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Chapter 10

This document provides an overview of participatory action research and related approaches. It discusses the evolution of participatory action research from its origins in Kurt Lewin's work through four generations. Key approaches discussed include participatory research, critical action research, classroom action research, and action learning. The document aims to develop a comprehensive view of social practice and reconceptualize research as a social practice, drawing on Habermas's notion of the public sphere.

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0% found this document useful (0 votes)

265 views60 pages

Chapter 10

Uploaded by

Abah Jufri

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Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd

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10
PARTICIPATORY
ACTION RESEARCH
Communicative Action
and the Public Sphere
Stephen Kemmis and Robin McTaggart

articipatory action research has an extensive history in many fields of social

Soft Systems Approaches

Soft systems approaches have their origins in organizations that use so-called hard
systems of engineering, especially for industrial production. Soft systems methodology is the human systems analogy for systems engineering that has developed as the
science of product and information flow. It is defined as oppositional to positivistic
science with its emphasis on hypothesis testing. The researcher (typically an outside
consultant) assumes a role as discussion partner or trainer in a real problem situation.
The researcher works with participants to generate some (systems) models of the situation and uses the models to question the situation and to suggest a revised course of
action (Checkland, 1981; Checkland & Scholes, 1990; Davies & Ledington, 1991; Flood
& Jackson, 1991; Jackson, 1991; Kolb, 1984).

Industrial Action Research

Industrial action research has an extended history, dating back to the postLewinian influence in organizational psychology and organizational development
in the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations in Britain and the Research Center for
Group Dynamics in the United States. It is typically consultant driven, with very
strong advocacies for collaboration between social scientists and members of different levels of the organization. The work is often couched in the language of workplace democratization, but more recent explorations have aspired more explicitly to
the democratization of the research act itself, following the theory and practice of
the participatory research movement. Especially in its more recent manifestations,
industrial action research is differentiated from action science and its emphasis on
cognition taking a preferred focus on reflection and the need for broader organizational and social change. Some advocacies have used critical theory as a resource to
express aspirations for more participatory forms of work and evaluation, but more
typically the style is somewhat humanistic and individualistic rather than critical.
Emphases on social systems in organizations, such as improving organizational
effectiveness and employee relations, are common. Also, the Lewinian aspiration to
learn from trying to bring about change is a strong theme (Bravette, 1996; Elden,
1983; Emery & Thorsrud, 1976; Emery, Thorsrud, & Trist, 1969; Foster, 1972; Levin,
1985; Pasmore & Friedlander, 1982; Sandkull, 1980; Torbert, 1991; Warmington,
1980; Whyte, 1989, 1991).

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THE EMERGENCE OF CRITICAL PARTICIPATORY ACTION RESEARCH

Until the late 1990s, the hallmark of the action research field was eclecticism.
Although the Lewinian idea was often used as a first point of legitimation, quite different rationales and practices had emerged in different disciplines. The sequestering
of much literature under disciplinary rubrics meant that there was little dialogue
between groups of different practitioners and advocates. Increases in visibility and
popularity of the approaches rapidly changed this. There were large increases in scale
and attendance at the world congresses on participatory action research as well as
burgeoning interest at international sociological conferences.Action research reemerged as an influential approach in the United States (Greenwood & Levin, 2000, 2001).
New associations between researchers and a vast literature of critique of modernity
and its insinuation of capitalist, neocapitalist, and postcapitalist state and social
systems into social life created both the impetus for and the possibility of dialogue.
The historical and geographical distribution of action research approaches around the
world and their interrelationships were better understood.
Critical participatory action research emerged as part of this dialogue. It aimed to
provide a frame of reference for comprehension and critique of itself and its predecessors and to offer a way of working that addressed rampant individualism, disenchantment, and the dominance of instrumental reasonthe key features of the malaise of
modernity (Taylor, 1991). Critical participatory action research, as we now understand
it, also creates a way of reinterpreting our own views of action research as they develop
practically,theoretically,and pedagogically over time (e.g.,Carr & Kemmis,1986; Kemmis
& McTaggart, 1988a, 1988b, 2000; McTaggart, 1991a). Before we revisit some of the
myths, misinterpretations, and mistakes associated with our work over three decades,
we present a summary of what we have regarded as the key features of participatory
action research. We do this to identify some key principles as markers of progress, but
we then look back at our own experience to develop what might potentially be seen as
the rationale for a new generation of critical participatory action research.

Key Features of Participatory Action Research

Although the process of participatory action research is only poorly described in
terms of a mechanical sequence of steps, it is generally thought to involve a spiral of
self-reflective cycles of the following:

Planning a change
Acting and observing the process and consequences of the change
Reflecting on these processes and consequences
Replanning
Acting and observing again
Reflecting again, and so on . . .

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Figure 10.1 presents this spiral of self-reflection in diagrammatic form. In reality,

the process might not be as neat as this spiral of self-contained cycles of planning, acting and observing, and reflecting suggests. The stages overlap, and initial plans
quickly become obsolete in the light of learning from experience. In reality, the
process is likely to be more fluid, open, and responsive. The criterion of success is not
whether participants have followed the steps faithfully but rather whether they have
a strong and authentic sense of development and evolution in their practices, their
understandings of their practices, and the situations in which they practice.
Each of the steps outlined in the spiral of self-reflection is best undertaken collaboratively by coparticipants in the participatory action research process. Not all theorists of action research place this emphasis on collaboration; they argue that action
research is frequently a solitary process of systematic self-reflection. We concede that
it is often so; nevertheless, we hold that participatory action research is best conceptualized in collaborative terms. Participatory action research is itself a socialand
educationalprocess. The subjects of participatory action research undertake their
research as a social practice. Moreover, the object of participatory action research is
social; participatory action research is directed toward studying, reframing, and
reconstructing social practices. If practices are constituted in social interaction between
people, changing practices is a social process. To be sure, one person may change so that
others are obliged to react or respond differently to that individuals changed behavior, but the willing and committed involvement of those whose interactions constitute
the practice is necessary, in the end, to secure and legitimate the change. Participatory
action research offers an opportunity to create forums in which people can join one
another as coparticipants in the struggle to remake the practices in which they
interactforums in which rationality and democracy can be pursued together without an artificial separation ultimately hostile to both. In his book Between Facts and
Norms, Jrgen Habermas described this process in terms of opening communicative
space (Habermas, 1996), a theme to which we return later.
At its best,then,participatory action research is a social process of collaborative learning realized by groups of people who join together in changing the practices through
which they interact in a shared social world in which, for better or worse, we live with the
consequences of one anothers actions.
It should also be stressed that participatory action research involves the investigation of actual practices and not abstract practices. It involves learning about the
real, material, concrete, and particular practices of particular people in particular
places. Although, of course, it is not possible to suspend the inevitable abstraction
that occurs whenever we use language to name, describe, interpret, and evaluate
things, participatory action research differs from other forms of research in being
more obstinate about its focus on changing particular practitioners particular practices. Participatory action researchers may be interested in practices in general or in
the abstract, but their principal concern is in changing practices in the here and

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REFLECT

ACT &

PLAN

O B S E R VE

D
ISE
REV N
PLA

CT
FLE
RE

ACT

Figure 10.1.

& O BS

E RVE

The Action Research Spiral

now. In our view, participatory action researchers do not need to apologize for seeing their work as mundane and mired in history; on the contrary, by doing so, they
may avoid some of the philosophical and practical dangers of the idealism that suggests that a more abstract view of practice might make it possible to transcend or
rise above history and to avoid the delusions of the view that it is possible to find a
safe haven in abstract propositions that construe but do not themselves constitute

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practice. Participatory action research is a learning process whose fruits are the real
and material changes in the following:

What people do
How people interact with the world and with others
What people mean and what they value
The discourses in which people understand and interpret their world

Through participatory action research, people can come to understand thatand

howtheir social and educational practices are located in, and are the product of, particular material, social, and historical circumstances that produced them and by which
they are reproduced in everyday social interaction in a particular setting. By understanding their practices as the product of particular circumstances, participatory
action researchers become alert to clues about how it may be possible to transform the
practices they are producing and reproducing through their current ways of working.
If their current practices are the product of one particular set of intentions, conditions,
and circumstances, other (or transformed) practices may be produced and reproduced
under other (or transformed) intentions, conditions, and circumstances.
Focusing on practices in a concrete and specific way makes them accessible for
reflection, discussion, and reconstruction as products of past circumstances that are
capable of being modified in and for present and future circumstances. While recognizing that the real spacetime realization of every practice is transient and evanescent, and that it can be conceptualized only in the inevitably abstract (but comfortingly
imprecise) terms that language provides, participatory action researchers aim to
understand their own particular practices as they emerge in their own particular circumstances without reducing them to the ghostly status of the general, the abstract,
or the idealor, perhaps one should say, the unreal.
If participatory action research is understood in such terms, then through their
investigations, participatory action researchers may want to become especially sensitive to the ways in which their particular practices are social practices of material,
symbolic, and social

communication,
production, and
social organization,

which shape and are shaped by social structures in

the cultural/symbolic realm,

the economic realm, and
the sociopolitical realm,

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which shape and are shaped by the social media of

language/discourses,
work, and
power,

which largely shape, but also can be shaped by, participants knowledge expressed in
their

understandings,
skills, and
values,

which, in turn, shape and are shaped by their social practices of material, symbolic,
and social

communication,
production, and
social organization, and so on.

These relationships are represented diagrammatically in Figure 10.2.

Participatory action researchers might consider, for example, how their acts of
communication, production, and social organization are intertwined and interrelated
in the real and particular practices that connect them to others in the real situations
in which they find themselves (e.g., communities, neighborhoods, families, schools,
hospitals, other workplaces). They consider how, by collaboratively changing the ways
in which they participate with others in these practices, they can change the practices
themselves, their understandings of these practices, and the situations in which they
live and work.
For many people, the image of the spiral of cycles of self-reflection (planning, acting and observing, reflecting, replanning, etc.) has become the dominant feature of
action research as an approach. In our view, participatory action research has seven
other key features that are at least as important as the self-reflective spiral.
1. Participatory action research is a social process. Participatory action research deliberately explores the relationship between the realms of the individual and the social. It recognizes that no individuation is possible without socialization, and no socialization
is possible without individuation (Habermas, 1992b, p. 26), and that the processes of
individuation and socialization continue to shape individuals and social relationships
in all of the settings in which we find ourselves. Participatory action research is a
process followed in research in settings such as those of education and community
development, when peopleindividually and collectivelytry to understand how
they are formed and reformed as individuals, and in relation to one another in a

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Kemmis & McTaggart: Participatory Action Research 2281

ON THE SIDE OF

ON THE SIDE OF
THE SOCIAL

THE INDIVIDUAL

Social media
Language
Work

(Participation in) Social practices

Power
Communication
Social structures, forms, forms of life
Cultural structures, forms, forms of life

Production
Social and system integration

Economic structures, forms, forms of life

Social-political structures, forms, forms of life

Forms of knowledge
Communication
Skills
Social and system integration

Social media
Language
Work
Power

(Participation in) Social practices

Communication

Social structures, forms, forms of life

Cultural structures, forms, forms of life

Production
Social and system integration

Economic structures, forms, forms of life

Social-political structures, forms, forms of life

Forms of knowledge
Cognitive understandings
Skills
Social values, norms; emotions

Figure 10.2.

Recursive Relationships of Social Mediation That Action Research Aims to

Transform

variety of settings, for example, when teachers work together (or with students) to
improve processes of teaching and learning in the classroom.
2. Participatory action research is participatory. Participatory action research engages
people in examining their knowledge (understandings, skills, and values) and interpretive categories (the ways in which they interpret themselves and their action in the social
and material world). It is a process in which all individuals in a group try to get a

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Kemmis & McTaggart: Participatory Action Research 2285

would give participants a greater sense of control of their work.Sometimes we overstated

our claims; we were victims of our own enthusiasm and persuasion. This was not always
unconscious. We faced the dilemma of the advocate; that is, rhetoric can help lead to
changes in reality. Our aspirations were often picked up by others, and the result left
action research advocates vulnerable to charges of hyperbole or navet in real settings
where individual and collective change often proved to be extremely difficult to effect.
It is true that an increased understanding of social situations through action materially changes individual power, authority, and control over peoples work. However, it
is equally true that such change is often technical and constrained, invoking concepts
such as efficiency. Authentic change, and the empowerment that drives it and derives
from it, requires political sustenance by some kind of collective, too easily construed as
an action group that defined itself by opposition to, and distinctiveness from, a wider
social or public realm. Nevertheless, it was a mistake not to emphasize sufficiently that
power comes from collective commitment and a methodology that invites the democratization of the objectification of experience and the disciplining of subjectivity. A
question remains as to whether this was an adequate conceptualization of empowerment, the way in which to achieve it, or indeed who or what empowerment was for.

The Role of the Facilitator of Action Research

We were troubled by the concept of facilitation as early as 1981 at the Australian
National Seminar on Action Research (Brown, Henry, Henry, & McTaggart, 1988). Too
often the facilitator lapsed into the role of process consultant with pretensions or
aspirations to expertise about a method of action research, a role quite inconsistent
with the commitment to participate in the personal and social changes in practice
that had brought participants together. Despite efforts to contain the concept then,
and to disavow its utility and outline its dangers later, it was a mistake to perpetuate
the use of a term that already carried connotations of neutrality. Although the role of
university researchers in action research is always somewhat problematic and an
important object of critique, conceptualizing facilitation as a neutral or merely technical activity denies the social responsibility of the facilitator in making or assisting social
change (McTaggart, 2002). The emphasis on techniques of facilitation also overplayed
the importance of academic researchers and implicitly differentiated the work of theoreticians and practitioners, academics and workers, and community developers and
peasant workers. Preoccupation with neutrality sustained the positivistic myth of the
researcher as detached secretary to the universe and focused attention on the social
practices (and research practices) of the other. This in turn helped to make action
research look like research for amateurs.
University professors often play an active role in action research. In the education
field, for example, they are often teacher educators as well as researchers. Teacher education is just one subpractice of education as a social practice and, of course, is not
practiced exclusively by university professors. In education, there are also curriculum

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Wittgenstein noticed, this may involve a conjuring trick that obscures the very thing
we hoped to see:
How does the philosophical problem about mental processes and states and about behaviourism arise? The first step is the one that altogether escapes notice.We talk of processes and
states and leave their nature undecided. Sometime perhaps we shall know more about
themwe think. But that is just what commits us to a particular way of looking at the matter. For we have a definite concept of what it means to learn to know a process better. (The
decisive movement in the conjuring trick has been made, and it was the very one that we
thought quite innocent.) And now the analogy which was to make us understand our thoughts
falls to pieces. So we have to deny the yet uncomprehended process in the yet unexplored
medium.And now it looks as if we had denied mental processes.And naturally we dont want
to deny them. (Wittgenstein, 1958, p. 103)

We conclude, therefore, that it is risky to proceed in a discussion of research on practice

principally from research methods and techniquesrisky because the methods we
choose may inadvertently have committed us to a particular way of seeing the matter.
In our chapter in the second edition of the Handbook, we depicted the relationships among five broad traditions in the study of practice. Table 23.1 summarizes
these traditions.
We argued that these different approaches to the study of practice involved different kinds of relationships between the researcher and the researched. Essentially, we
argued that objective approaches tended to see practice from the perspective of an
outsider in the third person; that subjective approaches tended to see practice from
the perspective of an insider in the second person; and that the reflexive dialectical
perspective of critical social science tended to see practice from the perspective of
the insider group, whose members interconnected activities constitute and reconstitute their own social practices, in the first person (plural). This last perspective on
practice is the one taken by participant-researchers in participatory action research.
In terms of these five aspects of practice and the five traditions in the study of
practice, it seems to us that a methodologically driven view of participatory action
research finds itself mired in the assumptions about practice to which one or another
of the different traditions of research on practice is committed. Depending on which
of these sets of presuppositions it adopts, it may find itself unable to approach (the
study of) practice in a sufficiently rich and multifaceted way, that is, in terms that recognize different aspects of practice and do justice to its social, historical, and discursive construction.
If participatory action research is to explore practice in terms of each of the five
aspects outlined in our chapter in the second edition of the Handbook, it will need to
consider how different traditions in the study of practice, and different research methods and techniques, can provide multiple resources for the task. It must also avoid
accepting the assumptions and limitations of particular methods and techniques. For

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example, the participatory action researcher may legitimately eschew the narrow
empiricism of those approaches that attempt to construe practice entirely objectively, as if it were possible to exclude consideration of participants subjective intentions, meanings, values, and interpretive categories from an understanding of practice
or as if it were possible to exclude consideration of the frameworks of language,
discourse, and tradition by which people in different groups construe their practices.
It does not follow from this that quantitative approaches are never relevant in participatory action research; on the contrary, they may bebut without the constraints of
empiricism and objectivism that many quantitative researchers put on these methods
and techniques. Indeed, when quantitative researchers use questionnaires to convert
participants views into numerical data, they tacitly concede that practice cannot be
understood without taking participants views into account. Participatory researchers
will differ from one-sidedly quantitative researchers in the ways in which they collect
and use such data because participatory action researchers will regard them as crude
approximations of the ways in which participants understand themselves and not (as
empiricistic, objectivistic, quantitative researchers may assert) as more rigorous (e.g.,
valid, reliable) because they are scaled.
On the other hand, the participatory action researcher will differ from the onesidedly qualitative approach that asserts that action can be understood only from a
qualitative perspective, for example, through close clinical or phenomenological analysis of an individuals views or close analysis of the discourses and traditions that shape
the way in which a particular practice is understood by participants. The participatory
action researcher will also want to explore how changing objectivecircumstances (e.g.,
performances, events, effects, patterns of interaction, rules, roles, system functioning)
shape and are shaped by the subjective conditions of participants perspectives.
In our view, questions of research methods should not be regarded as unimportant,
but (in contrast with the methodologically driven view) we would want to assert that
what makes participatory action research research is not the machinery of research
techniques but rather an abiding concern with the relationships between social and
educational theory and practice. In our view, before questions about what kinds of
research methods are appropriate can be decided, it is necessary to decide what kinds
of things practice and theory are, for only then can we decide what kinds of data or
evidence might be relevant in describing practice and what kinds of analyses might be
relevant in interpreting and evaluating peoples real practices in the real situations in
which they work. On this view of participatory action research, a central question is
how practices are to be understood in the field, as it were, so that they become available for more systematic theorizing. Having arrived at a general view of what it means
to understand (theorize) practice in the field, it becomes possible to work out what
kinds of evidence, and hence what kinds of research methods and techniques, might
be appropriate for advancing our understanding of practice at any particular time.
The theoretical scheme depicted in Figure 10.2 takes a view of what theorizing
a practice might be likelocating practice within frameworks of participants

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knowledge, in relation to social structures, and in terms of social media. By adopting

a more encompassing view of practice like the one outlined in Table 10.1, we may be
able to understand and theorize it more richly, and in more complex ways, so that
powerful social dynamics (e.g., the tensions and interconnections between system
and lifeworld [Habermas 1984, 1987b]) can be construed and reconstituted through
a critical social practice such as participatory action research.
Table 10.1.

Relationships Among Different Traditions in the Study of Practice

Perspective

The Individual

The Social

Objective

(1) Practice as
individual behavior,
seen in terms
of performances,
events, and effects:
Behaviorist and most
cognitivist
approaches in
psychology

(2) Practice as social

interaction (e.g.,
ritual, systemstructured):
Structurefunctionalist and
social systems
approaches

Subjective

(3) Practice as
intentional action,
shaped by
meaning and values:
Psychological
verstehen (empathetic
understanding) and
most constructivist
approaches

(4) Practice as
socially structured,
shaped by discourses,
tradition:
Interpretive,
aesthetic-historical
verstehen (empathetic
understanding), and
poststructuralist
approaches

Both:
Reflexive
dialectical
view of
subjective
objective
relations and
connections

Both: Reflexive
dialectical view of
individualsocial
relations and
connections

(5) Practice as socially

and historically
constituted and as
reconstituted by
human agency and
social action:
Critical methods;
dialectical analysis
(multiple methods)

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The participants in participatory action research understand practice from both its
individual and its social aspects and understand it both objectively and subjectively.
They view practice as constructed and reconstructed historically both in terms of the
discourses in which practices are described and understood and in terms of socially
and historically constructed actions and their consequences. Moreover, they view practice as constituted and reconstituted in human and social action that projects a living
past through the lived present into a future where the people involved and affected will
live with the consequences of actions taken.
This view of practice as projected through history by action applies not only to the
first-level practices that are the object and subject of participants interests (e.g., the
practices of economic life in a village aiming at community development) but also to
the practice of research itself. Participants in participatory action research understand
their research practices as meta-practices that help to construct and reconstruct the
first-level practices they are investigating. For example, participants in a participatory
action research project on practices of community development (the first-level practices) understand their research practices as among the meta-practices that shape their
practices of community development. Practices of management, administration, and
social integration are also meta-practices shaping their practices of community development. However, unlike those other meta-practices, the meta-practice of participatory action research is deliberately and systematically reflexive. It is both outwardly
directed and inwardly (self-)directed. It aims to change community development practitioners, community development practices, and the practice situations of community
development through practices of research that are also malleable and developmental
and that, through collaborative processes of communication and learning, change the
practitioners, practices, and practice situations of the research.Like other practices, the
practices of participatory action research are projected through history by action. They
are meta-practices that aim to transform the world so that other first-level transformations become possible, that is, transformations in peoples ways of thinking and talking, ways of doing things, and ways of relating to one another.
This view of research practices as specifically located in time (history) and social
space has implications that are explored later in this chapter. In the process of participatory action research, the same people are involved in two parallel, reflexively related
sets of practices. On the one hand, they are the practitioners of community development (to use our earlier example); on the other hand, they are the practitioners of
the meta-practice of participatory action research. They are both practitioners and
researchers in, say, community development, the development of primary health care,
or schoolcommunity relations. They understand their research as engaged
research (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992) through which they, as researchers, aim to
transform practices of community development, primary health care, or school
community relations. But they also understand their research practices as constructed
and open to reconstruction. They do not regard the research process as the application

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of fixed and preformed research techniques to the particular applied problem with
which they are concerned. On the contrary, they regard their research practices as a
matter of borrowing, constructing, and reconstructing research methods and techniques to throw light on the nature, processes, and consequences of the particular
object they are studying (whether community development practices, primary health
care practices, or practices of schoolcommunity relations).And this means that participatory action researchers are embarked on a process of transforming themselves as
researchers, transforming their research practices, and transforming the practice settings
of their research.
In our chapter in the second edition of the Handbook, we also argued for a view of
research that we termed symposium research, that is, research drawing on the multiple
disciplinary perspectives of different traditions in social science theorizing and multiple
research methods that illuminate different aspects of practices. We believe that this
approach will increasingly come to characterize participatory action research inquiries.
That is,we expect that as participatory action research becomes more sophisticated in its
scope and intentions,it will draw on transdisciplinary theoretical resources (e.g.,relevant
psychological and sociological theories) and multiple research methods and techniques
that will allow participant-researchers to gain insight into the formation and transformation of their practices in context.For example,we expect to see more participatory action
research using research techniques characteristic of all five of the traditions depicted in
Table 10.1. These methods and techniques are presented in Table 10.2.
In the current edition of the Handbook, we argue that the nature of the social relationships involved in participatory action researchand the proper politics of participatory action researchcan be more clearly understood from the perspective of
Habermass (1984, 1987a) theory of communicative action and, in particular, his later
commentary on the nature of the public sphere, as outlined in Between Facts and Norms
(Habermas, 1996, chap. 8).

THE POLITICS OF PARTICIPATORY ACTION RESEARCH:

COMMUNICATIVE ACTION AND THE PUBLIC SPHERE

In his book Theory of Communicative Action, and especially the second volume,
Habermas (1984, 1987b) described communicative action as what people do when they
engage in communication of a particularand widespreadkind, with three particular features. It is communication in which people consciously and deliberately aim
1. to reach intersubjective agreement as a basis for
2. mutual understanding so as to
3. reach an unforced consensus about what to do in the particular practical situation in
which they find themselves.

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Communicative action is the kind of action that people take when they interrupt
what they are doing (Kemmis, 1998) to ask four particular kinds of questions (the
four validity claims):

Whether their understandings of what they are doing make sense to them and to others
(are comprehensible)
Whether these understandings are true (in the sense of being accurate in accordance
with what else is known)
Whether these understandings are sincerely held and stated (authentic)
Whether these understandings are morally right and appropriate under the circumstances
in which they find themselves

In Between Facts and Norms, Habermas (1996) added a fourth feature to the original list of three features of communicative action. He noticed something obvious that
previously had been overlooked,namely that communicative action also opens communicative space between people. He gave this fourth feature of communicative action
special attention because he considered that opening space for communicative action
produces two particular and simultaneous effects. First, it builds solidarity between the
people who open their understandings to one another in this kind of communication.
Second, it underwrites the understandings and decisions that people reach with legitimacy. In a world where communications are frequently cynical, and where people feel
alienated from public decisions and even from the political processes of their world,
legitimacy is hard-won. More important for our purposes here, however, Habermass
argument is that legitimacy is guaranteed only through communicative action, that is,
when people are free to chooseauthentically and for themselves, individually and in
the context of mutual participationto decide for themselves the following:

What is comprehensible to them (whether in fact they understand what others are saying)
What is true in the light of their own knowledge (both their individual knowledge and
the shared knowledge represented in the discourse used by members)
What participants themselves regard as sincerely and truthfully stated (individually and
in terms of their joint commitment to understanding)
What participants themselves regard as morally right and appropriate in terms of their
individual and mutual judgment about what it is right, proper, and prudent to do under
the circumstances in which they find themselves

What is projected here is not an ideal against which actual communications and
utterances are to be judged; rather, it is something that Habermas believes we normally take for granted about utterancesunless they are deliberately distorted or
challenged. In ordinary speech, we may or may not regard any particular utterance
as suspect on the grounds of any or all of the four validity claims; whether any particular utterance will be regarded as suspect or needing closer critical examination
will depend on who is saying what about what to whom in what context. On the

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Table 10.2.

Methods and Techniques Characteristic of Different Approaches to the

Study of Practice

Perspective

The Individual

The Social

Objective

(1) Practice as
individual behavior:
Quantitative and
correlational
experimental
methods;
psychometric and
observational
techniques, tests, and
interaction schedules

(2) Practice as
social and systems
behavior:
Quantitative and
correlational
experimental
methods;
observational
techniques,
sociometrics,
systems analysis,
and social ecology

Subjective

(3) Practice as
intentional action:
Qualitative and
interpretive
methods; clinical
analysis, interview,
questionnaire,
diaries, journals,
self-report, and
introspection

(4) Practice as
socially structured,
shaped by
discourses and
tradition:
Qualitative,
interpretive, and
historical methods;
discourse analysis
and document
analysis

Both:
Reflexive
dialectical
view of
subjective
objective
relations and
connections

Both: Reflexive
dialectical view of
individualsocial
relations and
connections

(5) Practice as
socially and
historically
constituted and as
reconstituted by
human agency and
social action:
Critical methods;
dialectical analysis
(multiple methods)

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other hand, when we move into the mode of communicative action, we acknowledge
at the outset that we must strive for intersubjective agreement, mutual understanding, and unforced consensus about what to do in this particular situation because
we already know that one or all four of the validity claims must be regarded as
problematicby us here and now, for our situation, and in relation to what to do in
practice about the matter at hand. That is, the validity claims do not function merely
as procedural ideals for critiquing speech; they also function as bases for, or underpinnings of, the substantive claims we need to explore to reach mutual agreement, understanding, and consensus about what to do in the particular concrete situation in which
a particular group of people in a shared socially, discursively, and historically structured specific communicative space are deliberating together.
What we notice here, to reiterate, is that the process of recovering and critiquing
validity claims is not merely an abstract ideal or principle but also an invocation of critique and critical self-awareness in concrete and practical decision making. In a situation where we are genuinely acting collaboratively with others, and where practical
reason is genuinely called for, we are obliged, as it were, to retreat to a meta-level of
critiquecommunicative actionbecause it is not self-evident what should be done.
Perhaps we simply do not comprehend what is being talked about or we are not sure
that we understand it correctly. Perhaps we are unsure of the truth or accuracy of the
facts on which our decisions might be based. Perhaps we fear that deliberate deception
or accidental self-deception may lead us astray. Perhaps we are not sure what it is
morally right and appropriate to do in this practical situation in which our actions will,
as always, be judged by their historical consequences (and their differential consequences for different people and groups). In any of these cases, we need to consider
how to approach the practical decision before us, and we must gather our shared
understandings to do so. In such cases, we interrupt what we are doing to move into the
mode of communicative action. In some such cases, we may also move into the slower,
more concretely practical, and more concretely critical mode of participatory action
research, aiming deliberately and collaboratively to investigate the world in order to
transform it, as Fals Borda observed, and to transform the world in order to investigate
it.We take a problematic view of our own action in history and use our action in history
as a probe with which to investigate reflexively our own action and its place as cause
and effect in the unfolding history of our world.

Participatory Action Research and Communicative Space

In our view, participatory action research opens communicative space between participants. The process of participatory action research is one of mutual inquiry aimed
at reaching intersubjective agreement, mutual understanding of a situation, unforced
consensus about what to do, and a sense that what people achieve together will be legitimate not only for themselves but also for every reasonable person (a universal claim).
Participatory action research aims to create circumstances in which people can search

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together collaboratively for more comprehensible, true, authentic, and morally right
and appropriate ways of understanding and acting in the world. It aims to create circumstances in which collaborative social action in history is not justified by appeal to
authority (and still less to coercive force); rather, as Habermas put it, it is justified by
the force of better argument.
To make these points is to notice three things about the social relations engendered
through the process of action research. First, it is to notice that certain relationships are
appropriate in the research element of the term participatory action research. It is to notice
that the social practice of this kind of research is a practice directed deliberately toward
discovering, investigating, and attaining intersubjective agreement, mutual understanding, and unforced consensus about what to do. It is aimed at testing, developing, and
retesting agreements,understandings,and decisions against the criteria of mutual comprehensibility, truth, truthfulness (e.g., sincerity, authenticity), and moral rightness and
appropriateness.In our view,participatory action research projects communicative action
into the field of action and the making of history. It does so in a deliberately critical and
reflexive way; that is,it aims to change both our unfolding history and ourselves as makers of our unfolding history.As science, participatory action research is not to be understood as the kind of science that gathers knowledge as a precursor to and resource for
controlling the unfolding of events (the technical knowledgeconstitutive interest characteristic of positivistic social science [Habermas, 1972]). Nor is it to be understood as
the kind of science directed toward educating the person to be a wiser and more prudent actor in as yet unspecified situations and circumstances (the practical knowledge
constitutive interest characteristic of hermeneutics and interpretive social science
[Habermas, 1972]). Participatory action research is to be understood as a collaborative
practice of critique, performed in and through a collaborative practice of research that
aims to change the researchers themselves as well as the social world they inhabit (the
emancipatory knowledgeconstitutive interest characteristic of critical social science
[Carr & Kemmis, 1986; Habermas, 1972]).
Second, it is to notice that similar relationships are appropriate in the action element of participatory action research. It is to notice that the decisions on which action
is based must first have withstood the tests of the research element and must then
withstand the tests of wisdom and prudencethat people are willing to, and indeed
can, reasonably live with the consequences of the decisions they make, and the actions
they take, and the actions that follow from these decisions. This is to notice that participatory action research generates not only a collaborative sense of agency but also
a collaborative sense of the legitimacy of the decisions people make, and the actions
they take, together.
Third, it is to notice that participatory action research involves relationships of participation as a central and defining feature and not as a kind of instrumental or contingent value tacked on to the term. In many views of action research, including some
of our earliest advocacies for it, the idea of participation was thought to refer to an
action research group whose members had reached an agreement to research and act

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together on some shared topic or problem. This view caused us to think in terms of
insiders and outsiders to the group and to the action research process. Such a view
carries resonances of discussions of the role of the avant-garde in making the revolution. It suggests that the action research group constitutes itself against established
authorities or ways of working, as if it were the role of the group to show how things
can and should be done better despite the constraints and exigencies of taken-forgranted ways of doing things.
The idea of participation as central to participatory action research is not so easily
enclosed and encapsulated. The notion of inclusion evoked in participatory action
research should not, in our view, be regarded as static or fixed. Participatory action
research should, in principle, create circumstances in which all of those involved in
and affected by the processes of research and action (all of those involved in thought
and action as well as theory and practice) about the topic have a right to speak and act
in transforming things for the better. It is to say that, in the case of, for example, a participatory action research project about education, it is not only teachers who have the
task of improving the social practices of schooling but also students and many others
(e.g., parents, school communities, employers of graduates). It is to say that, in projects concerned with community development, not only lobby groups of concerned citizens but also local government agencies and many others will have a share in the
consequences of actions taken and, thus, a right to be heard in the formation of programs of action.
In reality, of course, not all involved and affected people will participate in any
particular participatory action research project. Some may resist involvement, some
might not be interested because their commitments are elsewhere, and some might
not have the means to join and contribute to the project as it unfolds. The point is that
a participatory action research project that aims to transform existing ways of understanding, existing social practices, and existing situations must also transform other
people and agencies who might not naturallybe participants in the processes of doing
the research and taking action. In principle, participatory action research issues an invitation to previously or naturally uninvolved people, as well as a self-constituted action
research group, to participate in a common process of communicative action for transformation. Not all will accept the invitation,but it is incumbent on those who do participate to
take into account those others understandings, perspectives, and interestseven if the
decision is to oppose them in the service of a broader public interest.

Participatory Action Research and

the Critique of the Social Macro-Subject
As these comments suggest, participatory action research does notor need
notvalorize a particular group as the carrier of legitimate political action. In his critique of the social macro-subject in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity and
Between Facts and Norms, Habermas (1987a, 1996) argued that political theory has

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frequently been led astray by the notion that a state or an organization can be
autonomous and self-regulating in any clear sense. The circumstances of late modernity are such, he argued, that it is simplistic and mistaken to imagine that the machinery of government or management is unified and capable of self-regulation in any
simple sense of self. Governments and the machinery of government, and managements and the machinery of contemporary organizations, are nowadays so complex,
multifaceted, and (often) internally contradictory as systemsthat they do not operate
in any autonomous way, let alone in any way that could be regarded as self-regulating
in relation to the publics they aim to govern or manage. They are not unified
systems but rather complex sets of subsystems having transactions of various kinds
with one another economically (in the steering medium of money) and administratively (in the steering medium of power). Between Facts and Norms is a critique of
contemporary theories of law and government that are based on concrete, historically
outmoded notions of governmentality that presume a single, more or less unified
body politic that is regulated by law and a constitution. Such theories presume that
governments can encapsulate and impose order on a social body as a unified whole
across many dimensions of social, political, cultural, and individual life or lives. Many
of those who inhabit the competing subsystems of contemporary government and
management in fact acknowledge that no such simple steering is possible; on the contrary, steering takes placeto the extent that it can happen at allthrough an indeterminate array of established practices, structures, systems of influence, bargaining,
and coercive powers.
The same is true of participatory action research groups. When they conceive of
themselves as closed and self-regulating, they may lose contact with social reality. In
fact, participatory action research groups are internally diverse, they generally have no
unified center or core from which their power and authority can emanate, and they
frequently have little capacity to achieve their own ends if they must contend with the
will of other powers and orders. Moreover, participatory action research groups connect and interact with various kinds of external people, groups, and agencies. In terms
of thought and action, and of theory and practice, they arise and act out of, and back
into, the wider social reality that they aim to transform.
The most morally, practically, and politically compelling view of participatory
action research is one that sees participatory action research as a practice through
which people can create networks of communication, that is, sites for the practice of
communicative action. It offers the prospect of opening communicative space in public
spheres of the kind that Habermas described. Based on such a view, participatory
action research aims to engender practical critiques of existing states of affairs, the
development of critical perspectives, and the shared formation of emancipatory commitments, that is, commitments to overcome distorted ways of understanding the
world, distorted practices, and distorted social arrangements and situations. (By distorted here, we mean understandings, practices, and situations whose consequences
are unsatisfying, ineffective, or unjust for some or all of those involved and affected.)

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Communicative Action and Exploratory Action

Participatory action research creates a communicative space in which communicative action is fostered among participants and in which problems and issues can be
thematized for critical exploration aimed at overcoming felt dissatisfactions (Fay,
1987), irrationality, and injustice. It also fosters a kind of playfulnessabout action
what to do. At its best, it creates opportunities for participants to adopt a thoughtful
but highly exploratory view of what to do, knowing that their practice can and will
be corrected in the light of what they learn from their careful observation of the
processes and consequences of their action as it unfolds. This seems to us to involve a
new kind of understanding of the notion of communicative action. It is not just
reflection or reflective practice (e.g., as advocated by Schn, 1983, 1987, 1991) but
also action taken with the principal purpose of learning from experience by careful
observation of its processes and consequences. It is deliberately designed as an exploration of ways of doing things in this particular situation at this particular historical
moment. It is designed to be exploratory action.
Participatory action research is scientific and reflective in the sense in which John
Dewey described scientific method. Writing in Democracy and Education, Dewey
(1916) described the essentials of reflectionand scientific methodas follows:
They are, first, that the pupil has a genuine situation of experiencethat there be a continuous activity in which he is interested for its own sake; secondly, that a genuine problem
develop within this situation as a stimulus to thought; third, that he possess the information and make the observations needed to deal with it; fourth, that suggested solutions
occur to him which he shall be responsible for developing in an orderly way; fifth, that he
shall have the opportunity and occasion to test his ideas by application, to make their
meaning clear, and to discover for himself their validity. (p. 192)

For Dewey, experience and intelligent action were linked in a cycle. Education, like
science, was to aim not just at filling the minds of students but also at helping them to
take their place in a democratic society ceaselessly reconstructing and transforming
the world through action. Intelligent action was always experimental and exploratory,
conducted with an eye to learning and as an opportunity to learn from unfolding
experience.
In our view, participatory action research is an elaboration of this idea. It is
exploratory action that parallels and builds on the notion of communicative action.
It does more than conduct its reflection in the rear-view mirror, as it were, looking
backward at what has happened to learn from it. It also generates and conducts
action in an exploratory and experimental manner, with actions themselves standing as practical hypotheses or speculations to be tested as their consequences emerge
and unfold.

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CONSTITUTING PUBLIC SPHERES FOR COMMUNICATIVE

ACTION THROUGH PARTICIPATORY ACTION RESEARCH

Baynes (1995), writing on Habermas and democracy, quoted Habermas on the public
sphere:
[Deliberative politics] is bound to the demanding communicative presuppositions of political arenas that do not coincide with the institutionalized will-formation in parliamentary
bodies but extend equally to the political public sphere and to its cultural context and social
basis. A deliberative practice of self-determination can develop only in the interplay
between, on the one hand, the parliamentary will-formation institutionalized in legal procedures and programmed to reach decisions and, on the other, political opinion-building
in informal circles of political communication. (p. 316)1

relevant for Yolngu children, and often these curriculum documents are developed by
Balanda who are ethnocentric in their values. The way that Balanda people have institutionalised their way of living is through maintaining the social reproduction process where
children are sent to school and they are taught to do things in a particular way. Often the
things that they learn favour [the interests of] the rich and powerful, because when they
leave school [and go to work] the control of the workforce is in the hands of the middle
class and the upper class.
An appropriate curriculum for Yolngu is one that is located in the Aboriginal world
which can enable the children to cross over into the Balanda world. [It allows] for identification of bits of Balanda knowledge that are consistent with the Yolngu way of learning.
(Yunupingu, 1991, p. 102)

The Yolngu teachers, together with other teachers and with the help of their community, began a journey of participatory action research. Working together, they
changed the white mans world of schooling. Of course, sometimes there were conflicts
and disagreements, but they worked through them in the Yolngu waytoward consensus. They had help but no money to conduct their research.
Their research was not research about schools and schooling in general; rather,
their participatory action research was about how schooling was done in their schools.
As Yunupingu (1991) put it,
So here is a fundamental difference compared with traditional research about Yolngu education: We start with Yolngu knowledge and work out what comes from Yolngu minds as of
central importance, not the other way [a]round. (pp. 102103)

Throughout the process, the teachers were guided by their own collaborative
research into their problems and practices. They gathered stories from the old people.
They gathered information about how the school worked and did not work for them.
They made changes and watched what happened. They thought carefully about the
consequences of the changes they made, and then they made still further changes on
the basis of the evidence they had gathered.
Through their shared journey of participatory action research, the school and the
community discovered how to limit the culturally corrosive effects of the white mans
way of schooling, and they learned to respect both Yolngu ways and the white mans
ways.At first,the teachers called the new form of schooling both ways education. Later,
drawing on a sacred story from their own tradition, they called it Ganma education.
Writing about his hopes for the Ganma research that the community conducted to
develop the ideas and practices of Ganma education, Yunupingu (1991) observed,
I am hoping the Ganma research will become critical educational research, that it will
empower Yolngu, that it will emphasize emancipatory aspects, and that it will take a side
just as the Balanda research has always taken a side but never revealed this, always claiming to be neutral and objective. My aim in Ganma is to help, to change, to shift the balance
of power.

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Ganma research is also critical in the processes we use.Our critical community of action
researchers working together, reflecting, sharing, and thinking includes important Yolngu
elders, the Yolngu action group [teachers in the school], Balanda teachers, and a Balanda
researcher to help with the process. Of course, she is involved too; she cares about our problems, [and] she has a stake in finding solutionsthis too is different from the traditional
role of a researcher. (p. 103) . . .
It is, I must stress, important to locate Ganma in our broader development plans . . . in
the overall context of Aboriginalisation and control into which Ganma must fit. (p. 104)

outsiders (they have relatively permeable boundaries and changing memberships)

and between people who are relatively disinterested and those whose (self-)interests
are significantly affected by the topics under discussion. Thus, the communicative
apparatuses of many government and business organizations, and of organizations
that rely on the specialist expertise of some participants for their operations, do not
ordinarily qualify as public spheres.
While drawing on the resources and discourses of theory and policy in their investigations, participatory action researchers aim to achieve mutual comprehension and
create discourse communities that allow all participants to have a voice and play a part
in reaching consensus about what to do. By necessity, they use language that all can use
rather than relying on the specialist discourses of social science that might exclude
some from the shared task of understanding and transforming shared everyday lives
and a shared lifeworld.
In the Yirrkala Ganma project,much of the communication about the project not only
was in ordinary language but was also conducted in the language of the community, that
is,Yolngu-matha. This not only was a deliberate shift from the language in which Balanda
schooling was usually discussed in the community (English and some specialist educational discourse) but also was a shift to engage and use the conceptual frameworks of the
community and Yolngu culture. On the other hand, the modes of address of the Yolngu
culture require respect for elders and specialist forms of language for inside matters
(secret/sacred, for the initiated) versus outside matters (secular, for the uninitiated), so
many discussions of the Ganma conceptual framework required participants to respect
these distinctions and the levels of initiation of speakers and hearers.
At the Crdoba congress, many speakers used specialist educational (and other)
discourses to discuss their work or ideas, but much of the discussion took place in language that was deliberately intended to be inclusive and engaging for participants,
that is, to share ideas and open up participants for debate without assuming that hearers were fluent in specialist discourses for understanding either the sociopolitical context of education in Latin America or the technical aspects of contemporary education
in Latin American countries. More particularly, the languages used at the congress,
including translations from English and Portuguese, were inclusive because they were
directed specifically toward fostering the shared commitment of participants about
the need for change and the obstacles and possibilities ahead if participants wanted
to join the shared project of reconstructing education in Argentina and elsewhere.
Specialist discourses were used to deal with specific topics (e.g., in philosophy, in
social theory, in curriculum), but the conversations about those topics soon shifted
register to ensure that ideas were accessible to any interested participants.
7. Public spheres presuppose communicative freedom. In public spheres, participants are free to occupy (or not occupy) the particular discursive roles of speaker,
listener, and observer, and they are free to withdraw from the communicative space of
the discussion. Participation and nonparticipation are voluntary. Thus, communicative

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In the light of the Habermasian notions of system and lifeworld (explored in our chapter in the second edition of the Handbook), the critique of the social macro-subject, and
the notion of public spheres developed in Between Facts and Norms, we can throw new
light on the myths, misinterpretations, and mistakes about critical participatory
action research identified earlier in this chapter. The following comments present a
necessarily brief summary of some of the ways in which our understandings of these
topics have evolved during recent years.

Empowerment
In the light of the Habermasian theory of system and lifeworld, we came to understand the notion of empowerment neither solely in lifeworld terms (in terms of the
lifeworld processes of cultural, social, and personal reproduction and transformation
and their effects) nor solely in systems terms (in terms of changing systems structures or functioning or through effects produced by the steering media of money
and administrative power of organizations and institutions). Exploring practices, our
understandings of them, and the settings in which we worked from both lifeworld and
system perspectives gave us richer critical insight into how processes of social formation and transformation occur in the contexts of particular projects. Increasingly, we
came to understand empowerment not only as a lifeworld process of cultural, social,
and personal development and transformation but also as implying that protagonists
experienced themselves as working both in and against system structures and functions to produce effects intended to be read in changed systems structures and functioning. From this stereoscopic view, system structures and functions are not only
sources of constraint but also sources of possibility, and lifeworld processes of

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In the light of Habermass critique of the social macro-subject, the collective should
be understood not as a closed group with fixed membershipa coherent, unified,
autonomous,independent,and self-regulating wholebut rather as internally diverse,
differentiated, and sometimes inconsistent and contradictory. Nor does a participatory
action research group stand in the position of an avant-garde in relation to other people
and groups in the setting in which the research occurs, but it retains its connections
with those others, just as it retains responsibility for the consequences of its actions as
they are experienced in those wider communities in which they take place.
In the light of Habermass commentary on the public sphere, the collective formed
by a participatory action research project should be understood not as a closed and
exclusive group constituted to perform the particular organizational roles and functions associated with a project but rather as an open and inclusive space constituted
to create conditions of communicative freedom and, thus, to create communicative
action and public discourse aimed at addressing problems and issues of irrationality,
injustice, and dissatisfaction experienced by particular groups at particular times. In
our view, some of the most interesting participatory action research projects are those
directly connected with wider social movements (e.g., green issues; issues of peace,
race, or gender), but it should not go unnoticed that many participatory action
research projects constitute themselves in ways that are very like social movements
in relation to local issues, although often with wider ramifications, for example, by
addressing issues about the effects of hyperrationalization of practices in local settings that frequently have much more widespread relevance. For example, around the
world there are hundredsprobably thousandsof different kinds of action research
projects being conducted by teachers to explore the potential and limitations of various innovative forms of teaching and learning that address the alienating effects of
state regulation of curriculum, teaching, and assessment at every level of schooling.
The multiplication of such projects suggests that there is a social movement under
way aimed at recovering or revitalizing education in the face of the very widespread
colonization of the lifeworld of teaching and learning by the imperatives of increasingly muscular and intrusive administrative systems regulating and controlling the
processes of schooling. These projects in education are paralleled by similar action
research projects in welfare, health, community development, and other fields. Taken
together, despite their differences, they make an eloquent statement of refusal and
reconstruction in the face of a version of corporate and public administration that
places the imperative of institutional control above the moral and substantive imperatives and virtues traditionally associated with the practice of these professions.

REIMAGINING CRITICAL PARTICIPATORY ACTION RESEARCH

The view of critical participatory action research we have advanced in this chapter
is somewhat different from the view of it that we held in the past. Two decades ago, our

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primary aim was to envisage and enact a well-justified form of research to be conducted
by teachers and other professional practitioners into their own practices, their understandings of their practices, and the situations in which they practiced. Despite our
critique of established ways of thinking about social and educational research, certain
remnant elements of conventional perceptions of research continued to survive in the
forms of research we advocated, for example, ideas about theory, knowledge, and the centrality of the researcher in the advancement of knowledge.
Two decades ago, we hoped for advances in theory through action research that
would somehow be similar to the kinds of theory conventionally produced or
extended in the social and educational research of that time. We expected that practitioners would also develop and extend their own theories of education, but we were
perhaps less clear about what the nature and form of those theories would be.We had
admired Lawrence Stenhouses definition of research as systematic enquiry made
public (Stenhouse, 1975) but had given less thought to how those theories might
emerge in a literature of practitioner research. Now we have a clearer idea that sometimes the theories that motivate, guide, and inform practitioners action are frequently
in the form of collective understandings that elude easy codification in the forms conventionally used in learned journals and books. They accumulate in conversations,
archives of evidence, and the shared knowledge of communities of practice.
Two decades ago, although we had regarded knowledgeas a problematic category
and had distinguished between the private knowledge of individuals and the collective knowledge of research fields and traditions, we probably valued the knowledge
outcomes of research over the practical outcomes of participant researchthe effects
of participant research in changing social and educational practices, understandings
of those practices, and the situations and settings of practice. Now we have a clearer
idea that the outcomes of participatory action research are written in historiesthe
histories of practitioners, communities, the people with whom they interact, and
(again) communities of practice.And we see that the outcomes of participatory action
research are to be read in terms of historical consequences for participants and others
involved and affected by the action people have taken, judged not only against the criterion of truth but also against the criteria of wisdom and prudence, that is, whether
people were better off in terms of the consequences they experienced. We can ask
whether their understandings of their situations are less irrational (or ideologically
skewed) than before, whether their action is less unproductive and unsatisfying for
those involved, or whether the social relations between people in the situation are less
inequitable or unjust than before. The product of participatory action research is not
just knowledge but also different histories than might have existed if participants had
not intervened to transform their practices, understandings, and situations and, thus,
transformed the histories that otherwise seemed likely to come into being.We look for
the products of participatory action research in collective action and the making and
remaking of collective histories.

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Two decades ago, we were excited by participatory research that connected with
social movements and made changes in particular kinds of professional practices
(e.g., nursing, education, community development, welfare), but we were less aware
than we are now that this kind of engagement with social movements is a two-way
street. Social movements can be expressed and realized in the settings of professional
practice (e.g., the powerful connections made between the womens movement and
health or education or between green issues and education or community development), but social movements also take strength and direction from participatory
studies that explore and critically investigate issues in the particular contexts of different kinds of social practices. Social movements set agendas around the broad
themes that are their focus, but studies of particular practices and local settings also
show how differently those broad themes must be understood in terms of issues identified in in-depth local investigations. Now we have a clearer understanding not only
that participatory action research expresses the spirit of its time in terms of giving life
to social movements in local settings or in relation to particular themes (e.g., gender,
indigenous rights) but also that local investigations into locally felt dissatisfactions,
disquiets, or concerns also open up themes of broader interest, sometimes linking to
existing social movements but also bringing into existence new movements for transformation in professional fields and in the civil life of communities. Now, in judging
the long-term success of participatory action research projects, we are more likely to
ask about the extent to which they have fed collective capacities for transformation
locally and in the widening sphere of social life locally, regionally, nationally, and even
internationally, as has happened in the history of participatory action research as it
has contributed to the development of peoples collective communicative power.
Most particularly, two decades ago we valorized the researcher. According to conventional views of research, researchers were the people at the center of the research
actheroes in the quiet adventures of building knowledge and theory. We encouraged participant research that would make ordinary practitioners local heroes of
knowledge building and theory building and collaborative research that would make
heroic teams of researching practitioners who produced new understandings in their
communities and communities of practice. Increasingly, in those days, we saw research
collectives as key activist groups that would make and change history. We continue
to advocate this view of participatory research as making history by making
exploratory changes. Now, however, our critiques of the researchaction dualism, and
our changing views of the facilitator and the research collective, encourage us to
believe that critical participatory action research needs animateurs but that it also
thrives in public spheres in which people can take a variety of roles as researchers,
questioners, interlocutors, and interested observers.And if we reject the heroic view of
history as being made by individualsgreat men or great womenthen we must
see the real transformations of history as transformations made by ordinary people
working together in the light of emerging themes, issues, and problems (e.g., via social

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movements). We now see a central task of participatory action research as including

widening groups of people in the task of making their own history, often in the face of
established ways of doing things and often to overcome problems caused by living
with the consequences of the histories others make for usoften the consequences of
new ways of doing things that were intended to improve things but that turned out to
have unexpected, unanticipated, and untoward consequences for those whom the new
ways were intended to help. As we hope we have shown, Habermass description of
public discourse in public spheres gives us another way in which to think about who
can do researchand what research might be like if it is conceptualized as exploratory
action aimed at nurturing and feeding public discourse in public spheres. Now we are
less inclined to think in terms of heroes of knowledge building or even of heroes of
history making; we are more inclined to think in terms of people working together to
develop a greater collective capacity to change the circumstances of their own lives in
terms of collective capacity building.
Now, more so than two decades ago, we are excited by notions of collective understanding, collective research, communicative power, and collective capacity. We are
interested in describing and identifying conditions under which people can investigate
their own professional fields or community circumstances to develop communicative
power and strengthen their collective capacity. In projects and movements aimed at
collective capacity building, we see people securing new ways of working on the basis
of collective commitment. We see them achieving new ways of working and new ways of
being that have legitimacy because their decisions are made in conditions like those we
described in the last sectionthe conditions of public discourse in public spheres.
Now, more so than two decades ago, we see participatory action research as a process
of sustained collective deliberation coupled with sustained collective investigation of a
topic, a problem, an issue, a concern, or a theme that allows people to explore possibilities in action, judging them by their consequences in history and moving with a measure of tentativeness and prudence (in some cases with great courage in the face of
violence and coercion) but also with the support that comes with solidarity.
This account of what we now value as outcomes and consequences of participatory
action researchwell-justified and agreed-on collective action that reduces the worlds
stock of irrationality, injustice, inequity, dissatisfaction, and unproductive ways of doing
thingsmay seem a far cry from the kind of justification for much social and educational research. Perhaps more modestly, that research makes few claims to changing
history for the better and promises only improved knowledge and theories that may
contribute to clearer understanding and improved policy and practice. That is not necessarily the way it is used, of course; sometimes scientific theories or findings are
used to justify social programs, policies, and practices of breathtaking foolhardiness.
Our advocacy of critical participatory research is intended partly as an antidote to such
foolhardiness but also to insist, in an age of hyperrationality and the technologization
of everything, that people can still, gaps and miscues notwithstanding, have a hope of

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Kemmis & McTaggart: Participatory Action Research 2325

knowing what they are doing and doing what they think is right and, more particularly,
doing less of what they think will have untoward consequences for themselves and
others. Perhaps this is to take too activist a view of participatory action research
and to give up on the conventional understanding that people should wait for experts
and theorists to tell them what will work bestwhat will be best for them.
In 1957,in the Journal of Educational Sociology, Harold Hodgkinson presented a critique of action research that he regarded as a symptom of the times in which we live
(Hodgkinson, 1957, p. 152). Against Arthur Foshay, whom he quoted as saying,Cooperative action research is an approach to making what we do consistent with what we
believe (which we would argue fails to acknowledge the power of action research to
put our ideas to the test and correct what we believe), Hodgkinson retorted,
This is simply not so.Action research merely focuses attention on the doing and eliminates
most of the necessity for believing.We are living in a doingage, and action research allows
people the privilege of doing something. This method could easily become an end in
itself. (p. 153)

Hodgkinson (1957) believed that action research would produce teachers who spend
much of their time measuring and figuring, playing with what Dylan Thomas would
call easy hobby games for little engineers (p. 153). He held out for the great scientific
generalizations, based on sound empirical and statistical methods that would provide
a secure scientific basis for what teachers could or should do.
Those other approaches to research have produced some justifications for improved
ways of working in education, social work, community development, and other spheres
of social action. They will continue to do so. But they will always create a problem of
putting the scientist as expert in the position of mediator, that is, mediating between
the knowledge and action and the theory and practice of practitioners and ordinary
people. They will always create disjunctions between what scientific communities and
policymakers believe to be prudent courses of action and the courses of action that
people would (and will) choose for themselves, knowing the consequences of their
actions and practices for the people with whom they work. For two decades, we have
insisted that practitioners interpretive categories (not just how they think about their
work but also how they think about their world) must be taken into account in deciding what,when,whether,and how research should be conducted into professional practice and community life. Critical participatory action research is an expression of this
impulse, and it has proved, in hundreds of studies, to be a means by which people have
transformed their worlds. Sometimes, perhaps, things have not turned out for the
better, but many times people have concluded that their participatory action research
work has changed their circumstances for the better and avoided untoward consequences that they otherwise would have had to endure. This has been true in rebuilding education in South Africa, in literacy campaigns in Nicaragua, in developments in

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nursing practice in Australia, in improving classroom teaching in the United Kingdom,

in community development in the Philippines, in farms in Sri Lanka, in community
governance in India, in improving water supplies in Bangladesh, and in hundreds of
other settings around the world. These are not easy hobby games for little engineers, as
Hodgkinson might have it, but rather matters of great human and social significance.
These people might not have changed the world, but they have changed their worlds. Is
that not the same thing? They might not have changed everything everywhere, but they
have improved things for particular people in particular places and in many other
places where their stories have traveled. We do not think that it is too immodest an
aspiration to judge participatory action research in terms of historical consequences.
Indeed, perhaps we judge too much social and educational science against too low a
bar. We are used to expecting too little help from it, and our expectations have been
met. Under such circumstances, we believe, people would be wise to conduct their own
research into their own practices and situations. Under such circumstances, there continues to be a need for critical participatory action research.

NOTES

1. The quotation is from page 334 of the German edition of Habermass (1992a) Faktizitt
und Geltung (Between Facts and Norms).
2. This description is adapted from Kemmis and Brennan Kemmis (2003).
3. This description is adapted from Kemmis (2004).

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