Action Research: the reformation of maladjusted institutions by John F. Schostak First World Conference for Action Research and Process Management, Griffith University, Brisbane 1990 In this paper I want to take the perspective of education as a way of examining what is at stake for individuals in the relationship between individuals and the communities they serve. Why education and not sociology or philosophy or psychology? Education far from being a mere deliverer of curicula, of syllabi, of social values and so on, has a perspective on the issues of social organisation that are unique. Its role is to facilitate inquiry and encourage an awareness of structures and processes of cultural/social life, and to promote self expression and action in the world. Action research is a vehicle for promoting and realising the implications of such educational inquiries. Action research, as I use the term, is about getting people to reflect critically upon the conditions of their life in order to identify and experiment with alternative forms of self expression as a means of acting in, making, re-making and transforming the world around them. There are few better reasons for engaging in something like action research than to gain some greater freedom for self expression, to increase the sense of well-being, and to discover what being alive is all about. In this paper I want to explore the potential of action research, for promoting greater freedoms of expression in the realm of education, health and welfare. The discussion will draw upon the experience of a number of recent projects which start from the experience of individuals rather than starting from the concerns of professionals. The purpose is to expand the individual's or community's potential for alternative actions and for self expression. The Maladjusted institution Schools can provide a useful first model for thinking about institutions in general and the communities or clients they serve. Currently, in Great Britain the metaphor of the market place is all pervasive. The government talks about the clients of education, schools as cost centres, and pupils as products. The market metaphor reduces individuals to controllable, predictable units for the purposes of increasing output, reducing cost, increasing consumption and thus profit for distribution amongst anonymous shareholders. During the early 1980s it was clear the government considered that schools had failed to deliver the products industry was perceived to need. The rhetoric of all the educational and training reforms throughout the decade of the 80s was of the need to train the young to fit the needs of industry (Fiddy 1982). There was little or no talk of education as an end in itself, nor of people as ends in their selves, nor of the aim of education as being the promotion of action. Rather, schools have traditionally been institutions which manage the many for the purposes of the few. This they share in common with all other institutions. Indeed, the traditional social function of schools is to instil the generic values, habits of behaviour, beliefs, skills and knowledge required to fit and work within a societies' institutions. This renders institutions maladjusted to the whole-person needs of individuals and their communities. This is largely accomplished through the maintenance of structures of ignorance: that is, creating the discourse that says what kinds of knowledge children, employees, patients, clients, citizens need to be protected from, or do not 'in their best interests' need to know. For example, in a study of a large comprehensive school I carried out during 1980-82, I recall a conversation with a deputyhead and other senior members of the staff where it came to light that many families in the community served by school had no working lavatories, and many had no electricity or gas because they had failed to meet bills. This was in an area of massive unemployment where the norm was to be unemployed. When I raised the potential of the school as a vehical for making known these social injustices, I was immediately told 'our job is to keep the lid on the dustbin'. Any other response would lead to 'violent revolution'. Shortly after these words, the youth of many city areas of the country suddenly took to the streets in some of the worst street riots for decades. Had education really nothing other to do than to keep the lid on the dustbin? Was it so maladjusted to the needs of individuals that it could not attend to those needs? Indeed, schools collaborate, or cooperate wittingly or unwittingly with other agencies of control like the police, and the social services in the systematic production of categorisable careers. For example, there was Tony who had a record before he was born: His life can be read on file, his self, the drama of his biography inferred from the records. He is the object of the interpretations of professionals. When Tony was not more than two, his father went to prison. He was known as a 'hard case, a fighter' and mother was disowned by her family, 'they wouldn't speak to her or help her out'. By the time Tony was about four years old, mother and children had lived in 'a series of small damp houses and been moved around by the council. During that time Tony was found - I mean the earliest reports on file are things like "found two-and-a-half miles from home on his three-wheeler", sort of two years of age, no knickers on, no nothing by the police (...) His social worker uses the phrase, and it's on file "bad parenting", which is a terrible phrase. (pp85-6) From then on Tony's life is a catelogue of expulsions from school and run-ins with the law leading eventually to his imprisonment on an attempted manslaughter charge. None of these institutions had a response capable of meeting Tony's real needs. This was a child hurt and damaged by his relations with adults and with peers. To succeed he simply became harder and more violent then they. There are many Tonys. The mechanisms by which institutions deal with the Tonys are exclusion, detention and marginalisation. But how are those who are not like Tony dealt with? There are those, the mass, who are easily managed. They live by timetables which co-ordinate and synchronise their actions. Their daily timetables are largely inflexible whether at work or at home. In these circumstances what is the role of such methodolgies as action research? Is it to render people more efficiently manageable? To detain the unmanageable more securely? Making Explicit the Implicit The importance of action research to the educational perspective is to render explicit the implicit within social processes, to reveal the maladjustment of institutions to individuals and their communities. The Focus for Action The problem with the mainstream health promotion programmes, whether the focus is on AIDS, drugs, sex, hygiene, etc is that typically they do not take into account the decision making context, and the ways individuals interpret information within their own cultural groups. That is, they do not take into account the means through which people act within the world as they find it. Similarly, in a review of the literature regarding the management of personal welfare Titterton (1989) argues that the traditional paradigm focuses upon the individual as a problem at the point of failure, rather than focusing upon successful stress-coping strategies. The event which brings a moment of crisis occurs within a life context. To this event, individuals bring the coping strategies available to them either learnt through their personal biography or through their cultural socialisation. The focus it is argued, should be on the event and the individual in context. Health and welfare provision will miss the target unless it takes into account the individual-community context. The traditional mainstream health professional-client relationship has been one where the individual is reduced to the role of patient, a problem to be diagnosed, abstracted from the individual's life situation. Action research can be used to re-situate the professional-client relationship within the life context of the client. During an action research based degree course for health professionals at the University of East Anglia, action research has been used to explore the professional roles of the students, all of whom are highly experienced people engaged in a number of health related professions: e.g., nurse tutors, health visitors, physiotherapists, radiologists, midwifes. For example, a study by the midwifes of an antenatal course for mothers- and fathers-to-be revealed that their experiences, feelings, and beliefs were not a part of the agenda of the course. The course was largely irrelevant in affecting breast or bottle feeding patterns. By interviewing the parents the real factors affecting their decision making processes could be revealed and recommendations for changes in the course were made to allow time for free discussion and the sharing of experiences and beliefs. The real focus for health and welfare provision is not the clients' problem or need in isolation, but the whole life relationship of the client within which the problem or need arises. The Context for Action The context for action can be briefly illustrated with reference to a project in the process of being developed in a poor rural community in the mountainous region of Northern Portugal. The school (consisting of just 12 children) is isolated, the teacher works alone, her own under school aged child at the back of the classroom. These range from 5 to about nine years old. She is not used to this kind of school. She has worked with older children following distance learning television programs. A school based project was set up involving the theme of 'hygiene'. During a meeting with a team of visiting support/advisory teachers the remark was made that the program could begin with a good hosing down. The children were dirty and their hair full of paracites. The village economy was largely subsistence. However, with the building of a new dam nearby, migrant workers were disrupting the culture although adding to the economy. The role of the support teachers was to develop the quality of education in relation to the needs of the community. Besides developing an educational project, the team also tried to establish links with a health care team. The initial thoughts were to establish a project centring upon health. However, as the teacher at the school pointed out, the parents believed that the children were healthy and were clean. They objected to being told that the children's hair was infested. The teacher had tried to make the mothers help. She bought the medicine that was needed and gave it to the parents. But the parents refused. The teacher also pointed to several children and said that they and their parents had a problem with alcoholism. Again, the parents refused to listen to the teacher. It became important to tackle the problem from a different angle. It was decided to introduce the teacher to a style of working being developed in other schools in the region. Essentially, it consisted of empowering the children by eliciting what was on their own agenda of concerns. If health matters were important to them, it was reasoned, then the agenda of concerns would reveal this. The children worked in groups with an adult to help write down a list of their questions and 'wants'. After a morning's work the children, many of whom had difficulty in writing and had never worked in this way before, wrote a list on the blackboard: Gostava de ter quarto de banha (we want to have a bathroom) Campo de jogos (playing field) Gostava de ter um cinema (we want to have a cinema) Estrada bem arranjada (good roads) Gostava de ter casa da povo (we want to have a social meeting house) Noa tamamos banho por que nao temo tempo (we don't bathe because we don't have time) Gostava de ter frigorifico e televisao (we want to have a television) Por que ragas nao temos uma casa do povo com: medicos e enfermeira (why doesn't Ragas have a peoples house with doctors and nurses) Por que ragas nao construiram casa de banho nas nossas cases? (Why hasn't Ragas built bathrooms in our houses?) o meu pai abandonou-nos a minha mae e a min (my father abandoned us, my mother and me) eu sou crianca porque tenho de trabalhas muito? (I am a child, why have I to work so much?) Another list was developed by the other group, written on paper by one of the visiting adults. Both health and welfare issues are not hard to discover in either list. They are clearly situated within the experience and needs of the children. There is the abandonment of families by fathers, there is the cry of the child who works so much to help the family that the sense of being a child is lost or injured. There is the lack of basic facilities and the desire for luxuries. And to sum it all up, there was one last message made by 'a very angry young boy' who wrote this on the board: eu quando comprar uma motadas pesadas levo um pau a tres e voudar nas costas ao meu pai a Venezuela (when I buy a heavy motorbike I'll take a stick and go to the coast to my father in Venezuela) His intention is to beat his father with the stick. The teacher pointed to the words on the blackboard with a shared sense of anger and despair. Yet a beginning had been made. It was the first time the children had been able to express these needs in such a free and open way. The task following this was to develop a structured approach to curricula action. The project had begun to develop such an approach with other schools in the region. It involved the children working on their questions that they would use as the basis of a project by asking people of their choosing in the community. They would then decide what to do with the information they collected. In other schools this had involved the media and the production of school newspapers distributed around the community. Through the children's concerns the agenda of concerns of the community itself could be mapped. Health and welfare could be seen not as a set of concerns that outsiders pressed upon the community but as integral to the community itself. This is the first step in a process whereby individuals and a community begin to recover or to discover their own power to act. In order to discuss the process further, it is necessary to focus down upon particular events in the lives of individuals in order to discover their needs. The Event as a Unit of Analysis The process of analysis will be discussed with reference to a one year study of school aged people and alcohol. The project proposal began with the aims of: producing developmental profiles of secondary aged girls and boys in relation to their attitudes towards, and patterns of drinking, providing explanations of behaviour adequate to the social realities experienced by young people, grounding social action in knowledge concerning social realities in order to target health educational programmes to young people The object was to show how curricular materials could be developed by children reflecting upon and sharing their own experiences. This was an explicitly educational perspective on health and welfare issues as they related to the culture of aclohol. Such a perspective has the purpose of mapping the contexts within which health and welfare needs arise, the coping strategies that are available to individuals, and the points of breakdown in coping in order to understand and share understandings. In the development of the profiles of each pupil interviewed accounts of alcohol related events could be identified. These events occurred within group and sub-cultural contexts which framed and limited the available courses of action in any given situation. Each group or sub-cultural group has its own repertoire of discourse strategies by which to interpret events, behaviours and through which to circulate images, identities, values and the stories (or anecdote based folklore) of the group. Each event could be analysed in terms of the encounters, decisions, courses of action, consequences and kinds of narratives that could be told concerning them. The profiles and the narratives that can be constructed of events can be arranged, or analysed in terms of what may be called a grounded typology: This typology is initially grounded in the accounts told during interviews specific to a local community. The typology is thus limited. Nevertheless, it is also full in terms of being redolent of the images, themes and experiences of growing up. Its power derives from this fact of being grounded. The teachers of these children can readily recognise and respond to the stories. But more than this, teachers who do not know these particular children personally can and have recognised in the accounts, children like them that they do know. By increasing the range of communities, and by extending the detail of information regarding the individuals being studied, the range of the typlogy itself can be extended. By taking an inter-regional approach, the emergent typology draws the variations to be found in the regions into itself and expands to encompass them. Since the typlogy is grounded, it is ever evolving and ever kept alive to the year by year changes in the youth sub-cultures and experiences of young people in a fast developing and changing world. The typology is constructed in four stages although in practise the stages may not be so distinguishable from each other. Each stage potentially contains the others. Stage 1 is the construction of developmental profiles from ethnographic data. The essence of this is the experience of the individual. This stage is characterised by story telling: the stories or accounts people make and give of their lives or significant moments in their lives in relation to what can be understood by outside observers. Stage 2 is the construction of analytic profiles (...) of each individual who has been the subject of case study (...). The essence of this is reflection upon experience in order to produce a close analysis of the life circumstances of individuals as a preparation for identifying educational strategies for those individuals. Such educational strategies cannot be imposed; are not necessarily restricted to the classroom; and should be seen as a continuous process of self development that is, as much as possible, self-developed. Such educational strategies identified through the process of stage 2 are an emergent feature of the developing critical awarenes of the individual with regard to their own life circumstance's . Stage 3. Although stages one and two are undoubtedly forms of educational strategy in their own right, it is stage 3 that enables educational responses specific to the individual, to his/her critical experiences, system of priorities, turning points, key decisions, significant others and so forth. Specifically at stage three a dialogue emerges between the educationist and the individuals involved. This dialogue is the basis of the educational relationship. It is at this point that educational intervention can occur. The dialogue depends upon a relationship of trust, openess, suspension of judgement, mutual respect and an assumption of the centrality and value of each child's experience. Stage 4 emerges from all the previous stages and through comparisons and contrasts between different accounts and different understandings, a higher level of generality is achieved. This stage aims towards a typology of life stories/narratives (paradigmatic narratives) which are derived from the resources available to the young people which their specific cultures and sub-cultural experiences provide. It is essential at this stage, therefore, that the sub-cultural typologies specific to a region and across regions are analysed. The 'life stories' which emerge from the profile and sub-cultural/cultural analyses are 1] a potential fund of curriculum materials; and 2] more significantly, they are the property of the child, an example of how an individual life may be understood, unravelled, spoken about, seen, empowered. The child, so to speak inherits, his or her own paradigmatic narrative. Because it is a means of objectifying his or her life experiences, it is also a way of creating a sense of distance which enables the child to become momentarily an audience to the drama of his or her own life. This creates the conditions for emancipation from previously taken-for-granted constraints and thus enables the emergence of radically new perspectives on seemingly habitual forms of problematic behaviour. It also enables the generation of a system or way of understanding to be carried into adult life. What takes place in the classroom is the start of a process that ideally continues into adult life. As a first illustration, a summarised account of one encounter told by a girl of sixteen: involved the generation of unwanted obligations from which an individual seeks escape, either within the encounter or subsequently. She was described by a teacher as "a leader, completely capable, streetwise" who was "a leader in the youth club, trusted by the youth club" and viewed as "the toughest girl in her group" . When interviewed she recounted the events of one evening in a fashionable pub in the city centre close to the club and discotheque areas. She told the interviewer that a friend had challenged her "I bet you can't drink six double whiskeys". At this stage she had already drunk one pint of lager and had a vodka and orange "on the go". She fulfilled the bet with consequences including a four hour hospitalisation and stomach pumping. According to the director of the Senior Tutorial Centre with whom she had also spoken about that evening, there was somewhat more to the evening. "She saw that the two men who were getting her and her friend drunk had one thing in mind as she put it. They were after one thing.....She decided to get so drunk that they wouldn't be interested. That's a conscious decision on the part of a 16 year old". Another consequence of that evening, is that in the two months since, she has not had a single alcoholic drink and she has been "put off whisky for life". The event is composed of a number of interactants: the girl, her friends, the man, other party members. The girl had a reputation to keep, as 'leader', 'hard', 'streetwise'. The stories she tells of herself are chosen and told to reproduce these images of herself. She must be on guard then that the stories that circulate about her also reproduce the desired images. This is an important criterion in her decision making concerning her health and welfare. Thus, one fundamenatal structure underlying the sequences of events that evening was a character test. One side of the test involved a challenge by her friend, the other involved being manipulated by the two men. She was placed into a situation that had a range of alternative actions, each action having a particular consequence in terms of her character as valued by others whom she values. Whatever action she took would have consequences for the stories about her that would be circulated amongst her group from then on. The courses of action and their consequences constitute her practical frame for decision making. The practical frame can be analysed in terms of those consequences that are 'in reach now', those that could be 'in reach if' something else is done first and those that are 'unreachable because' 'they are considered unrealistic, just fantasy or wish, or beyond one's power.' During the encounter with the two men, a challenge is made by her friend. This challenge places the sexual compliance/vulnerability of the two girls 'within reach' of the two men. If they won she would contribute to their stories of conquest and she would simply take on a role of being a 'slut' or perhaps a 'slag', an 'easy lay'. She decides to take a course of action which satisfies two criteria in her mind: 1) meeting the challenge of her friend; 2) by meeting that challenge to excess, placing herself sexually out of reach to the men (i.e., being no good to them). As a result she is taken to hospital thus satisfying in a dramatic way her two aims. The events told later as an account or anecdote serve the purpose of other tales of excess, that of being 'put off' something for life. Whether it is said as a real consequence or simply for dramatic effect is another matter. It enters the folklore of her group of friends and acquaintances to be told and retold for a multiplicity of purposes. The implications for health and welfare are in terms of understanding the strategies by which individuals and groups move something into practical reach and deny other alternatives the status of being practical or realistic. The project developed, in embryo, a number of extended narratives composed of interview material. This material con be extended and enriched through observational accounts of situations/events. Although in this instance it was funded researchers who constructed the accounts, there is no reason why the accounts should not be constructed by the children themselves to be used as a basis for reflection and analysis. They may be used to form the basis of creating participatory health educational programmes Participatory Health and Welfare Programs Frankam and Stronach (1990) carried out an evaluation of AIDS education play. The purpose of the play was to present the issues surrounding AIDS within a dramatised context. The evaluators interviewed young people both before and after the saw performances of the play. Their conclusion was: It is unreal to separate the HIV/AIDS issue from the much broader and more complicated area of human relationships. "Love Bites" differed markedly from the sort of education most young people seem to receive and, most crucially, I believe, it diffrered in its capacity to put the HIV/AIDS issue right in the middle of the complications of real life. In this sense educational drama has, potentially, a unique contribution to make. The audiences saw the play as a reflection of their lives, not as something that existed outside them and the participatory, exploratory hot-seating sessions were crucial in reinforcing this, or in creating this sense, in some who remained 'one step removed' through the play itself. It seemed to me that the play linked HIV and AIDS issues to real life, and that it may have helped individuals relate information they already have to their own lives. Thereby, in the long term, sexual behaviour may be influenced or changed. What teenagers, and others, need to find is an appropriate set of messages that speak to them as individuals and that will help them to deal with the multi-facetted and complicated business of sexual relationships. Of other kinds of program the people who were interviewed were largely scathing: "We did have a program on AIDS but that was a bit blurry and his speech, we couldn't understand it. And everyone cracked up." "We did understand it but it didn't go into really great details about it. I mean, they went into how you can get it from sex and all that, but they didn't sort of go into other things, you know." As in the case of the alcohol project, the teenagers tended to know something of the facts, but somehow the facts did not really help them. What they really wanted was to be able to discuss and to be able to relate the facts to their own lives. Principles for a Program of Action All individuals have to act upon the world in an attempt to satisfy wants, needs, interests and overcome dangers, fears and anxieties as they arise. Access to, and understanding of the material world is mediated by cultural practices which largely pre-exist the birth of the individual. It is not simply a matter of reaching out and grabbing what is needed, desired or willing the disappearance of what is feared. In addition, wants, needs, interests, fears and anxieties are not simply born with the individual but are a product of cultural interaction. If an individual needs or desires something it is as a product of cultural experience. The manner and the extent to which he or she will fulfil the need or desire depends upon the repertoire of cultural practices available to the individual at any given time. It is the repertoire of cultural practices available to the individual that sets the boundaries to action, that defines what is within or out of reach, what is dirty or clean, what is dangerous or safe, what is healthy or unhealthy and what is or is not within an individual's or community's 'best interests'. At any given time, in any given society, not all its members have equal access to the full range of cultural practices. Action research involves the individual in inquiring into his or her own life circumstances. This is what gives action research its power to situate programs within the life context of people. However, there is a real danger to this unless action research is guided by principles which safeguard the rights of individuals. If the research is participatory, involving the client in its development, then the client generates a sense of ownership, relevance and empowerment over the directions of his or her actions. Contact the author at: email: John Schostak. Reference Titterton, M. (1989) 'The Management of Personal Welfare.' A consultancy report prepared for the ESRC. mimeo. Dept of Social Administration and Social Work, University of Glasgow. Appendix 1 The Process of Curriculum Development The following were the observed elements underlying the processes of development in the Peneda Geres project schools: 1. Identify the agenda of concerns The children must produce a list of issues that they are concerned about. This can involve aspects of the community or their own personal interests or situation. The procedures required to do this are: form the children into manageable group sizes ensure each group has an older child, or an adult who can ensure each child takes a turn to contribute their own ideas, the adult or older child writes down each child´s contribution write the combined list of issues on the black board 2. Discuss the list of issues This can be done by getting the children to discuss the following kinds of questions: Which issues/questions/problems can be categorised together? If there is more than category, do each of the categories fit together to produce an integrated study of a village, region, or a way of life? How could a study be produced that the class would be interested in doing? What would be the purpose of doing a study? How should the study be organised? Who should be the audience for what is produced ? 3. Decide how the study is to be organised Each child must have a role to play. The important task is to ensure that nobody is excluded from the project. It is here that the teacher must be very aware of group dynamics. Dominant children, the talkative ones, the ones who seem to have a lot of good ideas can very easily take over the project. It is important to ensure that the social skills and the educational skills of the quiet ones and the one´s who have problems expressing themselves are developed. Therefore ensure that there is a clear distribution of tasks amongst the children. what are the different tasks to be accomplished in order to develop the project? These may include for example: interviewing parents, neighbours, experts, administrators, employers, government officials, politicians etc ; and recording the interviews. observing and making an account of for example: social customs traditional or modern ways of working a typical day in the life of a member of the community collecting artifacts, documents, artwork, songs, proverbs, stories etc of the community past and present - collect also the accounts of how these are used, what they mean etc illustrating the theme imaginatively as well as historically by describing, making stories, poems, paintings 4. Identify the curriculum potential of the project Once the children have decided upon a project they consider to be worth developing, the teacher can explore the wider curriculum potential of the project with the children. This can be done by considering: its historical dimensions: is this a local history? Are there historical documents available? Is it an oral history? Are there people alive who can recall that history? its geographical dimensions its potential for the stimulation of talk and of writing its potential for using information technology software its scientific and mathematical dimensions etc. 5. the use of the products of the study The children should be involved in decisions concerning what use should be made of the work they have done. Possibilities include: exhibitions - locally, or to a wider audience publishing locally or more widely books, articles contacting the media computer networking - i.e., transmitting data to others Return to main page.