Building knowledge,building community: reflecting on the value of a national research programme in adult literacy

In 2003 the National Literacy Secretariat (NLS) of Canada, at that time a branch of the Department of Human Resources and Development Canada, decided to review its research function. This article discusses some of the questions the review raised for the field. Many of these issues are to do with the management of knowledge – what research gets funded, to be performed by whom, and with what kind of approach – whereas others are concerned with the meaning of the research function itself, and what it can contribute to a field of practice such as adult literacy.     

Objective outcome evaluation of a leadership course utilising the positive youth development approach in Hong Kong

Abstract

This study adopted a single-group pretest-posttest design to explore the changes in 2,876 undergraduate students in positive youth development, psychological well-being and desired graduate attributes after they took a leadership subject utilising the positive youth development approach at one university in Hong Kong. The subject aims to promote undergraduates’ leadership qualities, particularly their intra- and inter-personal competencies. Participants completed the same objective outcome evaluation forms before and after taking the subject. We found that the participants showed significant positive changes in most positive youth development attributes (i.e. self-determination, cognitive competence, behavioural competence, social competence, emotional competence, self-efficacy, spirituality, and clear and positive identity), life satisfaction and desired graduate attributes (including problem-solving ability, critical thinking, life-long learning and ethical leadership). The findings demonstrate that leadership subjects can promote the positive youth development of Chinese university students and enhance their psychosocial well-being and desired graduate attributes.     

Rhythms of knowing: toward an ecological theory of learning in action research

This article describes the culmination of a 2-year research study, where the researchers used writing practices with participants to structure interpretations of gay, lesbian and transgendered teachers' experiences. The researchers were interested in learning how such work might help the teachers interpret the ways in which they negotiated minority identities within public school teaching. For the final aspect of the study, the researchers decided to move the group from an urban setting to a seaside location, and chose to move more definitively into a participatory role by inviting a colleague to lead the group in interpretive research activities through the use of writing techniques and practices. The three-day writing workshop yielded new insights about the nature of writing and human cognition and, more specifically, revealed how events of collaborative research reflect an ecological complexity, where the outcomes of such work co-emerge and are co-specified by a particular group of individuals working in a particular place and time. As such, these research events develop their own patterns and rhythms of insight.     

An action learning approach to partnership in community development: a reflection on the research process

Green space offers a significant environmental resource that can improve the individual experience of health and quality of life. However, barriers exist that prevent the use of green space, and partnership (multi-agency) working has the potential to overcome these. Current public health policy aims to broaden the range of environmental public health intervention through effective partnership working. In response to this, a community development partnership project (Stepping Stones to Nature) was established in the south west of England to improve green spaces in neighbourhood communities through engagement and consultation. Integral to this project was an initiative to research the process and experience of partnership working. The aim of this paper is to report the experience of the multi-agency group guiding the research process and how they used an action learning approach to explore their experiences and guide the research process. Halfway through the project a ‘formal’ focus group discussion was arranged in order to capture the reflective thinking and learning that had taken place. The focus of this paper is on the data from that group discussion. Four main themes were evident from the data: expectation/perceptions; stakeholder involvement; tensions (at organisational and individual levels); and reflection and learning (through the partnership and research process). This paper reflects the different expectations of the research process that need to be identified early in partnership research in order that they can be appropriately managed.     

The student voice in well-being: a case study of participatory action research in positive education

Positive education blends academic learning and student well-being. Although research and application in positive education is growing, most has involved psychologists and educators applying strategies in schools, with little research that involves student voices in the development and implementation of a school’s positive education strategy. Assumptions are frequently made about what is best for student well-being, with little input from the students themselves. This paper describes a case study of participatory action research (PAR) carried out by students (N = 10) at a publically funded Australian school aiming to implement positive education. PAR is a form of collective inquiry undertaken by the people that the issue directly affects. The PAR group researched the school community regarding well-being during the school year. Mixed methods examined PAR student’s well-being, self-efficacy, autonomy, social and emotional assets, and other competencies before and after the process. Student involvement allowed the school to better understand their students’ well-being, and student-led communication about positive education laid the groundwork for its implementation. Results suggested benefits for the PAR students, particularly in engagement and self-efficacy. This realistically scaled study suggests that involving students using a framework of PAR is a promising, accessible, evidence-based, and developmentally beneficial approach to the implementation of positive education.     

Barriers to the implementation of specialized reading instruction in secondary co-taught classrooms: an exploratory study

ABSTRACT

This exploratory research underscores Bandura’s social learning theory on collective agency to investigate co-teaching partners’ collaboration regarding reading instruction for students with disabilities. Students whose Individualized Education Programs stipulate reading are dependent on special educators to deliver such instruction. In the current research, we investigate barriers to implementation of specialized reading instruction in co-taught classes. One hundred seven secondary special education co-teachers across the United States, who primarily teach students with learning disabilities, responded to a questionnaire about their co-teaching experiences and delivery of specialized reading instruction. Emphasizing the impact that co-planning has on barriers to the implementation of reading, our results indicate the moderating role of special educators’ perceived co-teaching benefits. Empirical findings are discussed, and implications for research and practice are offered.     

Grounding participatory action research in rural Colombia: a demonstration study on youth financial inclusion

ABSTRACT

Since the new millennium, the issue of financial inclusion of young people has increasingly gained recognition, especially in relation to those living in deprived circumstances. Financial inclusion can be promoted through education that specifically aims for the strengthening of young persons’ financial capabilities. In 2013, a participatory action research project was started in a rural region of Colombia to improve the research capacity of a local university through the development and implementation of a demonstration project on the financial inclusion of young people. University teachers, students and employees of a financial cooperative were trained in conducting qualitative methods with a specific aim of being responsive to the life stories of their interviewees. This paper shares the experiences from an international team of educational scholars who aim for the democratisation of research capacity and the dissemination of localised knowledge. This is done by working closely together with stakeholders and ultimately giving a voice to youth employed in the informal economy as they are usually the ones being most deprived from access to financial services.     

Changing educational practice in the early years through practitioner-led action research: an Adult-Child Interaction Project

This article reports the development of the first two years of a three-year project that examines the effectiveness of adult–child interactions in the early years, and tracks the development of teachers’ thinking and practice as they engage in practitioner-led action research. The Adult-Child Interaction Project involves practitioners who work with children from six months to six years in one local authority in England as they aim to develop their practice. On the basis of action research cycle, the methods include systematic video observation and stimulated recall; individual, paired and collaborative reflective dialogue; project logs and critical engagement with research. A distinctive feature is continuous engagement with an early years expert as a co-researcher and reflective partner in the processes of change and development. This article focuses on the impact and effectiveness of the project methodology, specifically the strategies that support critical reflection, dialogue and change processes.     

The evolution of reading in the age of digitisation: an integrative framework for reading research

In the course of digitisation, the range of substrates for textual reading is being expanded to include a number of screen‐based technologies and reading devices, such as e‐readers (e.g. Kindle) and tablets (e.g. iPad). These technologies have distinctly different affordances than paper has. Given that textual reading is at the same time likely to remain important as a cultural practice, and is undergoing massive change as digital screens are supplementing paper – with the potential to replace it as the dominant substrate – there is an urgent need to investigate what effects such change might have on the reading of different kinds of texts, for different purposes. This article proposes the need for an integrative, transdisciplinary model of embodied, textual reading accounting for its psychological, ergonomic, technological, social, cultural and evolutionary aspects. The envisaged model aims to be partly explanatory, in the sense that it aligns and integrates existing knowledge, and partly exploratory, in the sense that it points to blank spots in our knowledge where further research is needed. The model will thus serve to guide the planning of such further research, and to make research more compatible and research outcomes more widely useable.     

A mentoring programme based on competency development at a Spanish university: an action research study

This article describes an action research (AR) project for designing and implementing a structured mentoring programme in a Spanish university. A student affairs unit, a team of researchers, faculty-mentors and student-protégés worked together on three cycles of AR. The result is a programmatic mentoring programme for the development of non-technical personal and professional competencies for undergraduate students. This paper describes the original situation that sparked the project, the iterative process followed, the tools and guides developed and the final programme designed. In addition to the increase in the level of satisfaction perceived by the entire university, the paper outlines the five critical factors that emerged from the AR project: the competency development process, programme value added, trust between mentors and protégés, the prominence of the student-protégé in the improvement plans and the continuous improvement culture generated.     

Action research and organisational learning: a Norwegian approach to doing action research in complex organisations

The purpose of this article is to present a specific approach to the practice of action research ‘in complex organisations’. Clearly, there are many approaches to the challenge of doing action research in organisations; approaches that are, and also must be, quite context dependent and specific. But my purpose is neither to give an overview nor a recommendation of how action research is or should be done in complex organisations by different schools of action researchers around the world. The approach I will present has grown through practical experience accumulated over many years with doing action research in many different Norwegian organisations with organisational change and development as the specific objective. I will limit myself to an outline of this Norwegian context, and to how I and others have worked specifically with organisational learning both practically and theoretically within or in relation to a broad Norwegian or Scandinavian approach to action research and organisation development represented by many individuals.     

Evidence,Evaluation and the ‘Tyranny of Effect Size’: a proposal to more accurately measure programme impacts in adult and family literacy

As literacy grows in importance, policymakers’ demands for programme quality grow, too. Evidence on the effectiveness of adult and family literacy programmes is limited at best: research gaps abound, and programme evaluations are more often than not based on flawed theories of programme impact. In the absence of robust evidence on the full range of short- and long-term programme impacts, it is difficult to accurately measure intervention effectiveness. Too frequently, researchers and policymakers focus only on short-term, easily measured outcomes, creating a ‘tyranny of effect size’ that may systematically underestimate impact while simultaneously distorting practice. However, the answer does not lie in turning away from quantitative research. Doing so will consign adult and family literacy to the margins of public policy, when they should be in the mainstream. Longitudinal research from Turkey and the US suggests a need for revised, more subtle theories of how adult literacy and family literacy programmes work, and the diverse ways they benefit participants. By working together more closely and intelligently, researchers, policymakers and practitioners can develop evaluation strategies that more accurately measure programme effects. The key is combining methodological rigour with fully fleshed out theories of literacy development and programme impact.     

Procuring a sustainable future: an action learning approach to the development and modelling of ethical and sustainable procurement practices

This paper contributes to an understanding of the processes by which organisational actors learn how to affect positive and sustainable social change in their local region through action learning, action research and appreciative inquiry. The paper is based on a critically reflective account of key findings from an ongoing action research project, funded by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation. The project is an attempt to alleviate poverty in the Leeds City Region through the identification and spread of ‘good practice’ in large local organisations. The paper is based on insights into the tensions involved in accomplishing such modes of action research and action learning in this particular context, and how these findings can relate to similar research in other domains of inquiry, action and cross-organisational learning. Through this, the paper discusses the inherent challenges faced when attempting to use action research and action learning approaches to help large organisations to learn and develop as ethical and sustainable agents.     

Exploring the teaching of culture in the foreign language classroom within the context of collaborative professional development: a critical participatory action research study

ABSTRACT

This article describes the experience of French language teachers as they explored interculturality within a collaborative professional development environment. Participants studied how to design culture lessons for their classrooms through the lens of Intercultural Communicative Competence with the support of theoretical frameworks for intercultural learning. The findings underscore a need for teacher professional development that creates space for teachers to explore topics of interest in an in-depth and collaborative manner, that makes time for exploration of theoretical frameworks, and that models practical strategies for embedding interculturality in curricula. Furthermore, this study reveals that explicit examples of intercultural lessons taught while using the target language are needed in order for language teachers to gain confidence in this area.     

Participation in health through the construction of encounters: a micropolitical approach

We assume that the construction of encounters that produce care is a participative practice in health. Drawing on different research that has explored care production from a micropolitical approach, we present a view of participation as embedded in everyday life and based on the construction of encounters and relationships. Our goal is to provide reflections for debate on participatory practice within different frames of action. Based on the analysis of different cartographic narratives generated by research on a reproductive health policy, we discuss some core elements for the construction of encounters that produce care. On the same lines as models of professional development based on professionals’ day-to-day experiences, we propose experimentation during the encounters and discussion about what happens in them, as both a reflective practices and forms of collective and participative knowledge production.     

Relationality as a response to challenges of participatory action research in indigenous contexts: reflections from the field

ABSTRACT

Three researchers share their reflections on the challenges and goodness of fit of using participatory action research (PAR) in studies with indigenous peoples in the United States and Canada. Three central challenges of participatory methodologies are identified: (1) defining what constitutes participation; (2) the extended time required for a PAR study; and (3) researcher positionality. The authors discuss tensions inherent in the western academy when shifting final decision-making authority over research processes away from the academic institution to the indigenous community. A model situating the principles of PAR alongside perspectives and values congruent with the indigenous concept of relationality is presented as a means of mitigating these challenges. This approach aligns PAR principles within culturally-congruent definitions of relationship and encourages researchers to re-imagine participation as a form of relationship, allowing them to engage more deeply and genuinely with indigenous participants.     

Collaborative action research between schools,a continuing professional development centre for teachers and the university: a case study in Spain

This article describes a collaborative action research project developed over the course of the 2011/12 academic year in the Faculty of Education at Cordoba University (Spain). The RIECU school–continuing professional development centre for teachers–university learning network is part of this research process. The aim is to create and consolidate a community of practice made up of continuing professional development advisers to teachers, infant education teachers, university students who are training to become infant education teachers and university teaching staff. The most relevant findings, which respond to the questions raised, are: the action research conducted indicates that teamwork between teacher, adviser, researcher and university student is an effective strategy to facilitate the acquisition of professional competences among student teachers; and student-teachers involved in the case study have evolved in their conception and approach to childhood and have had the opportunity to learn by modelling the professional conduct of their mentor teachers.     

Participatory action research in two primary schools in a rural Tanzanian village: an exploration of factors to cultivate changes in teaching and learning

Access to primary and secondary education in Tanzania has drastically expanded in the past two decades. In response to this success, its ministry is now targeting improvements in educational quality through additional reform. Yet teacher absenteeism, physical abuse, overcrowding, lecture-based pedagogy and a system of accountability based primarily on state and district examinations centered on rote memorization impose great obstacles to students being prepared for future employment and further education. This study draws insights into how traditional teaching and learning methods in one rural village in Tanzania can be changed through examining a collaboratively created intensive after-school program that focused on three content areas and used a participatory action research approach centered on cooperative inquiry. The key elements of the participatory action research approach drawn upon were using a participatory model to create a community of co-learners, designing the curriculum collectively, students collecting data in their communities about identified problems, requiring all participants to contribute, student groups disseminating their findings through presentations and an ongoing support system for teacher development in applying a student-centered pedagogy. Students responded through increased school attendance, confidence, self-esteem and active engagement while teachers incorporated participatory methods of instruction in their classrooms. The factors accounting for the consensus of support by villagers and school and government leaders for the program include community and government buy-in, the creation of a community of learners, consistent follow-up support for teachers and reinforcement of expectations.