Educational Action Research – has it a role to play in higher education?
Paul Greenbank
Lecturer in Business & Management
Department of Business, Management & Leisure
Edge Hill College of Higher Education
St. Helens Road
Ormskirk
Lancashire L39 4QP
Tel. 01695 584541
Email:
Paper presented at the British Educational
Research Association Annual Conference
16-18 September 2004
Educational Action Research – has it a role to play in higher education?
Abstract
This paper considers the value of educational action research to teaching and learning in higher education, drawing upon the author’s experience of carrying out such research in a department of business and management. The paper begins by examining the changing environment within which higher education operates and how the system is now characterised by central control and accountability and with it reduced lecturer autonomy. It is contended that educational action research represents an opportunity for lecturers to gain more control over pedagogic issues and provides a means, especially when a collaborative approach is adopted, of improving teaching and learning. Educational action research enables teaching and learning to be prioritised as an important aspect of the lecturer’s professional role. It is also argued that a collaborative approach provides an opportunity to develop a new form of professionalism in which academics enter into a dialogue with stakeholders about what constitutes right action (in relation to core educational values). The introduction of collaborative action research does, however, represent a significant challenge because it requires the commitment of participants; it needs both a critical and a supportive role from those involved; and it entails the management of a process in which participants often have different values and degrees of influence. Such challenges can only be met by learning from the experience of introducing educational action research into higher education. It is advocated that an action research approach to introducing educational action research is required.
Introduction
Whilst the use of action research has been traced to a number of social reformers (McKernan, 1996), the term is generally associated with the social psychologist Kurt Lewin (Elliot, 1991; McTaggart, 1991; Kember and Gow, 1992). Action research was first applied to education by Stephen Corey in the 1940s (Walker, 2001) and in the UK a key factor influencing the growth of educational action research was the ‘teacher-as-researcher’ movement of the 1960s and 1970s promoted by academics such as Lawrence Stenhouse and John Elliot (Zeichner, 2001). In higher education, however, apart from teacher educators and a small number of other examples (e.g. Kember, 2000, 2002; Walker, 2001) limited use has been made of educational action research (Watters et al., 1998; Zeichner, 2001).
This paper focuses on educational action research and will critically evaluate the value of such research to teaching and learning in higher education. The paper draws upon my experience as a lecturer in business and management at Edge Hill College of Higher Education, especially my recent and continuing attempt to introduce more collaborative forms of assessment on to our undergraduate and post-graduate courses using an action research approach (see Greenbank, 2003).
The paper will begin by identify key contextual issues that it is believed may impact upon the application of educational action research in higher education. It then goes on to consider whether action research can offer anything new to the way lecturers in higher education currently approach their teaching. Issues around adopting a collaborative approach to action research are then discussed. Finally, the paper will critically examine whether educational action research can improve teaching and learning and contribute to a redefinition of the professional status of lecturers in higher education.
Higher education: key contextual factors
The ending of the polytechnic-university binary system in 1992 supposedly created a single university sector (Gammie and Gammie, 2002). It is important, however, to keep in mind, that the ‘university sector’ retains a significant number of colleges, such as Edge Hill, who provide higher education. Moreover, the culture and organisational strengths and weaknesses inherited from the old polytechnics’ management and funding structure continue to influence the way they operate in the unified system. As a result, differences along the old binary lines remain. Care therefore needs to be taken when generalising about the higher education sector. Nevertheless, a number of changes have occurred over the past three decades that are relevant throughout the sector - although the impact of these changes are likely to vary both between and within HEIs (Light and Cox, 2001).
Higher education: a changing sector
The most important change has probably been the transformation of higher education from an elite to a mass system. This has brought about a more diversified student body in terms of age, ability and experience (Ottewill and Macfarlane, 2002). There are also claims that students have become more instrumental in their approach to study (e.g. Tapper, 1999; Packham and Miller, 2000; Ottewill and Macfarlane, 2001a). For example, Kneale (1997) refers to ‘strategic students’ who attempt to maximise their marks by concentrating only on work that is to be assessed (cited by Ottewill and Macfarlane, 2001a). According to Ottewill and Macfarlane (2001a, 2002) business and management students are particularly instrumental, because they enrol on courses for their vocational relevance and subsequent economic benefits, rather than from an intrinsic interest in the subject being studied. Willmott (1995) also argues that student loans may have raised student awareness of the costs and benefits of higher education, a factor that he feels may have contributed to students behaving more like ‘consumers’ of education.
During the period of expansion the government also created a more competitive environment which pitted HEIs against each other for scarce financial resources (Groves et al., 1997). This was juxtaposed with increasing levels of accountability through teaching quality assessments; the audit of institutional systems for quality assurance; and the evaluation of research activity, latterly through the research assessment exercise (RAE) (Groves et al., 1997; Parry, 2001). The management response to increased competition, accountability and declining financial resources per student was the adoption amongst HEIs of what Henkel (1997, p. 137) refers to as ‘centralised decentralisation’. According to Henkel (1997) centralisation involved the establishment of a strong senior management team augmented by cross institutional support units covering areas such as staff development, teaching and learning and quality; whilst decentralisation involved the devolvement of responsibility and budgets. However, decentralisation was also accompanied by management control through the setting of performance targets (Holley and Oliver, 2000).
Increased centralisation and the introduction of performance targets and other management controls have fundamentally altered the character of the lecturers’ work in higher education (Nixon, 1996; Morris, 2000; Walker, 2001; Gammie and Gammie, 2002). The role of centralised units with a remit to cover areas such as quality, teaching and learning and staff development - combined with accountability to external agencies - has reduced the ability of lecturers to unilaterally determine course content and the approach they adopt to teaching and learning (Holley and Oliver, 2000). It is also claimed that such changes have had a detrimental effect on individual creativity and the propensity to take risks (see for example Kember and McKay, 1996; Henkel, 1997; Macfarlane, 2002). On the other hand, Willmott (1995) has pointed out that if institutions want more than mere compliance from lecturers they have to allow them a degree of autonomy. Moreover, Trowler (1997) argues that it is very difficult for senior managers to fully operationalise strategic decisions because individuals will always find ways of pursuing their own objectives within the constraints of the control infrastructure introduced by management. Trowler (1997), for instance, provides examples of how lecturers at one institution were able to manipulate the quality regime in order maintain some control over their own teaching activities.
Attitudes to teaching and research
Despite HEIs and lecturers stressing the importance of both teaching and research, it is the latter which tends to be prioritised (Rowland, 2000; Kember, 2000).[1] This is because research is often regarded by lecturers as being more satisfying and having greater intellectual status than teaching (Rowland, 2000; Levin and Greenwood, 2001). As discussed above, funding mechanisms also encourage institutions (and therefore lecturers) to focus on research rather than teaching (Kember, 2000). Willmott (1995) argues that performance indicators like the RAE tend to marginalise activities, such as teaching, which do not make individuals accountable. This means that lecturers in higher education often have to concentrate on research as a means of securing employment and obtaining promotion (Schratz, 1993a; Light and Cox, 2001). As Schratz (1993a) argues, “One often gets the impression that teaching stands in the way of their [the lecturers] ongoing research commitments …” (p. 112).
Educational action research could provide a means of bridging the teaching-research divide by allowing lecturers to combine their roles of teacher and researcher (Ottewill and Macfarlane, 2001b). Research by Rowland (2000), however, indicates that some HEI departments may not regard educational research as part of their remit. For example, one head of department believed that educational research should be carried out by experts in that field (ibid., p. 24). Others though did not feel the same way - with some heads indicating that staff were already actively involved in educational research (Rowland, 2000, pp. 24-25).
In my own discipline of business and management, teaching and learning is part of the academic discourse as evidenced by the activities of the Learning and Teaching Support Network (LTSN) for Business, Management and Accountancy and the publication of a number of educationally focused business and management journals. It is, nevertheless, impossible to know the level of educational research activity in business and management departments without carrying out further research.
In the department I belong to educational research has been encouraged, with members of the department accounting for one- third of those entered under education in the 2001 RAE (although none of this research involved action research). However, centrally set performance targets relating to research output look likely to create pressure to carry out disciplined based research in order to raise our research profile in business and management. This highlights the importance of published research to HEIs and how centrally produced performance targets can impact upon lecturers.
It has been argued that the primary function of educational action research is to improve practice rather than contribute to the advancement of knowledge (see for example Elliot, 1991). Such an approach is, however, unlikely to be encouraged by HEIs who are seeking to build or maintain a research profile. Other writers have contended that action researchers have an obligation to contribute to the development of their profession through the dissemination of their research (e.g. Ebbutt, 1985; Whitehead, 1985; Kember, 2002). By making their research public, action researchers produce a body of case study evidence that can contribute to the advancement of educational practice (Lomax and Parker, 1995; Zeichner, 2001) and the development of theory (Nixon, 1981; Kember and McKay, 1996).
Action research: ‘… it is something we already do’
It can be argued that the reiterative action research cycle of planning, action, evaluation and reflection is a process that teachers in higher education intuitively adopt. As one lecturer commented in Blakley-Reid (2000), “… it is something we already do” (p. 2). My own personal experience of trying out new ideas in the classroom involves a process that incorporates the key components of the action research cycle. Nonetheless, before I actively adopted an action research approach the evaluation and reflection stages were often not formalised. This meant that information was acquired by observing and talking to students and this informal (and invariably unconsciously absorbed) knowledge informed the formulation of what often remained tacit personal theories of teaching and learning. Similarly, Carr and Kemmis (1986) have put forward the view that teachers tend to utilise ‘implicit theories’, based on what they regard as effective practice, to inform their teaching. Schön (1995) refers to such knowledge as ‘knowing-in-action’ and argues that this, “…makes up the great bulk of what we know how to do in everyday and in professional life” (p. 30).
A number of writers (e.g. McCutcheon and Jung, 1990; Schön, 1991, 1995; McNiff, 2002) have stressed the importance of tacit knowledge, based on experience, as an effective way of operating in complex, changing and unique social environments. Similarly, in management a number of writers have advocated the use of intuition as a viable alternative to more ‘rational’ forms of decision-making (see for example, Lank and Lank, 1995).
Lecturer/action researchers may, however, want the results of their research to be accepted by their colleagues or the wider teaching and research community, and such ‘unscientific’ methods may not be perceived as credible (Winter, 2002). This might mean that they have to adopt more rigorous approaches to evaluation and reflection, involving the use of questionnaires, interviews, document analysis, diaries, field notes, analytic memos, etc. (see Armstrong, 1981; Elliot, 1991; McTaggart, 1991; McNiff et al., 1996; McNiff, 2002). Besides offering a more ‘rational’ and ‘scientific’ approach, these multiple sources of information also allow triangulation to take place (Elliot, 1991; McTaggart, 1991; McKernan, 1996). Whilst such an approach can be criticised as pandering to positivistic notions of research validity (Carr, 1989), it may be necessary to adopt these techniques if the findings of action research are going to be accepted by others.
More importantly, however, intuitive forms of ‘knowing’ may be subject to a number of unconscious cognitive biases (see Bazerman, 1990; Henry, 2001 for summaries). For example, intuition tends to rely on personal experience, but this can be influenced by the fact that people more readily recall recent or out of the ordinary events which may not be truly representative of a situation (Earl, 1990). They may also assume (often wrongly) that their personal experience of events mirrors that of other people (Dawes, 1990). Therefore, whilst additional more formal sources of information may not eliminate cognitive (or other forms) of bias they may provide a check on the researcher’s intuitive feelings (Winter, 1996; Kember and McKay, 1996).[2]
It might also be argued that teachers will automatically reflect on their practice. However, the degree and effectiveness of their reflective process is likely to vary enormously (Schön, 1991), with Elton (2001) commenting on the poor level of self-reflection amongst lecturers in higher education. The discipline of following an action research model may encourage a more systematic and rigorous approach to reflection (Lomax and Parker, 1995). Indeed, research carried out by Kember (2002) found that lecturers claimed to have become more reflective about their teaching as a result of engaging in educational action research. However, the reflective process is complex and little understood and therefore ensuring that it takes place does not guarantee it will be carried out effectively (Day, 1993). Participants bring their own frame of reference and values into a situation, and critical reflection requires individuals to question these (Meizirow, 1990; Day, 1993; Clouder, 2000). One way of facilitating this process is to involve others in the reflective process (Kemmis and McTaggart, 1982; Kember, 2000; Christenson et al., 2002). As Kember (2000) argues, “…it is through group discourse that participants become aware of unconscious assumptions or false perspectives” (p. 28).