Pedagogy, Culture & Society

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Research for praxis: knowing doing

Stephen Kemmis

To cite this article: Stephen Kemmis (2010) Research for praxis: knowing doing, Pedagogy,
Culture & Society, 18:1, 9-27, DOI: 10.1080/14681360903556756

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Pedagogy, Culture & Society
Vol. 18, No. 1, March 2010, 9–27

Research for praxis: knowing doing

Stephen Kemmis*

School of Education, Charles Sturt University, Wagga Wagga, Australia

(Submitted;
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10.1080/14681360903556756
1468-1366
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[email protected]
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Educational action is a species of praxis in both an Aristotelian sense and a post-

Marxian sense: in the first, it involves the morally informed and committed action
of the individual practitioners who practise education; in the second, it helps to
shape social formations and conditions for collectivities of people. In this paper, it
is argued that, in the context of a profession like education, research into praxis has
two main purposes that parallel these two senses of ‘praxis’: (1) to guide the
development of educational praxis, and (2) to guide the development of education
itself. Some approaches to researching praxis that have emerged in recent years
include ‘praxis research’, ‘phronetic research’, ‘praxis-related research’ and
‘research as practical philosophy’. These approaches are briefly analysed in terms
of their ability (or inability) to strengthen and extend praxis. In contrast to earlier
approaches to studying practice/praxis, which usually regard practice as an object
of study external to the researcher or observer, the practical philosophy approach
regards practice and especially praxis as ‘internal’ to the persons and groups
whose practice/praxis it is, and as ‘internal’ to the practice traditions which give
meaning and significance to a practice like Education. Following this insight, the
paper outlines a new view of what it might mean to ‘research’ praxis by studying
praxis and practice traditions ‘from within’. It is argued that this can only be
achieved by those whose own individual and collective praxis is both their proper
work and, at the same time, the focus of their critical investigation. The paper also
invites further exploration of the relationships to be found between different kinds
of practices and praxes – particularly the relationship between different kinds of
research practice/praxis and different kinds of educational practice/praxis.
Keywords: educational action; praxis; research praxis; educational praxis;
practice traditions

Praxis
‘Praxis’ has two principal meanings. According to the first, following the usage of
Aristotle, praxis is ‘action that is morally-committed, and oriented and informed by
traditions in a field’ (Kemmis and Smith 2008, 4). According to the second, follow-
ing the usage of Hegel and Marx, ‘praxis’ can be understood as ‘history-making
action’. In The German Ideology (1845b) Marx articulated his historical material-
ism, arguing that social formations, ideas, theories and consciousness emerge from
human and collective social praxis, and that social action (praxis) makes history. In
much Anglo-American-Australian usage today, the technical term ‘praxis’ is used
in the Aristotelian sense; in much of Europe, by contrast, ‘praxis’ is used in the
post-Marxian sense.

*Email: [email protected]

ISSN 1468-1366 print/ISSN 1747-5104 online

© 2010 Pedagogy, Culture & Society
DOI: 10.1080/14681360903556756
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10 S. Kemmis

Educational action is a species of praxis in both these senses because, on the one
side, it involves the morally informed and committed action of those who practise
education, and, on the other, it helps to shape social formations and conditions as well
as people and their ideas, their commitments and their consciousness. Thus, in the
context of a profession like education, we might say that research into praxis has two
main purposes. The first is to guide the development of educational praxis, that is, to
guide the development of professionals’ conduct in ways that will help them to be
better educators for their times and their circumstances. The second is to guide the
development of education itself by helping educators to develop a more self-
conscious understanding of the ‘history-making’ significance of their collective
educational work (both for the profession itself and for the people and societies they
serve through education). Taking into account these two different but related mean-
ings of ‘praxis’, then, what kind of ‘research’ would contribute to praxis and praxis
development?

The ‘happening-ness’ of praxis

An Aristotelian view
Aristotle (2003) saw praxis as a form of conscious, self-aware action, as distinct from
technical action (poiē sis or ‘making action’) and from theoretical contemplation
em
[]acr

(theoria) (Kemmis and Smith 2008b, 15–17). Dunne quotes Hannah Arendt’s (1958)
The Human Condition to suggest how Arendt understood Aristotle on the ‘sheer actu-
ality’ of ‘the work of man’ (to live well):

Aristotle, in his political philosophy is still aware of what is at stake in politics, namely,
no less than the ergon tou anthropou (the ‘work of man’ qua man), and if he defined this
‘work’ as ‘to live well’ (eu zē n), he clearly meant that ‘work’ here is no product but
]m
e[arc

exists only in sheer actuality. This specifically human achievement lies altogether
outside the category of means and ends; the ‘work of man’ is no end because the means
to achieve it – the virtues, or aretai – are not qualities which may or may not be actual-
ised, but are themselves ‘actualities.’ (Dunne 1993, 101–2)

Central to Aristotle’s conceptualisation of praxis, then, was the sense of knowing what
one is doing in the doing of it.

Marx on praxis
In the first of his Theses on Feuerbach Marx (1845a) articulated a view of praxis as
human activity:

The chief defect of all previous materialism (including Feuerbach’s) is that the object,
actuality, sensuousness is conceived only in the form of the object or perception
[Anschauung], but not as sensuous human activity, practice [Praxis], nor subjectively.
(Bernstein 1971, 11)

The phrase ‘sensuous human activity’ draws our attention to the notion that practice/
praxis is what actually happens when people act and to the fact that it happens via
human subjects who act. He says that the subjective experience of acting subjects can
be understood as ‘“revolutionary” or “practical-critical” activity’ (Bernstein 1971, 11)
of a kind that happens in the context of social change. Concluding Thesis 3, he says:
 Pedagogy, Culture & Society 11

The coincidence of the change of circumstances and of human activity or self-change can
be comprehended and rationally understood only as revolutionary practice. (Bernstein
1971, 12, emphases in original)

Although Marx was clearly interested in revolutionary change on an international

scale, the phrase ‘revolutionary practice’ can be understood on a smaller scale,
namely action aimed at self-conscious change of people’s circumstances and of
themselves (self-change). ‘Revolutionary practice’ in this sense would include
action of the kind taken by people involved in critical participatory action research
which Kemmis and McTaggart describe as ‘a form of collective self-reflective
enquiry undertaken by participants in social situations’ (1988, 1). On this view,
action research aims to change practices and the selves doing the practices and their
circumstances.

In Thesis 8 of the Theses on Feuerbach, Marx emphasises that social life is … essentially
practical. All mysteries which lead theory to mysticism find their rational solution in
human practice and the comprehension of this practice. (Bernstein 1971, 12)

The ‘happening-ness’ of practice/praxis, its ‘sensuousness’, its human-ness and its

sociality, is at once both obvious and difficult to grasp. It is difficult to grasp
because when we make practice/praxis an object of our thought we risk shifting
from the ‘rawness’ of conscious human social activity to discourse about it. We risk
shifting from the perspective of action to the perspective of knowledge, from the
perspective of practice to the perspective of theory. In Thesis 11, therefore, Marx
wrote:

The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is, to change
it. (Bernstein 1971, 13)

The point is, one might say, to act in the world, to practise, and to do – and not just to
engage in discourse about it.
If this is so, then we have reached this small and not entirely original insight:
knowledge is not action; theory is not practice; and words are not the world. If this is
so, we might be tempted to conclude that knowing practice is a contradiction in terms
– hence the subtitle to the present paper: ‘knowing doing’.
This sense of knowing what one is doing in the doing of it is something different
from knowing practice/praxis as an object. This is the distinction that Marx was
exploring in the Theses on Feuerbach.

What cannot be undone again

Our actions and practices are part of a wider, deeper ‘happening-ness’ that is consti-
tuted by the world and history even as it constitutes the changing world and unfolding
history. As Marx (1852) noted, our actions and practices become part of an ‘external’
material, historical reality that exists for each of us equally, no matter how differently
(or unequally) we may perceive it, how different (and unequal) our access to aspects
of it may be, or how different (and unequal) our self-interests may be. Written into the
world and to history, our actions and practices escape our control in the same way that
language does – as Habermas observes in his The Future of Human Nature on the
linguistic grounding of intersubjectivity:
12 S. Kemmis

As historical and social beings we find ourselves always already in a linguistically struc-
tured lifeworld. In the forms of communication through which we reach an understand-
ing with one another about something in the world and about ourselves, we encounter a
transcending power. Language is not a kind of private property. No one possesses exclu-
sive rights over the common medium of the communicative practices we must intersub-
jectively share. No single participant can control the structure, or even the course, of
processes of reaching understanding and self-understanding … The logos of language
escapes our control, and yet we are the ones, the subjects capable of speech and action,
who reach an understanding with one another in this medium. It remains ‘our’ language.
(2003b, 10–11)

Action and practice likewise ‘escape our control’ in a shared world and history. As
they are ‘loosed upon the world’ (Yeats 1921,19), spiralling ‘out’ from us in space and
‘down’ through time, action and practice become things less and more and different
than we intended, desired, anticipated, expected or hoped. Their effects are irrevers-
ible and may be amended only by apologies, compensation or promises to do differ-
ently in future (Dunne 1993, 97–100; Kemmis and Smith 2008, 19–21). As Aristotle
(2003, 120), quoting the Athenian poet Agathon (448–402 BC), observes:

For one thing is denied even to God:

To make what has been done undone again.

This is the feature of action and practice that prompts people to learn from experience,
from history, and from literature, and to seek knowledge through science. This is the
feature of action and practice that prompts us toward research on practice and praxis.

Different ways of knowing and theorising practice through research

Different general approaches to research take different kinds of relationships with
praxis. Empirical-analytic research adopts a third-person relationship with practice as
an object of enquiry; interpretive-hermeneutic research adopts a second-person rela-
tionship with practice as the action of another person who is a subject like oneself; and
critical-emancipatory research adopts a first-person relationship with practice as
constituted in one’s own action or in one’s participation in the social praxis of a
community or group or profession.
Reformulating the Aristotelian distinction between theoretical, technical and prac-
tical forms of knowledge and reasoning, Habermas developed his (1972) theory of
knowledge-constitutive interests (the interests that provoke the search for knowledge),
distinguishing empirical-analytic sciences oriented by an interest in technical control
(the technical interest), interpretive-hermeneutic sciences oriented by an interest in
educating readers and developing their practical capacities for wisdom and prudence
(the practical interest), and critical-emancipatory sciences oriented by an interest in
emancipating people from dependencies on myth, superstition, custom, tradition,
ideology and irrationality (the emancipatory interest). Oriented by the technical inter-
est, some scientists and sciences aim to achieve technical control in ways that will
allow them to produce desirable products or states of affairs. Oriented by the practical
interest, other scientists and sciences aim to educate people so they will act wisely and
prudently in the world. Oriented by the emancipatory interest, still other scientists and
sciences aim to identify and overcome forms of irrationality, injustice and unsustain-
ability that cause people harm or suffering.
 Pedagogy, Culture & Society 13

The different knowledge-constitutive interests evident in different kinds of

research on action and practice lead the researchers involved to construe actions and
practices differently as objects of research. Technical research is likely to construe
action and practice in objectivist terms, as ‘external’ things or mechanisms that can be
made to work differently. Practical research is likely to construe action and practice
in subjectivist terms, as activities that are authored by the people who enact them, and
that can be enacted differently if people see reasons to do so. Emancipatory research
is likely to construe action and practice as socially and historically constructed and
continually reconstructed in cultural discursive, material-economic and social-political
arrangements (‘sayings’, ‘doings’ and ‘relatings’; Kemmis and Grootenboer 2008). On
this view, transforming action and practice therefore requires transforming these
arrangements so that actions and practices will be enabled and constrained in different,
less harmful ways.

New developments in approaches to researching practice/praxis

There have been some new developments in thinking about researching practice and
praxis in recent times. Various researchers into practice/praxis have wanted to grasp
practice/praxis in all their ‘materiality’, ‘worldliness’ and ‘happening-ness’, in the
knowledge that all research always pre-constructs the objects it studies according to
the particular research approaches (often described as ‘methods’) that are employed
(Kemmis 1980). These approaches continue to be a matter of debate in the literature
of research methodology and in practice theory.
Some new approaches to researching practice/praxis have been proposed in recent
years; for example, ‘praxis research’ (Sandberg et al. 1992), ‘phronetic research’
(Flyvbjerg 2001), ‘praxis-related research’ (Mattsson and Kemmis 2007), and ‘educa-
tional research as practical science’ (Carr 2007; see also Carr 2000, 2004, 2006a,
2006b). In each case, the authors have attempted to find new ways of grasping praxis
and practice as objects of study.

Praxis research
Responding to the kinds of difficulties that arise when action research projects in
industry are subordinated either to the demands of the research community or to the
demands of action, Sandberg et al. propose the notion of ‘praxis research’:

Praxis research is characterised by a conscious and planned interaction between an

action phase of research and a phase characterised by a more remote conceptualisa-
tion and reflection. In so-called action research, the latter is often lacking. Even if
there is a declaration in principle of the necessity for a cumulative development of
knowledge and theoretical reflection, the tendency, as we have seen, is to neglect
these necessary parts of the research process in favour of the action aspect. This inter-
action distinguishes praxis research from consultation, and from development and
change projects in general. We may also call this research approach interactive
research. (1992, 34–5)

In describing the way this interaction should proceed, Sandberg et al. explicate a
crucial assumption: practitioners are practitioners and researchers are researchers. The
social division of labour represented in the organisational affiliations of the two
groups is paralleled by a technical division of labour in which the practitioners
14 S. Kemmis

conduct their practice and the researchers conduct their research, each according to the
different requirements and conditions of their practice.
Sandberg et al. also see the interaction between researchers and practitioners
taking place in a long-term dialogue in which initial problem selection and clarifica-
tion of issues are matters of discussion, as are emerging interpretations and sugges-
tions. In the end, though, this remains a dialogue based on difference: the standpoints
and the interpretive horizons of the two groups do not ‘fuse’ in a common intersub-
jective space. The quality of the science is still to be judged in the academy; the qual-
ity of the practice or action is still to be judged in the organisation or community.
Sandberg et al. envisage a new kind of research in which change in collective
praxis takes place in dialogue with researchers and scientific traditions and knowl-
edge, but the ‘happening-ness’ of the practice remains ultimately in the province of
the practitioners. Moreover, the scientific knowledge produced remains in a province
external to the exigencies of practice. On this view, the kind of scientific knowledge
produced remains essentially contemplative, and its stewardship remains within the
preserve of the academy.
My reading of the aspiration of this view of ‘praxis research’ is that it aims to
offer a new approach as a corrective to some cases or forms of action research in
which the demands of action override the demands of reflection and conceptualisa-
tion (especially as these are construed in the academy), but that it fails as a conceptu-
alisation of a new form of research into practice. It fails, firstly, because it maintains
rather than transcends or overcomes the dualisms of thought or knowledge and
action, and of theory and practice, both in the material form of a social and technical
division of labour. It fails, secondly, because it does not grasp what Aristotle and
Marx both understood about the ‘sheer actuality’ (Arendt 1958, in Dunne 1993) of
praxis in which knowledge is, we might say, in play, not standing contemplatively
apart from the action. So: Sandberg et al. seem to me to have made the dualisms
between research (or knowledge) and action, and theory and practice, internal to their
view of praxis research. It seems to me that the dialogue they envisage is one which
reproduces and reinforces difference between the worlds and perspectives of the
participants. Moreover, the knowledge developed in these interpretive interactions is
not conceptualised by Sandberg et al. as elaborating a new intersubjective space in
which different contributions are tested and extended, and in which new ways of
seeing the world have validity grounded in that shared intersubjective, communica-
tive space (see Habermas 1987, 1996, 2003a; Kemmis and McTaggart 2005). The
dialogue Sandberg et al. envisage is not a ‘fusion of horizons’ (Gadamer 1975, 305)
in which the knowledge and theory developed will be in play in action and practice –
instead, it is converted into a store of knowledge about action or practice owned by
the academy, to be made available to practitioners if they need it. In the conversion,
it seems to me, something crucial has been lost. In such a case, the scientific knowl-
edge and theory developed in and for the academy becomes external, once again, to
the internalities of the action and practice it was meant to inform. It has lost its
grounding in the happening-ness, the ‘sheer actuality’ of practice. When ‘cumulative
development of knowledge and theoretical reflection’ are interpreted as ‘necessary
parts of the research process’ (Sandberg et al. 1992, 35), then ‘research’ is being
understood as belonging to the academy rather than to the praxis field.
If I am right, then, praxis research, as Sandberg et al. conceptualise it, loses its grip
on praxis the moment it hands over the knowledge and theory it develops to the acad-
emy. It turns out not to be ‘praxis research’ when it asserts the imperative of research
 Pedagogy, Culture & Society 15

as an imperative of the academy rather than the field of praxis. From my point of view,
this is a pity because the name ‘praxis research’ is a very attractive one, promising a
more intimate connection with praxis than is achieved in the Sandberg et al. concep-
tualisation. I hope the term can be rehabilitated in a different conception of praxis
research of the kind I will describe later in this paper.

Phronetic research
Flyvbjerg (2001) adopts a different approach to envisaging a form of research that
might contribute to individual and social life. He uses Aristotle’s notion of phronē sis m
e][arc

(interpreted as ‘prudence’) to envisage a form of social research that could contribute

to social life and decision-making not in the contemplative or theory-making mode of
Aristotle’s epistē mē (especially, Flyvbjerg argues, if theory is understood on the
]m
e[arc ]m
e[arc

model of natural scientific theory) or in the applied science mode of technē (which ]m
e[arc

amounts to constructing rules for practitioners and others to follow). The kind of
research and social science he has in mind can, he argues, distinctively contribute to
praxis by contributing to public practical deliberation in the way that public philoso-
phy can do. He says:

the principal objective for social science with a phronetic approach is to carry out anal-
yses and interpretations of the status of values and interests in society aimed at social
commentary and social action, i.e., praxis. (Flyvbjerg 2001, 60)

Later, while cautioning that too great a concern with methodology and methodological
rules can distract from the real work of social science (2001, 129), he offers (2001,
129–40) a set of ‘methodological guidelines for a reformed social science’. He
concludes by stating that:

The result of phronetic research is a pragmatically governed interpretation of the studied

practices. The interpretation does not require the researcher to agree with the actors’
everyday understanding nor to discover some deep, inner meaning of the practices.
Phronetic research is in this way interpretive, but it is neither everyday nor deep herme-
neutics. Phronetic research is also not about, nor does it try to develop, theory or univer-
sal method. Thus, phronetic research is an analytical project, but not a theoretical or
methodological one … (C)larification is a principal concern for phronetic social science
and provides the main link to praxis. Phronetic social science explores historic circum-
stances and current practices to find avenues to praxis. The task of phronetic social
science is to clarify and deliberate about the problems and risks we face and to outline
how things may be done differently, in full knowledge that we cannot find ultimate
answers to these questions or even a single version of what the questions are. (Flyvbjerg
2001, 140)

Flyvbjerg suggests that the phronetic researcher is a kind of public philosopher

helping to clarify choices about what is to be done, and providing a kind of criti-
cal perspective on the use of power that might allow people to find alternative
ways of proceeding in social life. These are attractive aspirations and encourag-
ing admonitions.
Flyvbjerg’s phronetic researcher, however, remains on the sidelines. In a footnote
to the methodological guidelines, he distinguishes the phronetic researcher from the
action researcher (echoing Sandberg et al.’s apparent fear that the researcher may ‘go
native’ and lose the protection and authorisation of the academy):
16 S. Kemmis

Action researchers typically identify with those they study; that is, researchers take on
the perspective and goals of those under study and use research results as part of an effort
to achieve these goals. This is not necessarily the case for phronetic research. (2001, 192)

Whether or not this is an adequate characterisation of action research, especially

participatory action research, it implies that the phronetic researcher is located
‘outside’ and perhaps ‘above’ the practices and practitioners being studied.
Flyvbjerg’s characterisation of phronetic research shares with Aristotle the valuing
of the contemplative life. In phronetic research, however, the philosopher enters
public deliberation in the way an Athenian statesman, trained by Aristotle, might have
entered a debate about proposed laws for the city-state. But Aristotle also understood
that practice was in the doing (as did Marx). Flyvbjerg’s phronetic research aims to
nurture praxis from phron ēsis – by contributing to serious and informed practical
em
[]acr

public deliberation about power and its consequences in social life. The phronetic
researcher, it appears, does this on behalf of social life and those who inhabit it – as
one who shares the planet with those others, certainly, but also in a special role –
perhaps as a kind of ‘conscience’ for social life.
It is clear that Flyvbjerg’s phronetic researcher enters public deliberation about
issues in an interpretive-hermeneutic mode; in the second-person attitude of the self
talking to others who are also selves. This is a reasonable stance. It is the stance of the
public intellectual.
Since phronetic researchers do not necessarily ‘identify with those they study’
(Flyvbjerg 2001, 192), however, and since they stand on the sidelines commenting on
the social life and practices they study, it follows that the praxis they aim to inform is
not, or is not necessarily, their own praxis. It will be up to others – politicians, admin-
istrators, practitioners, communities or organisations – to make their decisions taking
account, or not taking account, of the deliberations of the phronetic researcher. The
phronetic researcher enters a dialogue with those others, but from a refined and some-
what distanced perspective on the issues and practices under study. Like Sandberg
et al., Flyvbjerg aims to preserve and extend the work of social science in the acad-
emy, and his phronetic research is a way to make the social science faculties matter
again to university administrations and to governments. Of course he also hopes the
fruits of phronetic research will matter to wider publics as well.
Oddly, and once again, then, we find ourselves distanced from praxis in phronetic
research, even if in dialogue with it. Phronetic research feeds deliberation – phron ēsis em
[]acr

– directly, and feeds praxis indirectly, through the decisions of others. Perhaps, then,
phronetic research might equally be named ‘deliberative research’ (as in the notion of
‘deliberative democratic evaluation’ championed by House and Howe 2003).
The products of phronetic research are words addressed to the world, to be sure,
and in a spirit of mutual deliberation, but they are not yet praxis, even though they aim
to orient it. Speaking may be praxis, and be part of praxis, but reports from phronetic
research are not themselves the praxis of those phronetic research aims to influence.
We might therefore conclude that those whose phronēsis and whose praxis is the
em
][acr

subject of phronetic research are different from those whose praxis is the object of
phronetic research.
Phronetic research clearly reaches out to praxis, but it enters praxis through
becoming part of others’ phron ēsis and then, perhaps, their praxis. Phronetic research
em
[]acr

does not bridge the division of labour between the researcher and the practitioner, and
the interests of the researcher and the practitioner remain distinct, served by different
 Pedagogy, Culture & Society 17

forms of praxis, different institutional conditions, and different kinds of rewards.

Phronetic research thus remains vulnerable to Marx’s charge in the famous 11th thesis
on Feuerbach: ‘Philosophers have only interpreted the world; the point is to change it’.

Praxis-related research
In Sweden, a new form of educational research has recently been proposed, aiming to
bring research nearer to educational praxis: ‘praxisnära forskning’ (which translates
literally as ‘praxis-close research’) or, as Mattsson and Kemmis (2007) translated it to
English, ‘praxis-related research’. Issues regarding ‘praxisnära forskning’ were
explored in two reports published by the Swedish Research Council (Torpe and
Askling 2003; Carlgren, Josefson, and Liberg 2005).
Mattsson and Kemmis (2007) outlined a number of features of praxis-related
research, aiming to show that it is oriented towards changes in social praxis rather than
contributing to knowledge and theory alone, in the manner of ‘conventional’ scientific
research. On the one hand, the authors aimed to show how praxis-related research
contributes to social praxis; on the other, they also wanted to show that the reports of
scientific research and of the degree projects produced by undergraduate students in
the form of small theses are usually pressed to conform to the usual requirements of
scientific reports rather than requirements that might be more appropriate to transfor-
mations of social praxis.
The aspects of praxis-related research elaborated in Mattsson and Kemmis (2007;
see also Mattsson and Johansson 2008; Hesselfors Arktoft and Lindskog 2008; and
Mattsson 2008) take us towards praxis, and certainly describe a form of research that
aims to contribute to praxis. As indicated, the Swedish term ‘praxisnära forskning’
translates as ‘praxis-near’ or praxis-close’. The English term ‘praxis-related research’
also suggests that there is a relationship between this kind of research and praxis.
According to Mattsson and Kemmis, ‘praxis-related research’ aims to change things
in praxis: developing an inquiry culture in a field setting, developing a critical
approach among participants, empowering participants to take action, building their
sense of solidarity, drawing on and developing their life experiences, opening commu-
nicative space between them, and so on, all of which can contribute to changes in
currently established modes of praxis.
Mattsson and Kemmis embrace the possibility that praxis-related research can be
conducted both by practitioners themselves and also by researchers (perhaps action
researchers) who are not necessarily wholly in the practitioner role. They emphasise
the generativity of praxis-related research for social praxis and its transformation.
They envisage research endogenous to the ‘happening-ness’ of praxis that transforms
the way praxis happens.
As indicated by the question in the subtitle of their article ‘Serving two masters?’
Mattsson and Kemmis (2007) thus envisage praxis-related research that produces
different kinds of outcomes for practitioners and their praxis field, on the one hand,
and, on the other, for researchers and the academy. Two questions then arise: (1) what
is the nature of the role played by any non-participant or not-wholly-participant
researchers involved in praxis-related research, and (2) what is the nature of the
contribution of reports of praxis-related research beyond the praxis setting?
In relation to the first question, we might reasonably conclude that non-participant
or not-wholly-participant researchers play a kind of ancillary role in the conduct of
praxis-related research as research. It might also be the case that such not-wholly-
18 S. Kemmis

participant researchers raise and investigate problems and issues explored in relevant
scientific research literature related to the field of practice in which the praxis-related
research occurs. To the extent that this is so, it suggests an answer to the second question:
not-wholly-participant researchers might make contributions via research reports in the
same way and from the same position as the ‘praxis researchers’ described by Sandberg
et al. – that is, contributions to knowledge and theory in academic research literatures
based on the concerns and criteria of academic research fields which conduct their enqui-
ries independent of the concerns and issues of particular praxis fields. Such reports might
then be vulnerable to the criticism (made earlier of the views of Sandberg et al.) that
their contributions would be extracted from, and appropriated to, knowledge and theory
in the academy and thus, in the process, made exogenous to praxis and the praxis field
in which the research took place. To the extent that this is so, then the research begins
to be evaluated by criteria different from those Mattsson and Kemmis describe for
praxis-related research, namely the criteria for ‘conventional’ scientific research. The
research then begins to be evaluated in terms of its textual products rather than in the
social life and social praxis of some community, group or organisation.
To the extent that praxis-related research produces outcomes in the forms of
reports for the academic community, then, it is research that produces discourses
whose standing is to be evaluated outside the deliberative discourses of the settings in
which the research was conducted. Under such conditions, the ‘research findings’ no
longer have an ‘internal’ relation to social life and social praxis as knowledge in
action, and theory in practice, that is, as knowledge and theory that are in play in the
doing. We then return to conventional presuppositions that research produces knowl-
edge and theory about praxis or practice rather than in practice or praxis. This is an
important distinction, as I hope to show.

Researching praxis within practice traditions

While earlier, twentieth-century approaches to studying practice (and, sometimes,
praxis) have regarded practice as an object like ‘behaviour’ or ‘action’ or ‘activity’
that could be explained or understood as a phenomenon separate from or external to
the researcher observing it, some recent approaches regard practice, and especially
praxis, as in principle inseparable from and ‘internal’ to the persons and groups
whose practice/praxis it is, and also as ‘internal’ to the practice traditions of which
these people are members. If this is the case, then it might follow that practice/praxis
is only researchable ‘from within’, by the people whose practice/praxis it is, either as
individuals reflecting on their own practice with a view to transforming it, or as
collectivities like the communities that constitute a profession, who might want
collectively to explore the consequences of the work of their profession with a view
to transforming it. If practice/praxis is only researchable from within, then, it may
follow that we need to take a very different view of what it means to ‘research’ prac-
tice/praxis than has been taken in existing traditions of research (at least in those
traditions that regard praxis as an object external to the researchers or research
communities concerned).

Research as practical philosophy

In a series of related articles on education, educational theory, methodology in educa-
tion and educational research, and practical philosophy, Wilfred Carr (2007; see also
 Pedagogy, Culture & Society 19

Carr 2000, 2004, 2006a, 2006b) has posed a number of stark challenges to conven-
tional views about research, theory, methodology and ‘method’. He argues that
modernist notions of theory and method forged over the last 200 years have failed to
deliver what they promised to deliver: scientific knowledge and theory that would
provide reliable bases for application in practice.
Carr offers an alternative understanding of what it means to orient a practice by
returning to the Aristotelian conceptualisation of praxis, and to the notion of a form of
practical philosophy whose principal task is to assist in deliberation about what to do
at any moment in the conduct of a practice, under current and existing conditions and
circumstances. He points out that every practice – including a professional practice
like education – is only intelligible as a practice of its kind in the light of a tradition
that informs and orients it. Here, he follows Gadamer (1975) on the role of tradition
as shaping our perceptions and interpretations. Carr also draws on MacIntyre’s neo-
Aristotelian conception of practices as shaped by intellectual virtues, traditions and
‘the narrative unity of a human life’ (1983, 191–2) that gives meaning to those prac-
tices through consciously living ‘a certain kind of life’ (1983, 163).
Elsewhere in practice theory, Theodore Schatzki (2002) also regards mutual intel-
ligibility as a crucial feature of practices (following Wittgenstein 1953, on ‘forms of
life’) – we know what someone is doing when we see them teaching, or practising
medicine, or farming. Schatzki sees practice as ‘the site of the social’ (to use the title
of his 2002 book), where people meet and interact with one another in mutually
comprehensible ways, in the course of the different kinds of projects (‘teleoaffective
structures’; Schatzki 2002, 80–1) that orient them in their mutual interaction.
A crucial thread of Carr’s argument in these articles is that educational research
ought to be understood as research that orients and guides the individual and collective
praxis of educators. For Carr, however, only people who have some grasp of the tradi-
tions of thought and action, theory and practice, in the field and discipline of education
can reason or deliberate educationally about what they are doing. Education, like other
distinctive kinds of practices, is a practice tradition. This means that what makes
actions and interactions educational is intelligible in any sophisticated or learned way
only by those who have engaged in the practice traditions of education themselves,
and have deliberated for themselves and with others in their profession about what it
means to act educationally and to have acted educationally – to have practised educa-
tion, to have practised the traditions of education. That is, what makes the practice of
education more fully intelligible is that it is mutually intelligible within a community
of practitioners of the field and discipline of education whose communal praxis
constitutes the tradition as a practice-tradition. What is to count as the practice of
‘education’ then, is not just a matter of following rules about certain kinds of actions
and activities (that is, techn ē) and it is not just a matter of contemplation about the
em
[]acr

meaning of education in some ideal sense (that is, theoria); rather, decisions about
what is to count as ‘education’ must be made in shared deliberation about past, present
and future praxis. Since those situations always vary, practical deliberation and praxis
are always required, for individuals and collectivities whose concern is principally for
the good of the traditions of education – for the continuation, thriving of those tradi-
tions, sustainability as forms of life; as collective praxis; as living traditions.
Of course circumstances always change, so the practice traditions of education
must continually be re-interpreted for new times, new places and new conditions. An
example is the way in which the late nineteenth-century, early twentieth-century,
liberal progressivism of John Dewey (1916) was re-interpreted when teachers in
20 S. Kemmis

Dalton, Ohio, developed the ‘Dalton Plan’, fixing upon the child as individual and
creating a more individualistic form of child-centred education (Parkhurst 1922).
Later, standardising tendencies evident in schools following the Dalton Plan were
identified, and a new form of curriculum known as the ‘Winnetka Plan’ (Washburne
and Marland 1963) was developed as a corrective, giving greater prominence to
creative and social activities (on this example, see Connell 1980, 277–9).
Educational traditions always evolve in and through the practice of self-aware
educators who see their individual and collective praxis as needing to respond to new
circumstances and opportunities. This evolution cannot be sustained for long just
through the isolated innovations introduced into the tradition by individuals; they
need to be interrogated in the community of enquiry that constitutes the profession.
Educational traditions may orient and be present in the deliberation and conduct of
individual educators, but they can only survive and thrive as traditions by being
sustained in communal debate and deliberation among members of the profession. By
insisting on the role of a practice tradition, and by emphasising that practice traditions
orient deliberation about the particular circumstances and settings in which educators
find themselves, Carr makes a stronger connection with praxis than do the other
forms of research into practice described earlier. Perhaps one might say that, for Carr,
praxis is the ‘home’ of phronēsis, not merely an expression of it. Similiarly, phron
em
[]acr em
[acr

ēsis is not a body of knowledge or theory or deliberation that precedes and guides
]

action; it is conducted in the doing of praxis.

Education, we might say, does not come into existence (into ‘happening-ness’)
except in individual and collective educational praxis. But a person’s praxis or a
group’s collective praxis cannot be educational unless it is oriented by practice tradi-
tions and unless it is made intelligible as a praxis of this particular sort.
For Carr, then, praxis is primary to educational research. Since individual educa-
tional praxis or collective, social, educational praxis can only be understood as the
praxis of individuals and groups who are actually doing it, it follows that a researcher
can only have access to that praxis as praxis only by having access to the deliberation
and action of the one or ones doing the praxis. The ones with the greatest and most
privileged access to practice as individual and social praxis are those whose praxis it
is. On this view, practitioners themselves are best positioned to be educational
researchers – doing practical philosophy that aims to evaluate their own individual
and collective praxis in the light of tradition and in response to current and emerging
conditions and circumstances. On this view, it follows that a special case must be
made to consider anyone external to the actuality of educational praxis as being
adequately positioned to conduct research in or on praxis.
It also follows that the community of those who constitute a collective practice
tradition – in this case, educators themselves – are best positioned to evaluate whether
a particular form of educational praxis is within, or a contribution to the evolution of
the practice tradition of education. Only they have access to the barriers and exigen-
cies that confront contemporary educational praxis, and that challenge the practice
traditions that have informed their educational praxis until now. They are the ones in
a position to deliberate about how changed forms of those traditions and practices
might respond to changing historical and local circumstances like meeting the global
challenges for education in a digital age, or the local challenges faced by a remote
Indigenous community in inland Australia. It is not that practitioners have privileged
knowledge that is somehow superior to the knowledge or theories others may have
about their praxis; rather, it is that they are the only ones who have in their collective
 Pedagogy, Culture & Society 21

care the individual and social project of Education (and, in the European sense, of
Pedagogy).
As Carr argues, much educational research of recent decades has aimed to change
educational practice from without, by recourse to ideas about learning or motivation
from educational psychology, for example, or ideas about social class or difference
from sociology or cultural studies. These forms of educational research have aimed to
make educational action a species of technē , or rule-following, and they have typically
m
e[]arc

focused on improving various kinds of ‘products’ like ‘learning outcomes’ that are
products external to the person doing the producing. As Dunne (1993) observes,
however, praxis, as ‘right conduct’ and as ‘history-making action’ is inseparable from
the person or persons performing it; it is always also a process of self-formation. It
might be added that praxis is always a process of self-formation in both an individual
and a collective sense – praxis forms the person, the identity, of the one who acts and
the communities of which they are part; and these persons and communities are, as
Marx observes, both products and producers of history. Education forms individual
selves and social selves; it forms the identities, capacities and fortunes (in the broad
sense) of communities and nations. It follows that those whose conduct is educational
praxis – that constitutes educational praxis – must evaluate the quality of their work
not just against technical criteria like the magnitude or depth of the learning outcomes
of their students, but, rather, by evaluating the excellence of their students as persons,
and by evaluating the excellence of the communities and societies in which they live;
excellences, that is, in intellectual virtues of the kinds described by Aristotle and by
MacIntyre (1983) like honour, justice and rationality (to which might be added, for
our times, sustainability in its many dimensions).
It also follows from this that university educators can have a place in the evolution
of practice traditions of education, not as ‘experts’ on the sidelines of educational
praxis but as participants in that praxis, through their own work as teachers. Like
educators in schools and other child and adult education settings, university educators
also confront the challenges of changed historical conditions for education, changed
student populations, changed community and government expectations of education,
and changed local conditions for their work (see, for example, Kemmis and Smith
2008a; Ax and Ponte 2008). Through reflection and research on their own individual
and collective praxis, they, too, are positioned to comment on and contribute to the
evolution of the practice traditions of education for changed times and different
places.

Research as praxis, within practice traditions of research

No socialised human being lives outside practice-traditions. To be human is to partic-
ipate in a communal social life that gives meaning, value and social significance
because the individual has cultural-discursive terms in which to interpret themselves
and their world, material-economic activities through which to meet physical and
social needs and desires, and social-political commitments and obligations that provide
social solidarities in which individuals exist for others as well as for themselves. Prac-
tice-traditions are ubiquitous, not rarefied or specialised in highly differentiated forms
of life like the life of a profession.
To conduct research in any field or discipline, from a more or less amateur position,
as a member of a profession, or as a member of a university or a research organisation
is thus to participate in a practice tradition that makes a set of activities and interactions
22 S. Kemmis

with others and the world comprehensible as research. To do research in any serious
sense is thus to see one’s activities against the background of, and as a contribution to
the knowledge, the theory, the action and the praxis – the life – of a field or discipline.
If this is so, then most researchers conduct their research as realisations of and as
contributions to the development of practice-traditions of their fields and disciplines.
This does not, however, necessarily mean that, for example, their research contrib-
utes to the practice-tradition they might think it contributes to. Because some
researchers say they are doing educational research does not necessarily mean that
they are making a contribution to the praxis-traditions that actually constitute educa-
tion. Similarly, some researchers who conduct what they say is educational research
make contributions to the practice-traditions of education only indirectly, by changing
(enabling or constraining) the external and institutional conditions under which educa-
tion can be carried out, for example, by changing the financial or material or curricular
resources or the time available to educators, or by changing the access of different
people and groups to different educational activities. For more than a hundred years
now, many researchers who have adopted an empirical-analytic approach to educa-
tional research have changed these externalities (resources, conditions, curricula) with
the aim of informing and transforming education as a production process – as techn ē. em
[]acr

Other researchers have adopted an interpretive-hermeneutical approach, aiming (like

the advocates of phronetic research) to inform the deliberations of those (teachers,
educators) whose work actually constitutes education, whose work is education. And
some, like participatory action researchers in education, have conducted research
adopting a critical-emancipatory approach, aiming to transform the practice-traditions
of education from within.
Yet each of these groups of researchers – all considering themselves educational
researchers – conducts its work within a particular kind of practice-tradition. Some
empirical-analytical researchers work in the practice-traditions of various schools of
educational psychology. Some interpretive-hermeneutical researchers have worked in
various schools of history of education, philosophy of education and sociology of
education. Some critical-emancipatory researchers have worked in practice-traditions
of critical theory and critical social science.
Like the participants in Herman Hesse’s (1969/1943) The Glass Bead Game, a
novel describing the vicissitudes of the leading practitioner of a highly esoteric form
of practice (the glass bead game) played far in the future, researchers within a practice-
tradition realise, recreate and develop the tradition continuously through their partici-
pation in its practices. There is little doubt that when they conduct their enquiries, they
are doing so as a form of individual and collective praxis – a research praxis.
It does not follow, however, that this research praxis is educational praxis. Indeed,
for those researchers who investigate practice as an object or phenomenon to be
controlled and constrained, their research praxis is by definition external to educa-
tional praxis (although they may communicate and debate their findings with students
or fellow-researchers in the mode of educational praxis). The case is more difficult
with those researchers who aim to interpret education in relation to contemporary
cultural, economic or social-political traditions; they enter deliberation about educa-
tion that might or might not be within the tradition, or might only be within it to the
extent that they influence the ways practitioners of educational praxis understand their
work. When those researchers – those in universities, for example – enquire into their
own educational praxis (for example by reflecting on the cultural and historical condi-
tions that shape their praxis), however, it is likely that their research is both within a
 Pedagogy, Culture & Society 23

practice-tradition of research (a research praxis) like participatory action research and

within a praxis-tradition of education.
From the perspective of practice-traditions of education, then, some forms of
research praxis are also educational praxis and some forms of research praxis are
external to educational praxis.

Conclusions
It would be extravagant and inaccurate to say that those practice-traditions of research
that are external to educational praxis are always or necessarily harmful to educational
praxis. Some may be. It would be reasonable to suppose, however, that if most or all
research into education were conducted (as a research praxis) from the standpoint of
practice-traditions external to educational practice, then it might not nurture educa-
tional praxis and the practice-traditions of education.
If the expenditures by governments and research councils on educational research
were the sole criterion for judging whether educational research is in this state, one
would be tempted to conclude that educational praxis is not being nurtured by research
from within the practice-traditions of education. The preponderance of funded educa-
tional research investigates educational praxis from a vantage point external to the
practice-traditions of education. On the other hand, government programmes fostering
action research and other forms of self-reflective research by practitioners suggest that
some support is being given to encouraging practice-traditions of research that are
internal to educational praxis. The situation may not be as bright as it might be,
however, since some programmes of support for teacher research aim to ‘assist’ teach-
ers to develop in ways that make their practices more compliant to government poli-
cies about education.
On the other hand, enthusiastic teachers and educators continue to debate issues
and concerns about their individual and collective educational praxis, with or without
research funding. This communal discourse is essential to the vitality of educational
praxis.
Communal discourse within the educational profession is not as much under
threat of extinction, however, as it is under threat of distraction and obfuscation.
Properly educational debate, within the practice-traditions of education and
conducted in the interests of individual and collective educational praxis under
changing historical, cultural and material conditions, is under a threat of distraction
because the discourses of many governments and the researchers who advise them
are not, in themselves, educational discourses. They are administrative and technical
discourses about how education should be managed and what it should produce.
Educational debate is under a threat of obfuscation because practitioners of education
– those whose work constitutes individual and collective educational praxis – are
continually subjected to critique and attempted reconstruction from those external
administrative and technical discourses which misconstrue educational praxis as
technē , and education as training, and thus erode the opportunities to use properly
]m
e[arc

educational discourses to understand and interpret education under changing histori-

cal conditions and in different locations.
Dunne (1993) and Carr (2000, 2006b) have argued that the discourses in which
education as a practice can be understood are being contested and marginalised by
technical and theoretical discourses that are external to educational praxis. Kemmis
and Smith (2008a) and Ax and Ponte (2008) have argued that those colonising
24 S. Kemmis

discourses are undermining the field, the discipline, the practice, the traditions and
the profession of education. Strengthening – in some places reviving – practice-
traditions of research internal to individual and collective educational praxis is
needed to resist those colonising tendencies. Without such resistance, the practice-
traditions of education that orient and inform educational praxis might decline and
disappear like one of the indigenous languages around the world today that suddenly
loses the last of its speakers, taking with it not just the language but also the
knowledge it articulated, a specific form of human culture, a particular way of life, a
way of being human.
If this account of research praxis is correct, then a great deal hangs on how those
– or at least some of those – who conduct educational research identify themselves. If
they regard themselves, first and foremost, as educators and as practitioners of educa-
tion, then they may conduct research according to practice-traditions that see the
activity of developing education as something internal to educational praxis, as a
necessary part of doing education well. If, on the contrary, they regard themselves
primarily as theorists or researchers authorised by practice-traditions external to
education and educational praxis, however, then they may alter the conditions under
which education and educational praxis are conducted, indirectly enabling or limiting
educational praxis, but not for educational reasons. Instead, administrative or techni-
cal or some other reasons would provide justifications for the changes proposed.
I believe this is in fact the current state of official debates about the development
of education. Instead of regarding all educational questions from the perspective of
how best, under changing and sometimes difficult and distorted circumstances, to
develop the capacities of every individual and every community and society for indi-
vidual and collective self-expression, self-development and self-determination, offi-
cial questions of school education have largely become questions of administering
the learning and the lives of all children towards enhanced participation in the
economic life of societies. Questions of adult education have similarly resolved them-
selves into debates about ‘life-long learning’ harnessed to the participation of adults
as workers in ‘flexible’, changing and increasingly uncertain occupations and jobs. In
both cases, ‘learning’ has replaced ‘education’ as the core concern of those whose
lives and work are conducted for education. Similarly, states see their educational
responsibilities as responsibilities for the administration of schooling (at every level)
and ‘skill formation’ rather than for the education of citizens and societies in the
interests of the good for humankind. Under such circumstances, goals of civic partic-
ipation (‘active citizenship’) are reduced to social integration as compliance with the
will of governments and employing organisations, and goals of human development
are reduced to a kind of law-of-the-jungle adaptability to economic opportunities and
consumerist satisfaction.
These tendencies are partly, though insufficiently, ameliorated by initiatives and
social movements fostering forms of research praxis, and practice traditions of research
that are internal to education as a field and discipline – including advocacies and initi-
atives about participatory action research and other forms of reflective practice.
In the light of the contemporary dilemma about how research can contribute to the
development of practice-traditions of education and individual and collective educa-
tional praxis – whether and to what extent from locations external to or internal to the
practice-traditions of education – I believe that a revitalisation of debate about educa-
tion and educational praxis is needed, along with continuing enquiries concerning the
character of different kinds of research into practice.
 Pedagogy, Culture & Society 25

In this paper, I have tried to show that there are promising leads towards forms of
educational research that can connect with public deliberation about education and the
continuing development of education from ‘within’ its own practice-traditions. Carr’s
(2007) notion of educational research as practical science, or as practical philosophy,
is one such promising lead.
Throughout the paper, I have also tried to suggest that the Aristotelian notion of
praxis as morally informed, committed action and the Marxian notion of praxis and as
‘history-making action’ pose difficult conceptual questions for research and research-
ers. Aristotle and Marx make plain the ‘happening-ness’ and ‘sheer actuality’ of
praxis, and that it is the praxis of individuals, communities and societies that unfolds
in and through their action. While some forms of educational research, and practice-
traditions of educational research, aim to grasp educational practice as a phenomenon,
from the standpoint of the outside observer, what they grasp instead is an object
constructed by external theory and methodology. Those forms of educational research
do not grasp the ‘happeningness’ and the ‘history-making-ness’ of individual or
collective praxis from within. Having thus misconstrued praxis as an object seen from
the perspective of an external observer, those practice-traditions cannot construe the
educational activities of educators as praxis, as the right conduct and the socially
responsible action of people aiming to make their world better through education.
They therefore offer advice on how ‘it’ can be improved not in educational terms, but
in administrative or technical terms.
The ‘experts’ offering this advice, by virtue of their training as researchers in
administrative or social and behavioural sciences, offer the kinds of advice that
administrative science, or sociology or behavioural science can offer education,
namely advice from the sidelines. What is needed today is advice from the field.
What is needed is knowledge and theory that comes into play in the doing of educa-
tion, not from the sidelines but from the field of play, from the players whose life and
work is educational praxis. In the words of the Theses on Feuerbach, those external
researchers have only attempted to explain or interpret education; the point is to
change it. Researchers who study education from the outside do not grasp the palpa-
bility and actuality of individual and collective educational praxis, with all its wanted
and unwanted consequences, and its incessantly urgent need for development in the
light of changing circumstances. In the end, educational praxis can only be changed
from within, by those whose work – whose individual and collective praxis – is
education.

Acknowledgement
This paper was prepared for the ‘Researching Practice’ conference sponsored by the journal
Pedagogy, Culture & Society and Gothenburg University, held at Gothenburg University,
13 September 2008.

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