a brief account, see Holub 1991) criticised Gadamer’s view that it is not possible to escape the boundaries of the tradition within which an interpreter interprets the world. Habermas argued that, on the contrary, it is possible, in the process of achieving historical self-consciousness (or effective-historical understanding) to identify for critique aspects of one’s own and others’ thought that have been distorted in the traditions of thought we have inherited, and to explore ways in which these inherited ideas may now be found to be irrational, unjust, unproductive, or in some way contributing to human suffering. Following this view, critical participatory action research aspires, through deepening historical understanding and self-understanding, to create conditions for critical reappraisal of the structures and practices embedded in particular traditions, cultures, discourses, social-political and economic relations, and impacts of human action on environments. Critical participatory action researchers aim to identify current irrationalities, injustices, dissatisfactions and suffering in the situations they inhabit; to ‘read’ them as possible consequences of past and continuing historical conditions and circumstances; and to act to ameliorate or overcome such consequences by changing the practices and conditions that produce them (Kemmis and Brennan Kemmis 2003). Furthermore, critical participatory action researchers aim to ‘read’ (monitor and reflect upon) the consequences of their own actions in history, to determine whether their own changed practices, changed ways of understanding things, or changed conditions and circumstances do in fact produce changed and better consequences (‘better’ in the senses that they are less irrational, less unjust, less unsatisfactory, or less inclined to cause suffering).
- 3.
While praxis has frequently been understood as a property of individual action and actors, it also has a collective face in the collective history-making action of people whose actions collectively make the future conditions enjoyed or endured by communities, nations and co-inhabitants of the earth (Kemmis 2009, 2010). In contemporary times, the significance of praxis has been diminished by the contemporary preoccupation with technē (technical, instrumental or functional knowledge, reasoning and action). This preoccupation deprives practitioners of richer understandings of the moral purpose and historical significance and consequences of their work (Aristotle 2003; Carr 2005, 2006; Carr and Kemmis 1986; Dunne 1993, 2005; Gauthier 1963; Kemmis 2005, 2010; Kemmis and Smith 2008; Schwandt 2005; Saugstad 2005).
Critical participatory action research fosters the collective reflection on the shared consequences of collective action and interactions, making possible collective praxis—that is, doing guided by shared understandings and self-understandings of participants generated through communicative action (Habermas 1984, 1987a, b, 1996, 2003c), which Habermas describes as shared practical reflection and deliberation aimed at reaching intersubjective agreement, mutual understanding and unforced consensus about what to do (see below on communicative space).
- 4.
Participants aim to reflect critically, unravelling problems in order to reveal their causes—that is, exploring how perspectives, social structures and practices have evolved in ways that produce some undesirable consequences. In the tradition of critical theory and its successors (e.g. Horkheimer 1972, Habermas 1972, 2003c), critical participatory action research proposes acting negatively against the identified causes of these consequences (i.e. against irrationality, injustice, dissatisfactions and suffering), as opposed to acting positively to achieve some state of being that appears ideal (in the ‘progressive’ Enlightenment tradition fostered by Auguste Comte’s ‘positivism’ of the mid 19th century).
- 5.
The notion of reflecting self-critically embraces Gadamer’s (1975) ‘effective-historical consciousness’ in the sense of consciousness of one’s own historicality, but goes beyond it in the sense that it aims to discover irrationality, injustice, or causes of dissatisfaction or suffering, not only as a consequence of tradition or historically given conditions or circumstances, but also in the conduct and consequences of one’s own ways of thinking, acting and relating to others. Moreover, by considering the possibility of collective agency and collective praxis, critical participatory action research envisages not only an ‘I’ who is an actor and agent but also a ‘we’ (for example, people enmeshed together in a particular practice) who are collective actors and agents (Carr and Kemmis 1986; Kemmis and McTaggart 1988), who can reflect together on practical situations confronting us, and make critical appraisals not only of conditions and circumstances historically given to us but also of our mutual conduct and its consequences.
In light of Habermas’ (1987a, 1996, 2003c) critique of the social ‘macro-subject’ (a social totality understood as a self-regulating whole) and of praxis philosophy (that envisaged a self-steering state acting on behalf of the social totality), however, critical participatory action research can no longer regard participants as a bounded ‘collective’ (or as an enclosed ‘project group’) as if this group could act in an entirely self-regulating way without regard for perspectives of or the consequences for others (Kemmis and McTaggart 2005). Against this totalising view (and taking a lead from Heidegger and others), Habermas (e.g. 1998, 2001, 2002, 2003a, c) invokes the notion of intersubjectivity as opening a space in which participants’ perspectives and proposals for action can be mutually explored through communicative action. In this conception, neither the individual subject nor a social whole is totalised as actor or agent; instead, plurality and diversity (and recognition of and respect for others as subjects like oneself) are acknowledged and understood as ‘in play’ in communicative spaces where participants meet one another to reach shared understandings about the world, each other and themselves (their own ways of thinking, acting and relating).
This is to adopt an unbounded notion of both singular and social selves, seeing the individual as a (changing, developing) participant in conversations that develop and continue through time, and social ‘selves’ as constituted in communicative spaces that similarly develop and continue. On this view, an action research ‘project’ might better be understood as a conversation-space in which proposals for action are discussed, decisions about what to do are reached, and the actions taken are deliberately (monitored and) evaluated in the light of their consequences (against criteria of rationality and the validity of knowledge in the semantic dimension; justice and solidarity in the social dimension; and in terms of the integrity, capability and identity of persons in the dimension of historical time; Habermas 1992, pp. 343–344).
- 6.
As suggested earlier, the notion of communicative space refers to spaces in which people encounter each other reciprocally, as subjects worthy of recognition and respect, as subjects. Communicative spaces are spaces in which people consciously try to reach intersubjective agreement, mutual understanding and unforced consensus about what to do. The notion of communicative space embodies the inclusive, collective, transformative aims of critical participatory action research. As an ideal (although always challenged by power asymmetries which threaten its achievement), the process of communicative action involves people together seeking understanding and consensus about what to do by speaking freely and opening themselves up to creative, responsive, democratic approaches to problems (Habermas 1987b, 1996, 2003c; Kemmis and McTaggart 2005). In an earlier formulation (Habermas 1979) of ‘communicative competence’ and ‘the ideal speech situation’, Habermas had emphasised three (sometimes four) ‘validity claims’—‘truth’ in the sense of accuracy, sincerity or truthfulness, and moral rightness or appropriateness (and sometimes adding comprehensibility). Later (1996), after the publication of the Theory of Communicative Action (Habermas 1984, 1987a), and recognising that agreement about these was only possible when people were in communication with others, he drew attention (Habermas 1987b and especially 1996, Chap. 8) to the role of communicative action in opening communicative space between people—the space of intersubjectivity (which plays an important role in some of his more recent works, including Habermas 1998, 2002, 2003a, b, c). Opening communicative space, in turn, depends on our use of language as a tool for reaching understanding. Describing the linguistic grounding of intersubjectivity in The Future of Human Nature (Habermas 2003a), he writes:
As historical and social beings we find ourselves always already in a linguistically structured lifeworld. In the forms of communication through which we reach an understanding with one another about something in the world and about ourselves, we encounter a transcending power. Language is not a kind of private property. No one possesses exclusive rights over the common medium of the communicative practices we must intersubjectively share. No single participant can control the structure, or even the course, of processes of reaching understanding and self-understanding. How speakers and hearers make use of their communicative freedom to take yes- or no-positions is not a matter of their subjective discretion. For they are free only in virtue of the binding force of the justifiable claims they raise towards one another. The logos of language embodies the power of the intersubjective, which precedes and grounds the subjectivity of speakers.
…The logos of language escapes our control, and yet we are the ones, the subjects capable of speech and action, who reach an understanding with one another in this medium. It remains ‘our’ language. The unconditionedness of truth and freedom is a necessary presupposition of our practices, but beyond the constituents of ‘our’ form of life they lack any ontological guarantee. Similarly, the ‘right’ ethical self-understanding is neither revealed nor ‘given’ in some other way. It can only be won in common endeavour. From this perspective, what makes our being-ourselves possible appears more as a transsubjective power than an absolute one. (pp. 10–11)
- 7.
In order to devise solutions to substantial problems and issues (like contemporary problems of sustainability in the face of global warming, or the loss of meaning and significance from the work of professional practitioners caused by the functionalist reasoning that bedevils contemporary policy processes in almost every field of human endeavour), we must look beyond immediate goals, roles, rules, functions and outcomes to the conditions that make these goals, roles, rules, functions and outcomes possible. Critical participatory action research aims to create spaces in which participants can explore the (profoundly intertwined) cultural-discursive, social-political, material-economic and personal origins and dimensions of problems in order to make possible the reconstruction of the collective and individual practices implicated in producing such problems (Kemmis 2005, 2006).
- 8.
Habermas (1984, 1987a, b) argues that, in late modernity, contemporary social systems, steered in the media of money and administrative power, have become ‘relatively autonomous’ of the lifeworlds in which social life is anchored (in culture and discourses in the semantic dimension; in social integration and solidarities in the social dimension; and in the integrity, capability and identity of persons in the dimension of historical time). These media-steered social systems, necessary to late modern social organisation, have become ‘relatively autonomous’ of lifeworlds because of the functional reason characteristic of their operation—that is, they are framed and fuelled by organisational or institutional goals, roles, rules, functions and outcomes measured principally in terms of money, profit and administrative power. Being steered by these immediate concerns, they increasingly cut across the lifeworld functions of reproduction and transformation of cultures and societies, and the formation and transformation of the integrity, capability and identities of persons—lifeworld processes that are necessary to sustain cultures, societies and persons. An effect is that the integrity of cultures, societies and persons seems somehow overlooked, forgotten or even denied from the perspective of social systems qua system, although from its own perspective, an organisation may merely be taking a neutral stance on questions of the integrity of cultures, societies and persons.
On the other hand, given the pervasiveness of organisations in the constitution of late modern life, systems increasingly ‘colonise’ lifeworld relationships, bringing the content and manner of their operations into spaces like family and community life and the discussion spaces of civic society. A consequence is that people increasingly regard themselves in the roles of ‘client’ (in relation to the steering medium of administrative power) and ‘consumer’ (in relation to the steering medium of money). Habermas argues that contemporary social life is characterised by boundary-crises that arise at the points where organisations (systems) and lifeworlds intersect—at times when the needs on the two ‘sides’ are more or less incompatible. Social movements may arise, more or less spontaneously, in response to some of these boundary-crises—as in the case of the green movement which has arisen in response to various environmental crises induced by the operation of contemporary agribusiness, industrial pollution and systems of energy production and use.
Arguably, critical participatory action research has a natural ‘home’ in such social movements, in the organisation of will-formation and decisions about how to respond at local as well as global levels to contemporary crises (Kemmis 2000, 2001; Kemmis and McTaggart 2005). Arguably, too, critical participatory action research has a role in exploring boundary-crises at the intersections of systems (organisations) and lifeworlds, if and when systems transfer the burden of their operation to lifeworlds—for example, when participants experience a sense of loss of meaning (or incomprehensibility), justification or legitimacy, or in the form of irrationality, injustice, dissatisfactions or suffering. Acting either as participants in or observers of systems and lifeworlds, critical participatory action researchers may thematise such problems for discussion, consider alternative courses of action to address them, and take action to ameliorate or overcome them (monitoring and reflecting upon the conduct and consequences of their actions).
- 9.
See Fals Borda (1979).
- 10.
Critical participatory action research advocates exploratory interventions, that is, making changes during the course of individual and collective practice in order to improve it, as opposed to only passively intervening in practice after problems have arisen (Dewey 1916; Kemmis and Brennan Kemmis 2003). It aims to take communicative action into social practice, using social practice and practical and critical reflections on the consequences of practice as a source of new understandings and future reflection (Habermas 1987a; Kemmis and McTaggart 2005). Critical participatory action researchers make critical analyses of practice/praxis using a range of perspectives in order to create shared understandings of and orientations to social reality, with the intention of transforming social realities (Fals Borda 1979; Kemmis and McTaggart 2000, 2005) so that they may become less irrational, less unjust and less inhumane.
- 11.
The aim of practical reason—reasoning about what Reid (1978) calls “uncertain practical questions”—is praxis or right conduct in response to a particular situation (wise and prudent action, frequently oriented by traditions of thought and debate about relevant issues). Practical reason views both ends and means of action as problematic, and aims to equip people (as agents) with better ways of understanding action (phronēsis) and greater capacities for moral action (praxis) (Aristotle 2003; Carr and Kemmis 1986; Carr 2006). Action researchers conduct research into their action in parallel with doing whatever it is they are doing in order to enhance praxis for both the good of individuals and the good for humankind.
- 12.
Critical participatory action research aims to liberate people from harmful constraints (often historically given, whether given by tradition, or by social or economic or material conditions and circumstances)—from irrationality or lack of justification in the cultural-discursive dimension; from injustice and illegitimacy in the social dimension; and from suffering and dissatisfaction in the material-economic dimension. Collaborative reflection and theorising via critical reasoning helps participants determine how a situation has arisen and engages them in political action directed towards an emancipatory reconstruction of the setting (Habermas 1972, 1974, 1975). In the context of education, for example, policy makers and teachers could use less prescriptive, less instrumental ways of assessing students’ learning, thereby contributing to the development of less alienating, less controlled educational settings and less marginalised, less uninspired learners (Freire 1970a, b).
- 13.
The tenet that every person is of equal value by virtue of being a person is at the heart of critical participatory action research, hence its commitment to collaborative reflection and action, and to the abolition of social injustice (Horkheimer 1972; Habermas 2003c). For example, valuing students of minority cultures equally with students of majority cultures, as reflected in both the curriculum and in the way teachers conduct their classes, will help to build a less intolerant, less unjust school community. Young (1990) argues that injustice consists in domination and oppression—arguing that domination is constituted by social structures or practices that unreasonably constrain self-determination, and that oppression (in the five distinctive forms of exploitation, marginalisation, powerlessness, cultural imperialism and violence) is constituted by social structures or practices that unreasonably constrain self-expression and self-development.
- 14.
Critical participatory action research has the universal aim of building a better world via engagement in communicative forms of life and, sometimes, collective historical action through social movements (Touraine 1981; Habermas 1987a, b, 1996). Arguably, critical participatory action research initiatives in education aimed at reconstructing schools to be less irrational, unjust, unsatisfactory and unsustainable, will result in wider communities and societies which are more rational, just, inclusive, satisfying and sustainable.
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Kemmis, S. (2011). A Self-Reflective Practitioner and a New Definition of Critical Participatory Action Research. In: Mockler, N., Sachs, J. (eds) Rethinking Educational Practice Through Reflexive Inquiry. Professional Learning and Development in Schools and Higher Education, vol 7. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-0805-1_2
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