Bradbury
As the windows of the Academy open up, more scholars are called to co-create new experiments in societal learning in response to the social-ecological challenges we faced. Social constructionism is central in how action researchers work. Action Research is shaped by pragmatism, reflexivity and dialogue, in combination necessary to the action research transformative approach to learning-by-doing. This chapter proceeds with an introduction to Action-oriented Research for Transformations, or ART (Bradbury et al., 2019), and offers illustrations and principles for its contemporary practice. The author argues that constructionism offers a possibility for co-creating life sustaining institutions through our joint efforts.
Action research brings together action and reflection, theory and practice, with stakeholders, to issues of pressing concern; it is scholarly practice with a participative orientation to knowledge creation (Bradbury, 2015; Reason and Bradbury, 2000).
Action researchers seek to make a useful difference in a world in which scientific reports rarely provoke the response appropriate to the scale of the problems defined. Yet action researchers do not bring pre-packaged solutions. We acknowledge that expertise resides in the hands of stakeholders. Action researchers, do however, bring diagnostic and facilitative tools, along with distillation and documentation of notable results so that those involved can articulate their own answers and share them.
Action research belongs in a category of knowledge that has evolved from an orientation we might broadly label Pragmatism, which emphasizes the multi-dimensionality of human experience and knowledge. The central emphasis of Pragmatism is that knowledge should be assessed by its practical consequences and not - as Cartesian science insists - only by its explanatory power. As a brief framing, with more on the interweaving of heritage from Global South and North below, we may say that action researchers see clear intellectual lineage back to John Dewey's (1938) emphasis on the individual's active inquiry process in combination with William James’ articulation of the primacy of praxis in interaction with the world. This interweaving of learning and democracy also has roots in the work of Mary Parker Follett (1924) and Paolo Freire (1970). Knowledge-in-action concerns power; democracy is something to be learned as ever deeper levels of emancipation are realized.
Social constructionism (Berger and Luckmann, 1966), followed by the cognitive/linguistic turn, call us to appreciate the ways in which our individual (psychological) understandings of a situation actively shape our collective (sociological) reactions. Action researcher Budd Hall (1992), drawing on Berger and Luckmann (1966), explains that action researchers recognize that knowledge is socially constructed and embedded. This happens because action researchers are influenced by the potential of people they work with, their co-researchers, to shape their own world, through creative acts. Action research allows stakeholders not just to react, but to be choiceful about the type of world we want to shape. Marja-Liisa Swantz, a Finnish action researcher, credited with coining the term Participatory Action Research, gets to the heart of the matter in a recent interview: “In participatory research you can help people in seeing their own problems. You do not tell them, ‘This is your problem’, but you work with them in a way that they become active” (Nyemba and Meyer, 2018). This ‘help’ is a form of collaboration and implies an interest in transforming power dynamics toward mutuality.
Reason and Bradbury (2000) presented action research to fellow action researchers as a logical next step beyond a linguistic turn that privileged rational cognition, to one that seeks creative action. In allowing the importance of transforming power relations, if there is to be transformation, we can trace an easy line from the sociology of social constructionism to poststructuralism with the latter emphasis on how social institutions both enable but also dominate people (Foucault, 1994). Action researchers go beyond merely understanding domination to actively transforming toward desired futures. In this we see the value of a constructionist approach. The influential action researcher Bjorn Gustavsen referred to action research as a form of pragmatic constructionism (Gustaven, 2014). This is similar in spirit to Gergen et al.'s (2015) prod to qualitative scholars to move beyond qualitative (deconstructive) descriptions to invest more in supporting creative experiments that co-produce better worlds.
Looking to those rarer efforts that explicitly explicate epistemological groundings for action research (Coleman, 2015), we see social constructionism is at the heart of fostering the explicitly dialogic efforts for collaborative action. These take expression in a variety of forms from balancing inquiry and advocacy (Taylor et al., 2015) and critical appreciative inquiry (Duncan, 2015), to working within the arena of political action. Constructionism when it meets participation implies working transformatively with others, i.e., taking on the exercise of inhabiting another's mind-set, for which empathy is required. For this, action researchers must become better acquainted with the one who is doing the inquiring, namely the self. Thus, the practice of reflexivity becomes a critical anchor for ensuring quality of work with stakeholders in a way that integrates subjective, intersubjective and objective work (Chandler and Torbert, 2003). For example, the practice of relational action inquiry (Bradbury and Torbert, 2016) describes an effort by the author and her mentor to be in inquiry together about the impact of their different gender socialization. In an era of #MeToo, they illustrate and invite others to attempt to transform power dynamics through the active co-creation of mutuality. This highly personal work can transform deeply alienating, inherited patterns of how women and men relate.
As the windows of the Academy open up, and constructionism is understood as the way in which life is co-created through our joint efforts, there is an opportunity for scholars to help with the societal learning required to meet the interwoven social-ecological challenges we face. This chapter proceeds with an introduction to Action-oriented Research for Transformations, or ART (Bradbury et al., 2019), a contemporary update on action research thinking. It is an update that points to ways in which expanded epistemologies that empower participative and reflexive methodologies for collaborative action can help respond to the call of our social-ecological times. ART articulates a timely updating of our notions of learning beyond ill-fitting mental templates in which knowledge has been presumed to emanate from experts in the form of disinterested fact and figures. Instead ART encourages us to reconnect knowing with emotion and action.
A new global consciousness sensitized by awareness of ourselves as participants within the larger ecology of life, along with fellow sentient beings, is now required if we are to make the leap from passive recipients of inert facts to transformative co-creators within an ecology of living beings. Happily, it is not actually a leap, but more of an uncovering, a recognition of the truth available when we turn to our own experience. ‘How long we have been fooled’, poet Walt Whitman enlightened us, ‘we are nature.’ And so our experience, when not drowned out by conditioning to privilege objectifying skepticism, or turn dialogic partners into objects, offers a path forward in scholarship that encourages expression of our full selves within a community of subjects.
Action Research Heritage
The term ‘action research’ is often attributed to Kurt Lewin (1946), but increasingly it is common to hear of two origins of action research, one from Global North and the other from the Global South. These are, however, becoming quite intertwined. The Global North account starts with Kurt Lewin's efforts to understand and prevent human complicity in such horrors as the Nazi Holocaust. Father of social psychology, Lewin escaped Nazi Germany and then stumbled, through collaboration, into bringing observers (e.g., research facilitators) and research subjects (e.g., therapeutic groups) together to share, understand and create new patterns of dialogic interaction. The other account centers on the collaboration of Colombian Orlando Fals Borda (2006) working with Bangladeshi Anis Rahman (2004). Situated in the Global South, action research went hand-in-hand with popular liberation movements, which espoused the importance of popular knowledge creation among non-elite populations (Freire, 1970). The North and South traditions interweave today with, for example, the North's embrace of the arts, e.g., inspired by Augusto Boal's (1985) theatre of the oppressed, At the same time, the Global South embraces a wider set of
