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Insiders and outsiders – the place of second-order action research in Educational Action Research

This issue of Educational Action Research includes a ‘mini-special issue’ on participatory action research (PAR) edited by Mary Brydon-Miller and Michael Kral. They have written an editorial to introduce the four papers that make up that portion of this issue. My goal here is to do the same for the other six articles, as well as examining them through the lens of second-order action research (Elliott, 1985; Elliott 1988; Losito, Pozzo, and Somekh 1998). The articles in the main portion of this issue can be put into two groups. In the first, ‘Using collaborative action research to achieve school-led change within a centralised education system: perspectives from the inside’, the authors study the role of action research in schools with challenging situations. Elena Constantinou and Mel Ainscow examined the challenges involved when teachers engaged in action research in the highly centralized educational system in Cyprus. They argue a schooldriven approach to educational change that builds on collaboration and inquiry can lead to democratic development even in a highly centralized system with frequent staff changes and an influx of migrants. For this to happen, they argue, requires ‘radical collegiality’, which is characterized by ‘reciprocity, care and respect for each other’s learning’. Macarena Lamas, Sònia Sànchez-Busqués and José Luis Lalueza report on a long-term project to improve the educational participation of marginalized pupils in Barcelona, Spain. Their account, ‘Changes in school through a long term project of action research. Building Bridges between school practice and Roma Communities’, describes how an initial emancipatory project developed for out-of-school settings was implemented across a range of schools. The authors use cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT) as an organizing tool to analyze their interventions, which were designed to provide individual support to pupils who were operating between competing family and school cultures. This provisional account provides insights into the challenges of how teachers can bridge majority and marginalized cultures, and how this process enabled positive developments in participants’ self-efficacy and sense of identity. Teachers’ professional development and management of change is also the theme of Charlotta Hilli’s article, ‘Distance Teaching in Small, Rural Primary Schools in Finland: A Participatory Action Research Project’. Hilli situated her research as participatory action research (PAR). Her study is of teachers attempting to use distance teaching practices to sustain primary schools with falling enrollments in rural Finland. She used a ‘practice architecture’ model to analyze teachers’ discomfort with teaching at a distance through technology. The teachers found it difficult to adjust to teaching ‘strangers at a distance’, and Hilli discusses how traditional ecologies of practice became disrupted by the technological interface. EDUCATIONAL ACTION RESEARCH 2020, VOL. 28, NO. 1, 1–3 https://doi.org/10.1080/09650792.2020.1706307