Community Action for School Reform

Chapter 11

Chapter 11 Acting as a Way of Knowing Action Research The Task Force made efforts to tie action to research. This chapter examines ways the Task Force learned from action. We review two early initiatives where people wanted to do something but were unsure what to do and the logic of action outweighed the logic of research. Yet participants treated action as a means to knowledge, and the Task Force drew on experience to develop an education plan. The next chapter recounts later episodes where the Task Force used or engaged in research to decide what to do and the logic of research was ascendant. KNOWLEDGE AND ACTION Theodore Sizer admonishes educators to “plan backwards.” They should specify what students should be able to do, and then reason back through sequences of classroom, school, and, one might add, family or community activities that would enable them to act in these ways. Many planners think in terms of “program hypotheses” (Kettner, Moroney, and Martin 1990): while some interventions have relatively consistent, sure consequences, the complexity and uncertainty of society and nature often make action an experiment. It is possible to draw on a great deal of knowledge and still be unable to predict what will happen. Thus knowledge used to design an intervention can be framed in hypotheses: for example, “if teachers of A or B characteristics do C with students of D characteristic or E with students of F characteristic under G and H conditions, then students of D and F characteristics are likely to 147 accomplish I.” Planners should base hypotheses on knowledge tested in practice and fill in gaps with inferences from social theory. Weiss (1998), similarly, urges basing interventions on “program theory” or a “theory of change.” Still, some interventions are more experimental than others. Program hypotheses may be plausible but rest on spotty evidence. They are worth testing , because they make enough sense in addressing urgent problems, but they lack precedent. Implementation is research: acting to see what happens. Knowledge about the world comes from trying to influence it and noting how it reacts. These premises underlie “action research” (Greenwood and Levin 1998; Greenwood, Whyte, and Harkavy 1993; Whyte 1991). It involves assembling any available knowledge, from formal research findings to ordinary people’s everyday understandings, to plan action and then systematically noting results. Observation may suggest ways of modifying actions to come closer to goals, or it may show that initial goals were inappropriate and should be reformulated. In any event, observation sets off a further process of developing knowledge, planning, intervening, and reflecting. In this way an intervention offers three types of learning. First, observant participants, by trying to influence conditions, can learn about a substantive field, such as education or housing. Second, in trying to affect a social system or an institution, such as the schools or housing market, interveners can learn about a system. Third, reflective practitioners (Schön 1983) can learn about themselves as actors. Thus Task Force efforts to improve schools offered participants knowledge about education, the school system, and their own desires and capacities for action. ACTION AS A SOURCE OF KNOWLEDGE The Tutoring-Mentoring Program The people who developed the tutoring-mentoring program drew on professional training in teaching and social work and supplemented it with personal experience and common sense. The program’s main feature when it started— presentations on work—rested on the assumption that if successful adults talked about their jobs, the youths would find out about interesting work opportunities, think more concretely about jobs, develop more specific and hopeful ideas about their vocational futures, feel more motivated to study, and do better academically. This was not all spelled out, and the creators might have felt shaky about positing some of these results, but this was the gist of the underlying program hypothesis. Tutoring rested on the premises that if adults or adolescents helped elementary school students in reading, then the students would learn to read 148 Research as a Means to Action better, develop self-confidence, be more interested in learning, manage their behavior better, and accomplish more academically. However, though the project could be justified in these terms, it was not explicitly, deliberately planned; its knowledgeable creators were moved mainly by the logic of action. They intended to evaluate the results but did not do so systematically. Nevertheless, Task Force members drew lessons from periodic reports. The clearest, in the early...