Participatory and critical action research

Abstract

This issue of Educational Action Research includes 12 articles and one review of a podcast. The reviewing of podcasts related to action research is new for our journal, but, in this issue, Mindy Gold introduces us to The Action Research Podcast, hosted by Adam Stieglitz and Joe Levitan. As of this writing they have released 39 episodes, beginning in September 2020. As Gold describes in her review, the Podcast is a source of important information about action research and is enriched by the many guests who share their wisdom with the hosts. Readers of this journal will find the website to be enlightening and a useful resource for their work. I now turn to the regular articles in this issue. In most of them, the authors take either a participatory and/or critical stance toward action research; that is, there are some articles that report on participatory research, some that take a critical stance, and some that do both. It may seem odd that there are articles in this issue that are participatory but not critical, or critical but not participatory. I believe many of the journal’s readers would define participatory research as having a critical perspective; however, as this issue demonstrates, it is possible to have research that is one but not the other. From my reading of the articles, I found six that explicitly stated they were participatory. I next examined the ways in which the authors characterized the participatory nature of their projects. In all six, collaboration between the authors and participants was central to their approach. This was expressed as the studies being co-designed (Morris et al.), set up as a partnership (Chadha et al.), being community-based (Costley et al.; Morris et al.; Schwedhelm et al.), or involving the people who are the focus of the study (Costley et al.; Tiefenthaler, Schmidt, & von Köppen). That said, several of the articles reserved the term ‘researcher’ to refer to the authors, describing community-members or other stakeholders as ‘participants’ (Morris et al.; Schwedhelm et al.; Stapleton & Mayock). Several of the articles featuring participatory methods used definitions of participatory research that included critical aspects, and are, therefore, both participatory and critical. For example, two articles included the use of critical conversations and the construction of knowledge through open and critical dialogues in which hierarchies and power structures were questioned (Schwedhelm et al.; Stapleton & Mayock). Others made clear that participatory research required that relationships among researchers, co-researchers, and participants need to be egalitarian (Tiefenthaler, Schmidt, & von Köppen) and that participants should be recognized and valued, and seen as active agents in existing power and social structures (Stapleton & Mayock). I also looked to see how the authors who used critical methods defined what they meant by that. One aspect was a focus on what Isobel Rainey refers to in her paper as the ‘grassroots’, which she sees as synonymous with ‘outliers, the marginalized, the oppressed, the excluded, those at the rim or on the periphery, [or] practitioners from the global south and the deprived north.’ Other authors worked with young people EDUCATIONAL ACTION RESEARCH 2023, VOL. 31, NO. 4, 611–619 https://doi.org/10.1080/09650792.2023.2252212