Jean McNiff and Jack Whitehead: doing and writing action research

This clearly presented tutorial book, by two experienced authors who have collaborated for 30 years, appears to promise to offer a sound introduction to the vibrant international field of Action Research. The guidance is set out in bullet points, with regular summaries. Complexity is made more manageable. Progress can be step by step. However, it soon emerges that McNiff and Whitehead are two of the many blind scholars seeking to make sense of an intellectual elephant. It turns out that there can be many descriptions of the same beast, or at least of the same species or genus. I have long experience of Educational Action Research. When I qualified as a secondary teacher in 1975 I immediately joined a classroom Action Research project on ‘‘Teaching about Race Relations in the Classroom’’, an experimental extension of the Humanities Curriculum Project, directed by Lawrence Stenhouse at the University of East Anglia. This approach to teaching took me into designing and using classroom historical simulations, and then into artificial intelligence research. My key references, as I moved from the secondary classroom and into university research in 1980, as with McNiff and Whitehead, were to Chomsky, Foucault, Kuhn, Polanyi, Wittgenstein, Habermas and Freire, as well as Kemmis, Parlett and Hamilton. Some years later, when I participated in the conference ‘‘Culture, Language and Artificial Intelligence’’ in Stockholm in 1988, it became apparent that the field was richer and more diverse than I had realised. Having managed national research programmes in the UK, and fallen foul of conflicting models of programme evaluation, I encountered Bjorn Gustavsen, talking about Action Research Case Studies, based on a number of national programmes. For Gustavsen, this provides a key to enterprise development and regional development projects in Scandinavia and across Europe, with a focus on learning from differences. There has been a Norwegian national PhD programme, based on Action Research, addressing enterprise development and working life. Today Action Research can be seen as a major international phenomenon, with several major journals, including two published by the publishers of this book, contributions to major mainstream conferences in numerous fields, a mature and growing literature, and lively debate. This would not be apparent to the reader of this book, who will look in vain for references to Reason, Bradbury, Fals Borda, Elden, Chisholm, Emery, Gustavsen, Greenwood, Levin, Baburoglu, Eikeland, and many more. We hear nothing of emancipatory action research, dialogue, search, or organisational change. The first conclusion is that this book needs a new title, making it clear that it is concerned with a particular tradition of Educational Action Research, concerned with the reflective practitioner. It may also be of value to those working in other traditions. The context needs to be explored. More fundamentally, it has become clear that there has been an absence of communication and cross-referencing between the different Action Research traditions. The work of Reason and Bradbury (Handbook of Action Research), and Greenwood and Levin (Introduction to Action Research), both published by Sage, has shown that this is not an isolated phenomenon. There are ‘‘57 varieties’’ of Action Research, each apparently convinced that it offers the true way forward. Each having fought to combat orthodoxy, pioneers can be reluctant to recognise common cause with fellow travellers. R. Ennals (&) Kingston University, Kingston, UK e-mail: richard.ennals@blueyonder.co.uk