Action Research and the Politics of Educational Knowledge

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Abstract
There has been an explosion of interest in educational action research. As with many new forms of discourse which challenge existing orthodoxies there is a danger that those dominating what counts as ‘rational’ and ‘educational’ knowledge within our institutions of higher education will attempt to colonise the movement by taking over its rhetoric and incorporating it within the propositional form of their discourse. What counts as valid practice in schools, an area of knowledge long despised by theoreticians as mundane and trivial, and therefore left to the control of practitioners, would be appropriated. We believe that the emancipatory potential of action research, a potential that could raise the intellectual status of competent professional practice and the theories‐in‐use underlying it depends on a logic of question and answer. We think that action research needs a rationale which allows practitioners, through negotiation and collaboration, to regain control of their definitions of good practice. Such a rationale would legitimate claimants theories about their own practice, theories that would both form and be changed by the changing public conversation of all those engaged in that conversation about their own action. In this paper our concerns are threefold: (1) to present a critique of the taxonomy of action research presented by Wilf Carr; (2) to locate this critique in a broader debate about dialectical and propositional logic; and (3) to suggest a method of collaborative theory development that could enhance educational practices. Overall, we hope to exemplify our practice by using a discourse based on a logic of question and answer.

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