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Practitioner research as continuing self-education
Hazel Hampton and William Hampton, University of Sheffield
Introduction
Both the positivist and naturalist traditions have stressed the need for an objectivity that implies a distinction between the researcher and the researched. This distinction denies the importance of the subjective experience of the researcher except as an embarrassment to be overcome. The unique ontological position of the researcher is considered a hindrance in the search for replicability upon which scientific respectability depends. These concerns are now giving way - particularly, though not exclusively, in naturalist research - to the pursuit of understanding rather than proof. Within qualitative research, the subjective experience of researchers is becoming valued as data. The practitioner-researcher is understood to have access not simply to internal records, but to understandings drawn from personal reflection. The distinction between researcher and researched is conflated as the subject and object of the research become one.
Practitioner researchers engage with their ‘lived experience’[1] in structured and responsible ways in order to gain a deeper understanding of professional problems. This understanding is fed back into their practice. Within this strategy of action research, skills of reflection are developed which allow people to develop more fully as human beings: practitioner research becomes a form of continuing self-education. Continuing adult educators are concerned with these issues: both as teachers developing learning environments in which greater responsibility is placed upon the learners through such approaches as distance learning and accredited prior experiential learning (APEL); and as practitioner researchers reflecting on their own practice at a time of change.
The role of the reflective practitioner
Practitioner research places the practitioner at the centre of the research context with the question: ‘What is it I am actually doing?’[2]. We may imagine the research arena as a vast space of competing ideologies ready to colonise our research endeavour with epistemologies developed for other purposes, and we must have the confidence to pitch our tents in our own space and to find ways of speaking our own problem in our own way. We should follow the rules of the arena by being systematic and by exposing our work to public gaze but, because our goals are ‘I/thou’ centred rather than ‘you/they’ centred[3], both the process and the product may have to be constantly restated by individual practitioners. There will always be different starting points when approaching both a practitioner research problem and its solution: different starting points in terms of personal background, experience, and the nature of the problem.
Systematic strategies for reflection through the use of diaries, methodological ‘logs’, and supportive peer groups are central to the unique research process of practitioners. The practitioner-researcher is combining two roles to the ultimate benefit of both, but the benefits do not exclude the potential for role conflict inherent in the marriage of two occupied concepts: ‘practitioner’ and ‘researcher’[4]. Both concepts have an overt power status linked to them which should inform our reflective activity from the outset. For example, our professional position may empower us to define the health or educational needs of other groups; when we add a research dimension to that established position, we may approach participants in a research role, but be received by them in a practitioner role. Alternatively, participants who are familiar with the term ‘researcher’ and its power connotations may approach us as researchers rather than colleagues.
The space between the two positions of practitioner and researcher is reduced by reflecting on the value implications of what we propose to do. The practitioner-researcher will reflect upon the extent to which s/he is working with or on the researched. Such reflection should lead to a research methodology consistent with the stance of a practitioner who continues to be within and of the research site. The practical and ethical need to work with, rather than on, those who agree to co-operate with us in research presents a challenge. Neither the practitioner-researcher nor the participants can anticipate the outcome of a research process which may have various implications for participants[5]. Living the experience should imply that validation procedures are located within an ethical framework. Part of that framework will have implications for adult educators who should be experienced in communicating complex ideas in plain language. Research reports written in traditional ‘didactic deadpan’[6] are ill-suited for a discussion of reflective learning, or for communicating the increased understanding of a professional problem to busy colleagues or other participants: ‘Rather, the process of writing and rewriting ... is more reminiscent of the artistic activity of creating an art object ... that often reflects the personal ‘signature’ of the author’[7]. We can draw on literature, relationships, music, gardening, childhood, anything that helps to deepen our understanding and make creative connections around our professional problem.
Reflection as self-education
Writing and re-writing, often in the form of a first-person account, is the manner in which reflective practitioners can hold a mirror to their growing understanding[8]. Structured encounters with participants in research generate a wide range of perspectives around a common theme. Whatever the tone of those encounters: hostile, suspicious, negative, or evasive, we are encountering other ways of making meaning which will help to capture our ‘fringe thoughts’[9] and enable us to break through our ‘taken-as-given’ ways of thinking. A personal notebook for jottings of impressions following such encounters helps to ‘fix’ the data in our minds; it also gives us insights into how, at that stage in the process, we are making connections[10]. The writing process allows us to meditate on the action we have just left: perhaps we are angry at what we considered were outrageous views; perhaps our participant was unaware of the importance of what s/he contributed; perhaps another participant has been indiscreet and burdened us with information we are not able to share as a researcher, but which, as a practitioner, we could have shared with a colleague. The act of writing allows us to look at how we think: to ask the question, ‘How do we know what we think we know?’[11]. Of the many answers to that question, one may be that earlier personal experiences are affecting how we are listening to other people. That knowledge enables us to suspend such interferences in future while we continue our research. In addition to private notebooks, other records such as research logs or diaries enable practitioners to make connections with other experiential ways of knowing.
If we feel we have experienced a stigmatised identity emanating from skin colour, gender, poverty, or disability, then the act of writing becomes a protection against the loneliness and stress of our developing self-knowledge. The diary and methodological log of one of the present authors, for example, helped her to identify the extent to which early childhood experiences were affecting how she listened to participants; and, during the early part of the research process, to realise how her professional anti-racist discourse was leading her to label some participants as ‘racist’ even before she had analysed what they had said![12]. The daily process of jottings, analytical memos, and diagrams is further enriched as we use the data to think with as we read the relevant literature, or listen to a lecture, or take part in discussion with a peer group.
Reflection as self-education as a goal for adult education courses cannot be tacked on as an interesting requirement by tutors for students who are also busy practitioners; it demands a specific learning/teaching environment which starts in the experience of the students rather than external structures. Such strategies for fostering reflective practice can challenge the structural organisation of departments of adult continuing education, particularly when the ethos enables practitioner-students to co-operate in learning tasks that enter the assessment process.
The reflective group
Any researcher can benefit from the comments of a ‘critical friend’: but such benefits become qualitatively different when a group of practitioners reflect upon their own experience. Thus Coleman and her colleagues explored ‘the question: in what way do women experience their organisations’[13]. Her monograph has its origins in a dissertation for a Masters Degree during which she reflected on both the research question and the research process with the co-operation of a group of women. Neither Coleman nor any other member of the group was either ‘subject’ or ‘object’: they were co-operatively researching lived experience. This co-operation in the research for the dissertation caused some discussion among the examiners, but any doubts about the project were removed by the brilliance of its execution. If such projects are to become more commonplace, as surely they should on post-graduate degrees intended for experienced practitioners, then examination methods will need to be reconsidered.
Less contentious are groups of post-graduate students which provide peer support. For example, one group of MEd students in Sheffield met regularly without their tutor, first to develop each of their dissertation proposals and subsequently to review progress throughout the year. These groups can enhance the performance of each participant through a process of interactive reflection[14].
The interaction between lived experience and scholarship or research forms part of the tradition of university departments of adult continuing education. These departments have been prominent in the development of such subjects as trade union studies, local and labour history, and women’s studies. In such subjects the distinction between ‘tutor’ and ‘student’ often becomes blurred as experiences or life histories interact with theoretical exposition and the development of the syllabus. There is also a growing tendency to involve adult students at every stage in the evaluation of courses. This evaluation is itself a time for reflection on the learning process.
From the research perspective, the potential for developing co-operative inquiry groups in departments of adult continuing education is considerable. Reason[15] discusses such groups in terms familiar to adult educators who negotiate their curriculum: ‘people ... discuss the project, have some influence on its design ... [but] co-operative inquiry is not an unstructured process ... [it] involves a rigorous iteration between action in the world and reflection’. The topics researched by groups can range widely over the popular subjects taught in adult continuing education. The method can, however, have a particular significance for people who come together as practitioners to research their own practice, as teachers, nurses or managers for example. Adult tutors should realise the potential, also, for forming their own staff groups to reflect upon their practice. Here is a basis for the research into adult education that is often lacking in busy teaching departments.
Conclusion
The concept of reflective practitioner-researcher offers a shared methodology for tutors, post-graduate professionals and general course students. The blurring of divisions between tutor and student referred to earlier is completed as reflection becomes ‘a social process, not a purely individual process’[16]. The values underpinning this social process, for example, co-operation, openness, responsibility, tolerance of ambiguity, and the valuing of self and others, create the conditions that enable practitioners ‘to develop their reflexive powers, ie their capacities to monitor the self-in-action and to direct its future development in the professional context’[17]. The strategies to achieve this goal: diaries, journals, first-person accounts, co-operative peer support groups, and ‘critical friends’, ensure that we keep our inner worlds awake[18] and arrive at a deeper understanding of how we live in the world. Practitioner-research as continuing self-education allows adult educators to develop a distinctive form of research entirely congruent with their own, and their students, needs and strengths.
Acknowledgement
We benefited from the discussion of an earlier outline of this paper presented to the staff/student research seminar in the Division of Adult Continuing Education, University of Sheffield.
[1] M van Manen (1990), Researching Lived Experience: Human Science for an Action Sensitive Pedagogy. Ontario: The Althouse Press
[2]