Using participatory and creative methods to facilitate emancipatory research with people facing multiple disadvantage: a role for health and care professionals

Participatory and creative research methods are a powerful tool for enabling active engagement in the research process of marginalised people. It can be particularly hard for people living with multiple disadvantage, such as disabled people from ethnic minority backgrounds, to access research projects that are relevant to their lived experience. This article argues that creative and participatory methods facilitate the co-researchers’ engagement in the research process, which thus becomes more empowering. Exploring the congruence of these methods with their professional ethos, health and care professionals can use their skills to develop them further. Both theory and practice examples are presented

Nurturing the young shoots of talent: Using action research for exploration and theory building

This is an Author's Accepted Manuscript of an article published in European Early Childhood Education Research Journal, 19(4), 433-450, 2011, copyright Taylor & Francis, available online at: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/1350293X.2011.623515.This paper reports the outcomes of a set of action research projects carried out by teacher researchers in 14 local education authorities in England, working collaboratively with university tutors, over a period of three years. The common aim of all the projects was to explore practical ways of nurturing the gifts and talents of children aged four–seven years. The project was funded by the Department of Education and Skills in England as part of the government's gifted and talented programme. The project teachers felt that their understanding of issues relating to nurturing the gifts and talents of younger children was enhanced through their engagement in the project. It was possible to map the findings of the projects to the English government's National Quality Standards for gifted and talented education which include: (1) identification; (2) effective provision in the classroom; (3) enabling curriculum entitlement and choice; (4) assessment for learning; (5) engaging with community, families and beyond. The findings are also analysed within the framework of good practice in educating children in the first years of schooling. Participating practitioners felt that action research offered them a suitable methodology to explore the complexity of the topic of giftedness through cycles of planning, action and reflection and personal theory building

Students as co-creators of teaching approaches, course design and curricula: implications for academic developers

Within higher education, students’ voices are frequently overlooked in the design of teaching approaches, courses and curricula. In this paper we outline the theoretical background to arguments for including students as partners in pedagogical planning processes. We present examples where students have worked collaboratively in design processes along with the beneficial outcomes of these examples. Finally we focus on some of the implications and opportunities for academic developers of proposing collaborative approaches to pedagogical planning

Action research and democracy

This contribution explores the relationship between research and learning democracy. Action research is seen as being compatible with the orientation of educational and social work research towards social justice and democracy. Nevertheless, the history of action research is characterized by a tension between democracy and social engineering. In the social-engineering approach, action research is conceptualized as a process of innovation aimed at a specific Bildungsideal. In a democratic approach action research is seen as research based on cooperation between research and practice. However, the notion of democratic action research as opposed to social engineering action research needs to be theorized. So called democratic action research involving the implementation by the researcher of democracy as a model and as a preset goal, reduces cooperation and participation into instruments to reach this goal, and becomes a type of social engineering in itself. We argue that the relationship between action research and democracy is in the acknowledgment of the political dimension of participation: ‘a democratic relationship in which both sides exercise power and shared control over decision-making as well as interpretation’. This implies an open research design and methodology able to understand democracy as a learning process and an ongoing experiment

The purpose of mess in action research: building rigour though a messy turn

Mess and rigour might appear to be strange bedfellows. This paper argues that the purpose of mess is to facilitate a turn towards new constructions of knowing that lead to transformation in practice (an action turn). Engaging in action research - research that can disturb both individual and communally held notions of knowledge for practice - will be messy. Investigations into the 'messy area', the interface between the known and the nearly known, between knowledge in use and tacit knowledge as yet to be useful, reveal the 'messy area' as a vital element for seeing, disrupting, analysing, learning, knowing and changing. It is the place where long-held views shaped by professional knowledge, practical judgement, experience and intuition are seen through other lenses. It is here that reframing takes place and new knowing, which has both theoretical and practical significance, arises: a 'messy turn' takes place

A new model of collaborative action research; theorising from inter-professional practice development

The development of pedagogies to meet the needs of diverse communities can be supported through inter-professional practice development. This article explores one such experience, that of speech and language therapists developing a new video-based coaching approach for teachers and teaching assistants in multi-cultural settings with high numbers of children learning English as an additional language. To support them in developing and trialling the coaching approach, the expertise of a teacher-educator and educational researcher was provided through a university business voucher. It is this working relationship that the article has as its practical focus, as it transformed to one of collaborative action research. The action research is described, providing the context for a discussion of the characteristics of collaborative action research and the proposal of a new model. This model offers a way of conceptualising collaborative action research through time, and of recognising the importance of the partners’ zones of proximal, contributory and collaborative activities in sustaining change and knowledge-creation

Tied to the worldly work of writing: parent as ethnographer

Parent narratives have contributed to ethnographic accounts of the lives of autistic children (Kelly, 2005) but there are fewer examples of parents producing their own autoethnographies. This paper explores the affordances of an online blog for enabling a parent of an autistic child to produce a written record of practice which may be considered 'autoethnographic'. Richardson’s (2005) framework for ethnography as Creative Analytic Process is applied to extracts from a blog post in order to consider its contribution; reflexivity; aesthetic merit; and impact. The paper addresses the methodological and ethical implications of reconceptualising parents as researchers and the potential contribution of new writing platforms to the development of auto/ethnography. Key words: Autism, Auto/ethnography, Blog, Disability, Mothe

Double helix of research and practice—developing a practice model for crisis resolution and home treatment through participatory action research

Over the last five years Crisis Resolution/Home Treatment (CR/HT) teams have been established in Norway. These teams provide an alternative to in-patient acute care services offering assessment as well as direct care. This paper addresses a method of examining the nature of practice models that are being developed in a CR/HT team incorporating the philosophy of open dialogue and the open lifeworld approach. The overall design of this research is action research applying a cooperative inquiry perspective. Multistage focus group interviews are used as a method for generating data, followed by phenomenological–hermeneutic approach in analyzing the data. Three themes were identified: (a) “keeping the dialogue open” referring to the emphasis of openness in dialogues and opening up for a variety of perspectives on what's going on; (b) “tolerance of uncertainty” referring to the need to accept and deal with uncertainty and multiplicity; and (c) “nurturing everyday life issues” referring to the emphasis on illustrating clinical situations in detail through remaking of stories. The on-going co-processes of research and practice was a double helix that links the happenings in the practice with the findings in the research revealing the knowledge in practice and further developing that knowledge

Participating together: dialogic space for children and architects in the design process

© 2016 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis GroupTypically enmeshed in the ‘voice’ perspective within children’s participation debates, there are currently sporadic insights into designer–child creative dialogue. Drawing on the findings of a Leverhulme Trust-funded research project, this paper articulates moments of dialogue between architects and children in spatial design processes, whose spatial and symbolic qualities help to understand the interactions and meeting of cultures. Several authors have discussed the transformational potential for adults and children to ‘co-author’ identities in dialogical contexts. The paper builds on this body of research to suggest that design dialogue offers the space, literally and metaphorically, for children and architects to participate together. Identifying the qualities of the dialogic design space as potentially present in children’s and adults’ everyday cultures and interdependent relations, it is proposed that this dialogical framework might diversify architects’ and children’s roles in the design process and enrich practices and perceptions of design participation

How PETE comes to matter in the performance of social justice education

Background: For over four decades there have been calls for physical education (PE) and physical education teacher education (PETE) to address social inequality and foster social justice. Yet, as numerous studies demonstrate, attempts to educate for social justice in PETE are infrequent and rarely comprehensive. This raises the question why it appears to be possible in some situations but not others, and for some students and not others.    Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to examine the multiple socio-political networks or assemblages in which PETE is embedded and explore how these shape the possibilities for students to engage with the concept of social justice and sociocultural issues when learning to teach PE. Two research questions guided this study: How does an orientation for social justice education within education policy affect the standards for enacting PETE programs? How is social justice education encouraged within PETE programs? Methodology: Methodology: Drawing from a broader study of over 70 key personnel in more than 40 PETE programs, we examined how faculty in PETE understand their professional world, identify their subjective meanings of their experiences, and address sociocultural issues (SCI) and social justice education (SJE) within PETE. Data sources included an initial survey, a semi-structured interview, and program artifacts. We analyze the ways that SJE/SCI was represented in three national settings (England, the United States, and New Zealand) and identified common themes. Results:  Examination of each national setting reveals ways that SJE and SCI were enabled and constrained across the national, programmatic, and individual level in each of the countries. The coherence of explicit National policy and curricula, PETE program philosophies, and the presence of multiple individual interests in social justice served to reify a sociocultural agenda. Conversely possibilities were nullified by narrow or general National Standards, programs that failed to acknowledge sociocultural interests, and the absence of a critical mass of actors with a socio-critical orientation. These differences in assemblage culminated in variations in curriculum time that served to restrict or enable the breadth, frequency, and consistency of the messages surrounding SCI in PETE Conclusion: These findings highlight the importance of acknowledging socio-political networks where PETE operates. The agency of PETEs to enact pedagogies that foreground sociocultural interests is contingent on congruity of the networks. The authors caution that although the ‘perfect storm’ of conditions have a profound influence of the possibility of transformational learning of SCI in PETE, this arrangement is always temporary, fluid, and subject to changes in any of the three network levels. Additionally, the success of PETE in enabling graduating PE teachers to recognize the inequities that may be reinforced through the ‘hidden curriculum’ and to problematize the subject area is contingent on the expectations of the schools in which they teach.