Practitioner-based research
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Practitioner-based research: introduction
David J Jones, University of Nottingham
This set of papers is about practitioner based research and draws on the experience of those who are teachers, students or organisers in adult education. Generally the research is carried out by the practitioners themselves, though there are occasionally inputs and guidance from professional academic researchers. Much of this work is done by adult educators studying for a higher degree.
There is, of course, a danger that the practitioner is too close to the events or phenomena being studied; a danger that they find it difficult to be impartial, that they have a vested interest. This issue is addressed by Geoff Anderson et al. in their paper, ‘Issues in Researching a Common Practice’ where they address the problems inherent in researching what others might find commonplace and produce guidelines for this type of research. Mary Thorpe, in her paper ‘Practitioners as Researchers – or is it evaluation? and does it matter?’ similarly offers guidelines. She describes what she considers to be an appropriate stance for practitioners researching/evaluating curricula and argues that this sort of evaluation is different from the classic academic approach to research.
Peter Watson in ‘Adult Educators’ Reflections on MEd Research projects Which they Had Undertaken’ looks at the issues from the point of view of the research supervisor and similarly warns against the dangers of bias when a tutor elicits information from students, in this case students on an MEd course. Issues concerning possible bias and the classic need for objectivity are also raised by Hazel Hampton and William Hampton in ‘Practitioner Research as Continuing Self-Education’. These authors see research as a quest for understanding rather than proof and question the need for objectivity; they prefer to value the subjective experiences of the researcher and the researched and advocate co-operative enquiry groups as a research method.
Issues around the relationship between the researcher and the researched are also addressed by Mike Davis in his paper, ‘Practitioner-based Enquiry: In-service Teacher Education as a Research Environment’. He explores the tensions which exist between the needs of practitioners and the ability of the researcher to meet them.
Finally, Ian Bryant examines how adult educators, as practitioners, understand the concept of ‘reflective practice’ and make use of it in their teaching and professional development. In his paper, ‘Whose Line is it Anyway? The Use of Transcripts in Researching Reflective Practice’, he looks at the act of transcribing interviews as reflective practice and asks important questions about the authorship of the transcript.
What all these papers have in common is a focus on issues of bias and objectivity in practitioner-based research. These theme is approached in different ways but remains central. Ethical and philosophical questions are raised about the ownership of research and about the need for, even the existence of, a classically objective approach to this type of research.
Reproduced from 1993 Conference Proceedings, pp. 107 SCUTREA 1997