Abstract
This interview provides insight into the career and mindset of action researcher Bob Dick. Over the years, Bob has worked as a consultant, facilitator, and independent scholar in Australia. We believe that the mindset Bob uses to guide his practice and research has great value for practitioners and academics alike. This interview is one in a series that introduces influential thinkers in the field of AR. It is our hope that this conversation will benefit the theory and practice of current action researchers.
Introduction
Professor Bob Dick is an independent scholar at Southern Cross University in Australia. He has an international reputation as a consultant in community and organizational change. He is known for using action learning (AL) and action research (AR) approaches when leading experiential workshops. As a consultant, Bob helps people learn to work together, by fostering conflict management, program evaluation, professional development, communication, and facilitation skills. He integrates theory and practice in his workshops by introducing people to processes, concepts, and models of AR and AL, thus providing opportunities for application in community and organization change. His goal is to help others improve their practice so they can work effectively with their own communities and organizations. In addition to consulting, Bob is an engaging and challenging facilitator in the classroom. Years ahead of our current pushes for a more democratic classroom, he engages students in the process of co-constructing their educational experiences and knowledge. As an educator, he uses innovative experiential participative methods to help create future ‘change agents’ (Dick, 1991). He orients students towards the wider world, and transforms the school environment into a living, breathing laboratory that has immediate relevance for them as they embark on their careers.
As an academic, Bob has published extensively on AR and AL (Dick, 2001a, 2001b, 2002, 2004, 2005a, 2005b, 2007a, 2009, 2011, 2012). He is one of the most widely read action research scholars in the world, and has devoted a large amount of this time to reviewing and synthesizing the entire field's literature. In 2005, Bob completed a massive review of his own work focused on theoretical development, learning, and change processes for his dissertation. As a pioneer in knowledge distribution, many of Bob’s works are available online for free (www.aral.com.au). This is a rare gift considering the academy’s current system for sharing knowledge.
It is all of these activities listed above that lend credence to Bob’s self-identified title as an ‘independent scholar’. From theorizing, applying ideas, adapting methods, writing up the results, and reviewing literature, to consulting and teaching, Bob is independent because he works with people everywhere, regardless the institution, community, or organization. We consider Bob to be a widely respected mentor of the AR and AL fields as he has made substantial contributions to the theory and practice of evaluation and community and organizational change. To more fully understand Bob’s worldview, please consider the following quote: If I had to label my philosophical position as it appears to others it would be roughly that of pragmatism. I use theories publicly in my work not for themselves. I use them when they aid action or understanding ... I regard my work as belonging approximately in the tradition of the action research begun by Kurt Lewin (for instance 1946), built in turn upon the work of John Dewey (for instance 1933). Richard Rorty (for instance 1999a) might be regarded as a modern representative of this philosophical tradition. My private position is a little more complex. I accept that I can know the world only indirectly and imperfectly. When it comes to the physical world my knowledge is nevertheless adequate for me to survive day to day and year to year. I assume that our sensory apparatus including the brain has been honed by millennia of evolution. I accept that for the less tangible aspects of the world – the thoughts and motives of people, for instance – my perceptions are even less accurate. Even here, though, they have so far proved adequate for me to survive for 70 years. (Dick, 2005b, p. 41)
In the community
One of the notable contributions that Bob has made to the field of AR is that he invents and modifies various processes when consulting on community and organizational change. These synthesized procedures and techniques have been accumulated from his own practice as a consultant and scholar. During the consultation process, Bob makes a point of supporting these methods with related theories and concepts. He seeks to help people understand the why as well as the how when working with them. Always innovating, Bob is influenced by certain concepts, but he freely improvises with new structures. He tweaks methods and processes based on his own experience in practice. In modifying and adapting processes openly, he makes these skills accessible to his clients and students.
For example, Bob has developed a series of robust and learnable procedures for managers dealing with complex conflicts. He uses a problem-solving approach to conflict called FIDO (F: feelings; I: information; D: decisions; O: outcomes) (Dick, 1983, 2001a, 2001b, 2005a, 2005b). This model solves problems by recognizing feelings and attitudes, the importance of communicating relevant information, and making appropriate timely decisions so that desired outcomes can be achieved (Dick, 2001a, 2001b). First, the mediator conducts a preliminary interview with managers to assess their commitment to resolving the conflict at hand, and to identify the desired outcomes. During the second stage, managers are asked to prepare a list of issues to be discussed. This exchange of information serves to help define the types of decisions that need to be made. Here managers exchange and convey information with each other in a mutually understandable way. Within this stage, the mediator helps to achieve agreement by questioning and letting managers ask each other for clarification. Once all the necessary information has been exchanged and discussed, the group can agree upon and enact their decision. During the last stage, the mediator goes through the decision with the managers to make sure it is sufficiently detailed and sets the time for the next meeting. This is just one of many processes that Bob has either designed or adapted. Again, his models are fluid, and not set in stone, and multiple refinements can be made based on feedback from the clients and their community organizations.
In the classroom
The next major contributions of Bob to AR are his achievements with using experiential learning to guide the educational process. He applies the theoretical knowledge of industrial democracy (Dick, 1989) in the classroom and lets the students learn by teaching each other. His goal is to help the students achieve a high level of autonomy. Bob involves the students in the planning of the course content to help them acquire facilitation and communication skills. He also lets the students design and run their own workshops so other class members can learn from them. Thus, students become teachers and facilitators. The responsibility of being a teacher helps to remove most barriers to participation, and reduces anxiety while heightening the students’ awareness of their roles and responsibilities. In his own words, ‘I believe that the term ‘‘teaching’’ is a misnomer – teachers don’t teach: learners learn’ (Dick, 2012, p. 5). Importantly, this process shows students how to build trusting relationships with other people in a variety of situations.
These semi-structured classes are the training ground for educating future change agents. In conducting these classes, Bob adapts the work of Argyris and Schon (1974, 1978; Dick & Dalmau, 1990) to introduce students to a range of technical, interpersonal communication, and reflective skills. He asserts that all skills, including emotional skills can be taught. He urges students to approach problems from a cyclical point of view; where intent, acting, and reviewing occur over and over in the process. Bob emphasizes that to change the world, one has to change themselves. Therefore, equipping people with these skills and mindsets is essential for educating change agents. In his courses, he strives to teach students the skill of flexibility, because ‘change is an iterative process which depends upon a certain amount of trial and error’ (Dick, 1991, p. 140).
Connecting action researchers around the world
The world is a large place, and action researchers are spread out across the continents. Bob has helped to bridge this gap by maintaining an AR and AL website focused on community and organizational change (http://www.aral.com.au/). This seminal website holds archives and resources for people interested in learning and doing AR. Here people can sign up for workshops and consultation. Bob also maintains an electronic newsgroup for action, qualitative, facilitation, and tacit learning researchers. His goal is to use web-based approaches to connect people interested in participative and action-oriented methods, facilitation, change, and evaluation. Furthermore, he experiments with various online forums, offering a public online course in action research and evaluation as a public service for the Action Learning Action Research Association (ALARA). As if these forums were not enough, Bob also maintained a peer-reviewed journal, Action Research International. This online journal had a distinguished international editorial panel and unique review process in which authors and reviewers worked ‘side by side’ to improve their final products. It is with these great accomplishments in mind that we look to the man himself to learn more about his journey.
Interview outline
This interview highlights Bob’s path to becoming an action researcher. The first part of the interview reveals Bob’s diverse background with academic disciplines and different majors as he made his way through the Australian education system. We also learn about his rich organizational experience with the Department of Labour and his eventual transition into the academy. Next, we discover how Bob was introduced to action research and learn about his AR ‘mindset’, a mental framework that guides his practice. Here we explore his fascinating take on AR, and devote a considerable amount of space to letting him explain this schema. Then we discuss Bob’s happiest moments, and dive into the similarities and differences between practitioners and academics. Interestingly, while Bob is a professor, and a teacher, he sees himself more as a practitioner in the classroom. In addition, Bob also talks about the similarities and differences between action research and action learning. Finally, from our current position as students, we ask Bob if we could take a similar career path and seek his advice for aspiring action researchers. We conclude this interview with reflections about our thoughts and what we have learned from this new age AR sage.
The following interview was conducted in two parts, first on 28 February and then a follow up on 5 May 2011. Juanjuan Zhao and R. Alan Wight, two action research graduate students at the University of Cincinnati interviewed Bob in Australia. We used Skype video conferencing technology to bridge the distance and 14-hour time difference between Brisbane, Australia and Cincinnati, USA. We recorded and transcribed the audio portion of the interviews. The following document includes transcripts from both interviews and explores the several major themes mentioned above.1
Bob’s path to action research
Please tell us a little about yourself, where were you born, some memorable childhood experiences and then describe your collegiate career and entrance into the field of action research.
I was born in Toowoomba, which is a town up about an hour and half drive west of Brisbane, and I spent my early life moving around southeastern Queensland. My mother died was I was young and my father was overseas during the war years, so I was shared around amongst various relatives. I was 10 before I finally settled in Brisbane with my father when he returned from the Middle East with his new wife.
I did my schooling at five different primary and secondary schools, and my early work career was a bit patchy. I worked in a couple of jobs as a shop assistant, one with a news agent and casket agent, and one in a mobile shop that traveled around neighborhoods and sold things out of the back. And then I became an apprentice electrician and I served a five-year apprenticeship learning how to put wires through conduits. And at the same time, most of my evenings were spent doing a diploma of mechanical and electrical engineering. This was my father’s idea, not mine.
So you’re telling us you were an electrical engineer?
Well, no, I never finished the course, and as soon as I plucked up the courage to tell my father I did not want to be an electrical engineer I bailed out. So I did two and half years of a four-year course, and that was it. Later on I thought it’s a pity that I did not finish it, so I went back to do it and I found that they had changed the syllabus, so I would have to go back and repeat some first year subjects. I thought well, what I’ll do instead is I’ll finish off my matriculation, which I did. I thought this qualified me to attend university as a mature-age student. I went to Uni to enroll, and that is an interesting story actually. I was filling out the application forms and I noticed that in the conditions it said I required three subjects, completed within three calendar years. And I actually had not done that because, part way through matriculation, I became interested in theatre.
And because I had spent three years doing theatre, I had not finished these subjects within three years. I went up to the fellow at the counter and explained my problem. And he said, why don’t you put in your application anyway, maybe no one will notice. So I put it in anyway and in due course received notice that I had been successfully enrolled in an Arts degree at Queensland University. I did English literature and French language in my first year because those were two of the subjects that I had done for matriculation. I did not enjoy either of them, and I was wondering what to do in the second year. And a friend of mine said, ‘Do psychology. I did it last year – you can have my textbooks.’ So I enrolled in first year psychology and enjoyed it a lot. I did well at it, so I did second year psychology and did even better at that, so I did third year psychology. I did a second major in English Language, which I found way more interesting than English Literature. And had good enough passes that I won a full-time scholarship to do an Honors Year, which allowed me to qualify as a psychologist.
At the end of ’69 when I finished my degree, I applied for a Training Officer Job with the Department of Works. They said we have a Recruitment Officer vacancy. Do you want to have a go at that? So I became a Recruitment Officer for six months. Following that, I worked as an industrial psychologist in the Department of Labour for three years. Then the University contacted me and said, we need someone to teach applied psychology, and the only person who can teach it is going on study leave. We need to plug a gap for six months. Can you get a six months secondment from the Department of Labour to teach this class while this person is away? So I went to Uni and taught a couple of classes for six months. At the end of six months they said he is still on study leave and we have not been able to fill the position. Can you extend it to 12 months?
So I negotiated that with the Department of Labour and with some reluctance they said all right. At the end of 10 months the head of the university department came to me said, we still have not filled this position, and we need a second teacher in organizational psychology. There is a vacancy. Why don’t you apply for it? And I said, I only have a first degree. He said, look, we are desperate, it is worth a go. So I applied for it and got it and became an academic.
Could you tell us about your first experience of doing action research? When did you first hear about action research and why were you attracted to it?
I came into action research indirectly because I was familiar with the literature on industrial democracy and on work place participation. I tried to take those principles into the classroom and apply them to the classes I taught. And in the early stages that meant involving the class in helping to set the syllabus. I would give fairly experiential lectures, to draw the students into what I was doing. By the time I had been there about five years I was running classes in a very experiential and participatory way, which turned out to be very much like action research, although I was not thinking about it in those terms.
It was really the three years in the Department of Labour getting familiar with the literature on employee participation that provided the background for my teaching. The other organizational psychologist in the department was an action researcher, John Damm his name was, and he introduced me to action research. He had contacts with the Center for Continuing Education at ANU, the Australian National University, where there was a team of people working with Fred Emery, one of the gurus of employee participation and work structure and things like that. And although he did not write much about action research, action research was the methodology he used. I got to know Fred Emery and his colleagues through John Damm.
In fact I spent a six months secondment there (the Centre of Continuing Education, ANU) after I had been at Uni for 10 years. At about the same time, I met a fellow here in Brisbane, Ron Passfield, who used action learning in the Australian Tax Office. Ron suggested running a project-based leadership program for the Australian Public Service in Queensland, using action learning. So I learned about action research through John Damm and his networks, and I learned about action learning by running experimental courses for the public service in a project-based kind of way. For me AR and AL came together fairly early.
One more thing, in the Department of Labour, half of my job was to offer an information service on how to make practice more participatory because we would get a lot of inquires from the industry about high turnover or high absence. People in these organizations often had pretty terrible jobs, in manufacturing and the like. There were very high labor turnover rates, and that was costing them a lot in recruitment and retention practices. They would come to the department and say, what can I do about this? And the other part of it is, that I was responsible for, was the Queensland part of Australia-wide research surveys into what person or practices Australian organizations use. And from time to time I would do local case studies on interesting persons or practices in local organizations. That was the kind of background that I was able to take into university.
Action research as a mindset
What are the projects you are currently working on?
I actually do very little that I would explicitly label as action research. Action research is partly a mental framework and a mindset that I use to guide my own practice. Most of what I do is really talked about as facilitation or running leadership programs in organizations, or doing strategic planning or something like that. It is just that it is done in an action research or action learning kind of way.
Can you talk about the mindset and tell us about that framework? How does this framework relate to action research in your understanding of it?
It probably does not matter what label you put on it. What is important is the actions you carry out and what outcome you get from those actions. And action research provides a convenient set of labels for doing that sort of thing. It is probably easier to look at the way I used to run classes at Queensland Uni. For instance, I had a fourth year class which was self-managed, usually in the second semester of each year, and this all arose by trial and error. I just kept trying to improve my own practice and student learning, by making the class effective and enjoyable. And after about seven or eight years, it became a way of doing things that meant giving a lot of attention to, and really involving people in the course in such a way that they had ownership of it.
In that fourth year class for instance we would collectively decide what the class would be about, and what the content would be. It had to be within the boundary of organizational change and organizational psychology, but within that boundary the content could be anything that we collectively decided. And then we would decide what kind of processes we would use to learn that material and then we would negotiate roles, based on what class members were willing to do and what they wanted me to do. And then we would do it. But, what I found was if I tried to set that up in the first or second week, it did not work very well. What I learned to do instead was facilitate the first four weeks doing intensive relationship building in the class as a whole and in small groups. We would get organizational psychology practitioners to talk about what they did. We would do life and career planning exercises so people could relate what happened in the class to what they wanted to do with their life and what sort of career they wanted to pursue. Then in week five we would plan the course. By then the class was working as a community, and we would get a good course design. They were more willing to offer to run experiential workshops for their colleagues. So, most of the rest of class would consist of small groups of students running experiential workshops for the other students in the class.
They also carried out an action research project in the field. They would find a non-governmental organization or a community group, or something like this, and then offer their services to do some diagnostic work or some planning or something like that. They would do their project off campus, and they would bring their questions from the field back into the class. We would have class discussion about how the projects went. It became a very practical class, strongly tailored towards the particular needs of people in the class. And their needs arose out of what of they were doing in the field projects and in the running of the class. So that was really the experience that gave me the mindset. That and the three years experience in the Department of Labour.
You asked about the aspects of the mindset. At the top of this list for me is the issue about participation and involvement, and it seems to me that that depends on relationships. If I don’t have a good relationship with the people I am working with and they don’t have a good relationship with each other, then everything else is much more difficult to do. So I put a lot of early effort into helping people know each other as real people, not just as their organizational roles. If I run a two-day workshop for instance, I’ll spend the first half-day in helping people to know each other better. I think that provides a good foundation for then doing other work on top of it. That is the first piece of the mindset.
The other is the belief that the world is a really complex and unpredictable place. For example, I don’t believe in detailed strategic planning. I don’t ever think you know enough about the future, or about the present organization for that matter, to be able to plan in detail how you are going to conduct yourself for the next three years or the next 12 months… or often in the next couple of months. It makes a lot more sense to have some ideas about what you want the organization to be like, but then to work towards it in a trial and error kind of fashion. That really means using, whether you call it action research or not, a cycle where you form an intention to carry out some action, and then you carry it out. Then you examine whether or not it worked. If it did not work, you go back and have another go. And if it did work, then move to the next part of the cycle. So part of the mindset is a belief that wherever you start is the wrong place. You have to start in such a way that it does not matter where you started, you have a flexible process that will get you somewhere worthwhile.
That is the second part of the mind set, immense flexibility and responsiveness to the situation you are in and to the people you are with, and a willingness to change your mind and encourage other people to change their mind. I agree with what Kurt Lewin said, you learn about a system by trying to change it. And so in a sense the change comes first, and the learning emerges out of the intent to change, and I think that is an action research kind of approach. But, not only action research, you find it in some forms of quality management for instance, particularly those that stress continuous improvement. I think that most practitioners work at least tacitly in a cyclic kind of fashion, where they try something and if it does not work, they try something else until it does work. They have an idea what a better organization, or a better community, or better world would look like, without having to know the details. The details get filled in as you work on this process of trying to make the organization, or the community or the world a better place.
There are some individual pieces to it. I think most of the people who do the kind of change work I do, are people who are comfortable with ambiguity. There are some people who are uncomfortable with change and there are other people who don’t mind a bit of ambiguity and find it makes life interesting. Most of the people who work in a people-oriented style of consultancy tend to be comfortable with ambiguity. I think that is an important piece of the personal mindset.
Also for me, I don’t think this is true for everybody, an important part is to try to hold my own beliefs lightly, so that I can change my mind and be more open to learning from what happens. I think if I go into an organizational consultancy with my mind made up about how organizations work, it is much harder for me to be effective than if I stay open to learning from my experience. If I can encourage other people to take on this same kind of mindset, that is a bonus as well. And for me it’s important to think that I am in the learning business, that I still don’t know it all, that I still have a lot more to learn. It is out of doing things a bit differently that I learn what will work and what won’t.
And maybe the third piece of it is, there are times when too much is going on to be able to be conscious of what I am doing at all. So I do what seems like a good idea at the time, and as a result I often invent a new process. Many of the processes that I use today were invented in the heat of the moment when I was desperate, where I had run out of options, where I had exhausted my repertoire, and the only thing left to do was something I had never done before. And sometimes when I am desperate enough that works.
Happiest moments
What have been your happiest moments of being an action researcher?
In the classroom. I had a fourth year class at Queensland Uni that I mentioned earlier. It was an honors year for people who had already finished their undergraduate program and that meant they were intending to work as psychologists. After graduation they were going to begin work as practitioners. It means that they were more interested in being practitioners than academics. My task was to help them learn to be effective practitioners. It’s a funny kind of thing that most of my colleagues did not believe that what I was doing in that class was correct. They thought that I should teach the students, and they did not believe that students knew enough to teach themselves or to teach each other. Yet in the following year they are going to be working in the field and often in their own difficult change situations. It seemed to make sense for me to set up the fourth year as kind of half way experience, in-between the protection of an undergraduate program and the stress of being on your own in a difficult situation in the field. I got to watch people learn to trust their own learning, and learn to trust their own ability to design workshops.
If you talk to people who work as facilitators, many will tell you it is really useful to do a lot of courses on how to be a facilitator, and to read a lot about being a facilitator. And some of them think it takes a lot of experience before you become a facilitator. But people in my class didn’t know that. So with the little bit of guidance, they would design and run fully experiential workshops for their colleagues and it was a very supportive environment. It was great to watch people who started out nervously and then see them grow in confidence and grow in ability, so that by the end of the year they had the confidence to go into an applied job, and work as effective practitioners. That was immensely satisfying. Many of the people who did this experiential program and ran workshops for their colleagues, reported that it was the most useful course that they have done. Because it was the only experiential unit in the fourth year program, and it dealt with skills as well as conceptual understanding, it gave them something they could take into their work as practitioner.
Practitioners and academics
What are the differences between a practitioner and an academic?
I’ve been both you see… I decided fairly early on that teachers learn more than learners do. So, people can learn more if they teach themselves. My task was to help students reach a stage where they are willing, and in fact enthusiastic, to do that and to create an environment in which they were feeling comfortable doing it. This why I would facilitate the early weeks of class in an experiential way, and then engage them in running the class so that they could become teachers. Because they were working on subjects that were chosen by their colleagues, and because they would involve their colleagues in evaluation of the workshops they just ran, and because they have good relationship with colleagues, all that was done supportively. Their colleagues became involved in the workshops first as participants and then as evaluators, and because it was experiential, they were involved, and they would be learning from each other in turn. Really, I worked more as a practitioner in the classroom than as an academic.
I think there was one more thing that I did try to bring into my classroom work. I don’t want people to learn skills without knowing why the skills work. I wanted the students to have a repertoire of processes for community change and organizational change because that was what my class was about. If you have a process that you follow like a recipe, and if the recipe does not work, you are stuck, because every assignment is different, every organization is different, and every community is different. You never really know how well the recipe will work. So it seems to me it is important to know how it works and why it works. When you are stuck, you can then go back to the principles and ask, how can I do that? For instance, one of the principles is to get as much ownership of the change program and its goals for as many people as you can. And if you are working with, let’s say, an NGO, with a non-government organization with dozens of people in it, you make sure that everyone is involved in setting a vision, and diagnosing the present system. Then you work out a way of getting from here to there, and building enough flexibility into the program that it can change as they learn more from progressing along.
Action research and action learning
Can you talk about the similarities or differences between action research and action learning?
I don’t think there is a lot of difference at all really. People use different language to describe it, but if you were looking at something like a cooperative inquiry group and an action learning team working side by side, I think you would have a hard time telling them apart. There is a different emphasis as action learning focuses on concrete outcomes from the project. So people usually set up action learning teams when there is some project they want completed, or when there is a number of people who have individual projects to complete. And the learning tends not to be written up. There is a focus on learning and learners don’t talk about those same kinds of cyclical processes that action research uses. But the processes are the same and people just describe them differently.
Action research is different in that a lot of action researchers insist that it be published or at least shared in some way with a wider audience. And then there are forms of action research that aren’t used in action learning at all. For instance, action learning has nothing to do with the whole-industry action research that some of the Scandinavians like Bjørn Gustavsen use. And there is not the same first-person action research that has become common in educational action research, or more recently in a range of other fields where action research practitioners use action research to improve their own practice, often without involving anybody else in it much at all. So there are these forms of action research that are not anything like action learning. But group-based action research and the US style of action learning, I think, are so similar.
Action research usually traces its origins to Kurt Lewin, or in some cases to the South American approaches, whereas action learning traces its origins to Reg Revans in England. Action learning and action research are separate literatures to some extent, but the major action research association in Australia, for instance, is also the Action Learning Action Research Association (ALARA).
I probably need to say something about what I see as the essential differences between action research and other research generally. Almost all forms of action research use a cycle where you plan what you are going to do, you carry it out, then you reflect critically on what worked and what didn’t. I think that’s kind of common to action research. Although the theory part of that is less explicit in action learning, action learning works for the same kind of cycle, so it makes sense to treat action learning as a subset of action research.
Could we take a similar path?
After the first interview, it became apparent that Bob’s path into the academy was quite unique. Given his wide range of background experiences and unconventional way of becoming a university professor, we became curious about our paths and potential for employment in the academy. During our follow up interview we asked, would it be possible for us or students like us to take a similar path now, and end up where you are?
The short answer is probably not. My contract with Griffith Uni finished up because at this stage I did not have any doctoral qualifications. Even though it was generally regarded that I was a good scholar, an excellent teacher, and had a reasonable publication record, I don’t think there is much room for people coming from a practitioner background anymore unless they jump through all the academic hoops. I have an adjunct appointment at Southern Cross Uni, where they have just made redundant some of the very good people that have been practicing managers, because they were not academic enough. And Southern Cross started out as a very applied university. It is a small regional university in northern New South Wales. It made its reputation on links with the community, and a willingness to take in really good practitioners, and then encourage them to get doctoral qualifications. Now they are letting these people go. The whole Australian university system is becoming more academic in my view. And I am not sure there will be a place for me anymore.
There is room for practitioners in the Australian university these days, but primarily as casual employees (part-time). They are much cheaper and are brought in to run a couple of classes. The work I do with Southern Cross, I just run an online class in action research three times a year. I am paid for the actual teaching time. That is all. The other academic work I do is unpaid.
Recommendations
Do you have any recommendation for novice action researchers?
Look after yourself, in as many ways as you can. Learn what kind of person you are. Build on your strengths rather than trying to be what you are not. I do a fair bit of co-consulting, where I work with other consultants. Most of them are extroverted, and very feeling oriented. If I try to be like them, I could not be effective in what I do. That’s not who I am. I have to find some way of using my thoughtfulness. I am never as timely with my interventions as my colleagues are because they do not have to stop and think what they are doing, they just do it. They work from their tacit knowledge, whereas I prefer to understand what I am doing as I’m doing it, so my timing isn’t as good as theirs. But I often understand what they are doing better than they understand what they are doing. So we make a pretty good team. And so my advice to novices, would be know yourself. Work from your strengths and build on them, and be willing to work near the boundaries of your strengths, because that’s what extends your self-knowledge, and that’s what extends your repertoire of skills and processes. It is OK to go right up to the boundary for some of the time, but if you spend all your time working on the boundary, that becomes enormously stressful and you probably won’t last at it. If you work beyond the boundary, then you may be in trouble, so make sure you have got a support system for yourself. Make sure you have colleagues that you can talk with before a difficult assignment and after a difficult assignment. That is why I always encourage my students to bring their experiences from their field projects back to the classroom, and talk with each other so that they have a support system.
When I am running facilitation workshops, the last thing I do is to ask people to pick one thing that they are going to try to do differently, and then one thing they are going to do when it doesn’t work because it might not, and then how they will set up a support system for themselves. So it doesn’t matter if it doesn’t work, they’ll still have the courage and comfort to tweak it a bit, and have another go. I think those would be the most important things I would say. Novices don’t pay attention to what experienced practitioners say anyway. It doesn’t matter. They’ll do what they do and they’ll learn from it. I used to evaluate my fourth year class during the year as well as at the end of the class. I’d ask what their advice to the next class was so that they would get as much from it as possible and what was their advice to me about how I should run the next class differently. And they would say, I wish you could tell us about this, this and this. More often than not, I had. And not only that, I had handed out the syllabus which says this, and this, and this. But that wasn’t what they learned from. What they learned from was their own experience – managing the class, designing and running workshops, and designing and running evaluation projects. And I think it’s going to be the same for the novices. That’s my prediction.
Reflections from interviewers
Alan
It is fascinating to learn about Bob’s renaissance path from school to industry, to university classroom facilitator. I am struck by his desire to teach as little as possible and spend the first half of the class on building relationships. However, it does make sense because we learn best by teaching others, and we can get the most done if we have trusting relations with our colleagues and co-workers. It is sad to see that the academy is shedding its experienced practitioners in favor of those who have credentialed degrees, even if they are being hired as adjuncts. Bob’s career is a testament to the idea of an academic practitioner, and I hope to follow in his footsteps.
Personally, I am interested in becoming an activist-scholar, similar to a practitioner in the academy. I focus on helping humanity grapple with the ecological implications of our industrial food production system. I want to be an informed environmental food activist, one who is versed in the facts and opinions surrounding all sides of our debates. Although I am a graduate student, I have been in the academy long enough (eight years) to experience the divide between teaching and practice, theory and application, and scholarship and policy. Despite what some professors say about our roles and boundaries, I am determined to create a place in the university were we can work together with community members to foster better human–Earth relations.
It was wonderful to hear Bob talk about his own experiences, and reflect on the possibility of taking such a diverse career path today. According to him, such a path probably would be not possible in today’s over-credentialed world. Despite this, I am optimistic that having a diverse set of experiences and skills is more important than having a piece of paper that indicates money spent and hoops jumped through – even if the administrators disagree. I think Bob’s mindset, of openness to uncertainty, and acknowledging that we are all in the learning business is more important. We have to be flexible in this ever-changing world. Getting along with people, talking with them in a peaceful way, and co-constructing solutions to common problems is going to be very handy in a world with nine billion people. I think that Bob’s mindset is a great starting place to help humanity create a more ecologically sustainable system.
Juanjuan
Our interview starts with asking about Bob’s childhood experience because we thought it would be a good way to start to understand and connect where he was to what he is doing now. To our surprise, he not only shared with us his childhood experience, but also his journey to find a meaningful career path. Unlike what we usually see from TV interviews in which success means somebody was born with the capacity and talents to make a magnificent contribution in their cause, Bob is really candid in sharing with us his long and sometimes difficult development in his interests. As novice action researchers ourselves, we were grateful to hear about such experiences from a senior scholar in the field, knowing that we too have to explore before we find out what really interests us and what we really want to do for our career. It motivates us in our own pursuit of dreams and goals and makes us also believe that the process matters more than the result because it is the search for whatever we will set our heart on that brings us rich knowledge and helps us to develop our own path.
The title ‘A practitioner in the academy’ comes from Bob’s own description of himself when we asked him about the differences between an academic and practitioner. He uses action research as a mindset to guide his practice, bringing what he learned from the community into the classroom and vice versa. For us, the mindset Bob described which includes involvement and participation, flexibility and critical reflection also contains the features or requirements for being an action researcher. Especially as graduate students who lack experience in the field, it is important to ask ourselves whether we have acquired these necessary skills and how to obtain them before we engage in conducting research. As I was reading the transcription of the first interview about mindset, involvement and participation, I kept thinking of our own action research class in which cohorts are working together on a class project. In an earlier article, Bob (2007b) observes, ‘participation is seen as involving participants in tasks for which they may lack the skills or the interests’ (p. 151). This is true. The bottom line for a class project is common interest, but involving each individual in the class is definitely not an easy task especially when each of us is in a different phase of our doctoral program from various disciplines. To negotiate conflicting interests and decide one single project consumes time and energy. This also involves, apart from mindset requirements collective ability and cooperation from each member of a class, be they teachers or students.
Action research as a mindset could be also used to evaluate and examine our practice as an action researcher. In involving students and community members, do we build good relationships with our participants? Do we let them take ownership of their knowledge? Are we open to learn and to change our own mind, etc.? One has to be conscious and reflective to be a good action researcher. Knowing oneself and others seems to be a key step to work with others, which Bob also mentions in his suggestions for novice action researchers. As the ancient Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu said, ‘Those who know others are wise. Those who know themselves are enlightened.’ We believe that what we see from Bob here is what we need to acquire to be good action researchers.
Even though Bob suggests novice action researchers be cautious of crossing boundaries because it can easily exhaust one’s energy, it seems to us that being a practitioner in the academy he has been working to cross boundaries all through his life. What he enjoys most is his teaching experiences in classrooms. He brings knowledge from his practice in communities and runs his class in an experiential and participatory way in order to improve students’ learning, but his way was not accepted by his colleagues at the time. When asked whether it is possible for others to take a similar path as he does, he said no, which may at first sound depressing, but considered from a different perspective, it is a call for collective action on the part of all action researchers to cross the boundary by bringing knowledge from the academy to practice, and from the community to the academy as well.
Juanjuan and Alan
We want to thank Bob for his willingness to spend time with us in sharing his insights, personal experience, and thoughts regarding the future of action research. To us, this has provided us a unique opportunity to have a personal connection to a highly respected scholar in our field. His ideas are now an integral part of our own thinking and practice. We hope that by sharing these conversations with Bob Dick, other scholars in the field will be inspired as well.
Footnotes
Acknowledgement
Note