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Processing Action Research

...post a brief response that articulates your growing/changing understanding of action research in education (or some aspect of it) in the context of your own research area.

Kemmis, S., McTaggart, R., & Nixon, R. (2014). The action research planner: Doing critical participatory action research. Singapore Heidelberg New York Dordrecht London: Springer.

My research area is (currently) working with Indigenous communities (or maybe just one) in higher education to build capacity for digital storytelling as a distinctly Indigenous approach to online, distributed, or digital education. To borrow a term I learned from the podcast Recoding Relations (Haberl & Schnell, 2019), I am interested in Indigitizing education.

I have been reminded so far in EDCP512A of the reasons that Indigenous research methodologies are similar to what we have been learning with respect to educational action research (EAR). In particular, the need for EAR to be both participatory and have a foundational goal of socially just change.

Like EAR, Indigenous research is never undertaken on participants, but rather "by, and with, and for" (Lambert, 2018) participants. Kemmis, McTaggart, and Nixon describe critical participatory action research as having

the goal of helping participants to work together towards making their individual and collective practices meet the criteria of rationality, sustainability and justice—working together to make their practices

  • more rational in the senses of being more reasonable, more comprehensible, more coherent, and more sensible;
  • more sustainable (including for the long term and for future generations) in the sense that they are more productive, more satisfying, and less wasteful; and
  • more just in the sense that they more inclusive, more solidary (fostering solidarity), that they avoid the injustices of domination and oppression (Young 1990), and they do not cause harm to or suffering among particular individuals or groups. (2014, p. 22)

I am becoming more aware of the need and the process required to root my research in reciprocal relationships where my role (particularly as a white settler) is to give to the community more than it is to extract, analyse, and report data and results from the community.

References

Haberl, M., & Schnell, A. (2019). Recoding Relations. In Recoding Relations. Retrieved from https://www.recodingrelations.org

Kemmis, S., McTaggart, R., & Nixon, R. (2014). The action research planner: Doing critical participatory action research. Singapore Heidelberg New York Dordrecht London: Springer.

Lambert, S. R. (2018). Changing our (Dis)Course: A Distinctive Social Justice Aligned Definition of Open Education. Journal of Learning for Development - JL4D, 5(3). Retrieved from http://www.jl4d.org/index.php/ejl4d/article/view/290