Teacher participatory action research (TPAR): A methodological framework for political teacher research

Purpose

The societal importance of teachers is evident. Teachers are the vanguards of learning for subsequent generations, introducing all of us to worlds of new ideas, from the arts and sciences to the humanities and social sciences. While it could be assumed that teachers are power-holders in schools given their positions relative to students, examination of contemporary discourses about US teachers reveals a concerning lack of voice, empowerment, and self-determination, especially for teachers in low-performing schools (e.g. Dunn, Farver, Guenther, & Wexler, 2017). This situation is not only contemporary. One of two professions historically open to women, teaching has been among the lowest respected and paid professions, with many insisting that it is not worthy of being called a profession (Drudy, 2008). In her book Teacher wars: A history of America’s most embattled profession, Goldstein (2014) argues that teaching is under the highest scrutiny of any profession. Goldstein (2014) notes that we expect teachers to perform impossible feats to rectify increasing social and economic divides—all while underfunding education. Then, we chastise teachers for any and every inability to perform miracles. This culture of scrutiny and critique of teachers has intensified under neoliberal education reforms. These have included wide-scale movements to disband teacher tenure and teachers’ unions, as reflected in Wisconsin, Ohio, Indiana, and Michigan (Goldstein, 2014).

A 2015 quality of worklife survey of 30,000 educators conducted by the American Federation of Teachers and the Badass Teachers Association found that 89% of educators strongly agreed to feeling enthusiastic about their profession at the start of their jobs, but only 15% felt that way when surveyed (American Federation of Teachers & Badass Teachers Association, 2015). Seventy-three percent of respondents often found their jobs stressful. Commonly cited sources of this stress included negative depiction of teachers in the media, uncertain job expectations, fear of job loss, and lack of participation in decision-making (American Federation of Teachers & Badass Teachers Association, 2015). More specifically, 79% of educators felt disrespected by elected officials, while 77% felt disrespected by the media (American Federation of Teachers & Badass Teachers Association, 2015).

These are clearly dire times for teachers. As an education researcher, I strive to increase the status of the teachers by allowing wider audiences see and understand them as dedicated, insightful, and knowledgeable. For this reason, I have chosen to engage in participatory research with teachers.

Nowhere are teachers more important than in high-poverty schools. There teachers become social workers, counselors, mentors, and champions for students who may need them most. But in this neoliberal, high-stakes climate where test scores have become a proxy for learning, teachers are penalized for working with “underperforming” students. This paper explores an approach to participatory action research (PAR) conducted with teachers, which takes into account the struggles that teachers of low-income, “underperforming” students face within the current high-stakes accountability climate. In doing so, the aim is to elicit PAR methodological principles to further the political reach of teacher research.

This paper is based on empirical work from a collaboration between four veteran teachers and me, a university-based researcher, to explore food justice within an urban school district. Wanting to work alongside the teachers and give them as much intellectual space as possible, I chose to use action research (AR). From our first meetings, it became clear to me that the teachers were faced with extraordinarily difficult circumstances in their teaching positions. I realized that the pressures and stress the teachers were experiencing as a result of educational policies and mandates in their high-poverty district needed to be accounted for in our work. As a result, I moved toward PAR, noting that the teachers were experiencing marginalization. However, existing participatory research did not address the positional marginalization of teachers. This paper theorizes a new variation of PAR, Teacher Participatory Action Research (TPAR), which acknowledges marginalization by association with marginalized groups. I consider literature in AR, PAR, and teacher research before presenting my conception of TPAR. I conclude with a description of how TPAR unfolded within my study, including challenges and promises for potential TPAR projects.

AR

AR is the name given to a paradigm of (Pine, 2009) or orientation toward (Reason & Bradbury, 2008) research that involves practitioners, community members, or other nonresearchers engaged in research to improve their communities, practice, and situations. Attempting to categorize AR in a concise way is difficult because AR involves a large variety of perspectives and approaches and comes from a rich lineage, having been utilized by practitioner-researchers in fields as diverse as industry, international and/or community development, and nursing (Greenwood & Levin, 2007; Reason & Bradbury, 2008). One defining characteristic of AR is a discontent with positivist paradigms—mainstream in academic institutions for decades—which privilege objectivity and decontextualized knowledge (e.g. Fals Borda, 2001; Gaventa & Cornwall, 2001; Reason & Bradbury, 2008). Instead, proponents of AR argue that contextualized knowledge held by those who are insiders is valuable. As part of this, AR does not see theory and practice as belonging to different worlds; instead it is concerned with the development of theoretically informed practice (McTaggart, 1997a). In other words, AR values practitioner knowledge as much as theory. ARs intention is not to dictate to or study practitioners, but to work alongside them. Perhaps not surprisingly given the wide disciplinary spectrum involved in AR, there is a lack of consensus on several aspects. Specifically, Greenwood and Levin (2007) report on a split within AR between those who use it as a technique for improving practice and those who see it as a path toward addressing societal inequities.

PAR

PAR is a subgenre of AR that has taken a more decidedly critical stance than in the wider AR field, aiming to address issues of power (Greenwood & Levin, 2007; Miller & Brewer, 2003). The participatory genre of AR originated in the Global South through an international network of researchers operating both collaboratively and in parallel across a number of countries (Hall, 1981). Hall (1992) has recounted that in the mid-1970s, he and colleagues in Tanzania were working with a methodology they called participatory research, while simultaneously in Latin America, Fals Borda and others were working under the term action research. When a Latin American network coalesced behind the term participatory research, Fals Borda began calling his work participatory action research. Hall (1992) notes that participatory research and PAR indicate the same general process.

These participatory versions of AR see themselves as being different from the depoliticized versions of AR (Hall, 1992). In contrast to some types of AR which may prioritize problem solving (e.g. Gaventa & Cornwall, 2001), PAR is far more attentive to the process used toward knowledge generation and to whose voices are being heard and how (Fals Borda, 2001). PAR typically involves working with individuals from marginalized groups for emancipatory aims (Greenwood & Levin, 2007). A number of scholars have noted that PAR has a double aim or objective (Fals Borda, 2001; McTaggart, 1997b; Miller & Brewer, 2003). Miller and Brewer (2003, p. 225) note that PAR, “aims to produce knowledge and action directly useful to people and also to empower people through the process of constructing and using their own knowledge.” McTaggart (1997b, p. 40) explains that PAR’s “double aim” is to change not only a situation being researched, but to alter the researchers themselves. Likewise, Fals Borda (2001, p. 32) explains that, “Participatory action research has not been just a quest for knowledge. It is also a transformation of individual attitudes and values, personality and culture, an altruistic process.”

Another key aspect of PAR is an expression of empathy with participant collaborators. A prominent scholar in PAR, Fals Borda (2001, p. 31), describes how the field grew within conversations at the 1977 first World Symposium of Action Research where, “We found little use for scholarly arrogance and learned instead to develop an empathetic attitude towards Others.” Fals Borda (2001, p. 31) explains that empathy in this way means to value symmetry in social relations, appreciating the wisdom of practitioners by listening to “discourses coming from diverse intellectual origins or conceived with a different cultural syntax.” In other words, being empathic in PAR means respecting participants as fellow humans, worthy of dignity, and in possession of their own wisdom, however different it may be from that of academics.

Gaventa and Cornwall (2001) suggest that participatory research challenges power relations through three major aspects: knowledge, action, and consciousness. They argue that knowledge is a form of power itself and impacts decisions, while action includes a focus on who is doing the actions to produce knowledge, and consciousness reflects how the other two processes have impacted the participants’ perspectives. Pine (2009, p. 53) reflects that PAR “assumes that ideology, epistemology, knowledge and power are bound up together” and points out that for PAR, the knowledge and research produced are a political act.

Teacher research

Similar to AR, teacher research began in the field of education in the 1940s and 1950s with the work of people such as Stephen Corey at Teachers College, Columbia University (Pine, 2009). Also, similar to AR, there exists a split in teacher research between those focusing on practical solutions and those focusing on larger social problems. Cochran-Smith and Lytle (1993) outline three major conceptions of teacher research: teacher research to improve practice, teacher research as a community inquiry done to improve schools and specific communities, and teacher research as social inquiry aiming for social change. While these different trends reflect a range within the field of teacher research, it is generally accepted that, “Action research assumes teachers are the agents and source of educational reform and not the objects of reform” (Pine, 2009, p. 30). Furthermore, Cochran-Smith and Lytle (1993) point out that teachers bring an important emic perspective to research compared to the etic perspective of university researchers.

The need for TPAR

I term the research methodology introduced in this paper Teacher Participatory Action Research (TPAR) to represent that it is a PAR project conducted in collaboration with teachers who are experiencing marginalization in their positions as teachers. Though youth participatory action research has become popular in education research, I have not encountered TPAR as a construct elsewhere in the literature. (That said, there are studies that use the words “teacher participatory research,” but they do not define or theorize it as a construct, nor are they attentive to the principles of PAR.)

I have conceptualized TPAR as an explicit methodology separate from “teacher research” for several reasons. First, like the larger field of AR, not all teacher research is political (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2009). Much of the genre focuses on teacher research as a technical approach to improving teaching and curricula with no explicit political agenda. Second, teacher research is typically designed as a method for improving classroom practice and/or as professional development for teachers (e.g. Judah & Richardson, 2006) but I conceive of TPAR as open to broader projects relating to schools, teachers, and students.

Within the teacher research literature, my work is most compatible with the ongoing work of Cochran-Smith and Lytle (1993, 2009) who advocate for teacher research as a political endeavor, and argue that education practitioner research should be recognized as valuable knowledge for the field of education. Cochran-Smith and Lytle (2009) also recognize the myriad ways in which accountability movements have neglected to recognize teacher knowledge and expertise, and argue that practitioner research is an important political move toward valuing their local knowledge. Based on this privileging of local knowledge, I view Cochran-Smith and Lytle’s arguments as consistent with many PAR arguments. Nonetheless, I advocate for a distinct TPAR construct for the following reasons:

To signal that the research is explicitly political and consistent with PAR principles,

Engaging in TPAR leads to unique circumstances that may differ from PAR with other populations. First, teachers are tasked with working to help others (students), so their positionality is oriented around giving and providing support to populations that may be marginalized. This positioning has, in turn, made teachers vulnerable, because they are associated with the problems of their students and even blamed for them. This marginalization by association is perhaps the defining feature of TPAR as I conceptualize it, and I argue that the methodology is most appropriate for teachers who work primarily with student populations deemed “underperforming” by accountability standards.

While PAR projects typically involve participants researching the ways in which they themselves experience marginalization, I argue that TPAR has a dual purpose:

To look at the ways in which the teachers are being marginalized, and

While PAR has been conducted with many different marginalized populations, PAR literature has not recognized “marginalization by association” as I argue is the case with urban teachers. Thus, I offer this aspect as a potentially new contribution both to PAR practices and to conducting research with teachers.

Operationalizing TPAR

I conceptualize TPAR as consisting of a combination of three elements: 1. teachers engaged in AR project(s), 2. a nuanced, rich explication of the context (place, neoliberal policies, etc.) in which the teachers work, and 3. a consideration of the ways in which the teachers are experiencing marginalization within their positions. In other words, teachers design and execute AR projects, and analyses about their contexts and marginalization are added to tell a larger story (see Figure 1). This three-pronged TPAR approach contributes to PAR literature by explicitly structuring ways to evaluate teachers’ place-specific working contexts with an eye toward their own marginalization. Moreover, based on the principles of PAR, helping the participants recognize their agency to design AR projects is an important counteraction to the marginalization that they face in their teaching positions. This move also empathetically recognizes them as possessing wisdom (Fals Borda, 2001).

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Figure 1.

TPAR framework as a three-legged stool. TPAR: Teacher Participatory Action Research.

Methods

While PAR has guiding principles, it is vague about methods within PAR projects (Hall, 1992). In this way, PAR could be considered an ontological and epistemological project with the criteria that any methods used must be consistent with the ideological underpinnings of PAR. As a result, the list of acceptable methods to use in PAR is not prescriptive (Pine, 2009). In fact, Gatenby and Humphries (2000, p. 89) note that, “the actual methods of participatory action research are diverse and often experimental.” The intent is to approach the work through the agenda of the participants (Hall, 1981; Miller & Brewer, 2003), using whatever methods are best suited for those purposes. Following the agenda of participants means a deep valuing of “local knowledge” (Greenwood & Levin, 2007). “Authentic participation itself might be seen as constituting the method” (McTaggart, 1997a, p. 13). While quantitative or qualitative approaches can be used, PAR scholars typically recommend qualitative approaches (e.g. Miller & Brewer, 2003). Within qualitative approaches to PAR, the methods used may be those typically found in other studies such as participant observation, interviews, field notes, and document analysis (McTaggart, 1997b).

True to the principles of PAR, TPAR methods are not prescriptive. Rather, the how of TPAR is dependent on the requirements of the individual project and participants. Within chosen methods, careful attention must be given to the process so that teachers are respected, heard, and able to determine direction of the overall TPAR project.

A TPAR example

The TPAR project that informs this model was a collaboration between four veteran teachers who worked in a low-income urban school district and me, a university-based researcher/former K–12 teacher. I initiated the project’s focus, an exploration of food justice within the district, and recruited the teachers through personal contacts and local food justice events. The four teachers had a combined 107 years of teaching experience within a particular school district. Consequently, they possessed extensive knowledge about their city, district, and students.

Given that PAR methods are nonprescriptive and varied, McTaggart (1997b) speaks to the value of principles in guiding PAR work. Thus, I created guiding principles to shape the methods for this PAR project. These were to:

Create space for the teachers to meet together for collaboration, shared experience, companionship, solidarity, and mutual support

Consistent with PAR principles, I privileged the process within this project, making conscious decisions to give the teachers space to design and execute projects based on their interests and experience. I decided that starting with greater teacher autonomy would most allow teachers to design AR projects from their perspective. In doing so, I was interested in how teachers made sense of the way food justice plays out in their schools. Giving teachers wide intellectual space also allowed me to test the boundaries of researcher/teacher TPAR collaboration, with limited researcher influence in the design of teacher AR projects.

The teachers each had unique positionalities and positions within the district, from teaching high school social studies, to teaching STEM at an elementary school, to working as a special education teacher at an alternative high school. The teachers also had unique yet relevant life experiences: one of the teachers experienced hunger as a child, another grew up as a student in the district and had witnessed massive changes in school food service over the years, another taught primarily immigrant students and was the grandchild of immigrants with cherished memories of their cultural foods, another had taught health classes and served on the district health policy committee. Because of their varying experiences, interests, and teaching positions, we decided collectively that each teacher would engage in an individual AR project of their own design. The resulting AR projects were as varied as our team. One teacher created a unit for a study skills class that asked students to consider critical questions about food, the food system, and food and identity. Another teacher created an afterschool garden club using STEM concepts. Another teacher created a weekend backpack feeding program for students in need at her high school. Another teacher studied food insecurity as related to school food within her alternative high school (see Stapleton et al., 2017; or Stapleton, 2015 for more description of the AR projects).

As the university-based researcher on the project, I played a supporting role with all the AR projects, meeting with each teacher regularly to discuss their project ideas and asking them questions throughout the process to help their thinking and framing of the projects. I took an active role in the recording of their AR stories to the extent that I recorded, transcribed, and edited two of the stories when the teachers requested help with the writing process. The analysis of context and marginalization was primarily my work, at the request of the teachers and based on their continual input. In my analysis, I took a critical qualitative approach, using primarily ethnographic methods such as participant observation. Data sources included group meetings held at my house (always including a meal, camaraderie, and supportive conversation), individual meetings with teachers, school visits, and email/text correspondence with teachers. Emails, in particular, became an important source of data about the project since the teachers and I exchanged emails more frequently than any other form of communication. The teachers wrote narratives about their views on food and schools at the beginning of our work together. They also wrote vignettes telling the stories of their AR projects toward the end of the AR projects. Additionally, I transcribed and coded group meetings and individual meetings with the teachers. In analyzing these data sources, I employed field notes, analytic field notes, and analytic memos.

Challenges faced in using TPAR

Perhaps not surprising for any collaboration between practitioners and researchers, our TPAR project was not without challenges. The most fundamental challenge was figuring out how to work with an already overworked population in a way that supported rather than added to their heavy loads. This required me to be sensitive to the teachers’ needs, giving them space when they were busy, understanding the ebbs and flows of the school year schedule, and allowing them to dictate when they wanted to meet.

Another challenge was knowing the extent to which I could or should intervene within the teachers’ projects. This question of intervention is not unknown in PAR projects. Gatenby and Humphries (2000, p. 98) have noted that, “Decisions about what issues to raise with participants and how to raise them or lead discussion are often difficult.” I endeavored to give the teachers as much freedom as I could to identify their area of interest, design a project, and make decisions about data collection and analysis. In particular, as a researcher, my orientation around data collection and analysis was quite different from the teachers and gave me pause about how much to exert my views about how they might construct knowledge around their projects. For example, I suggested and hoped that several teachers would conduct student interviews, but I also did not want to push them, especially when they did not share my vision. I erred on the side of least intervention because I wanted to support and recognize projects that teachers devised from their positionalities as teachers. As a result, the projects reflected far more of the teachers’ own visions and knowledge than my own.

I also learned the importance of working with the teachers as individuals, particularly since they were engaged in their own AR projects. This meant that I worked more closely with some teachers than others, depending on their expressed desire for my input. Writing proved particularly challenging since not all of the teachers were equally comfortable with putting their thoughts and ideas to paper. To facilitate the written recording of their AR projects, I found that I needed to help each teacher find their writing method. One teacher wrote their own work fairly independently after our meetings, asking me for editing comments and suggestions. Another teacher had much to say but no time to write it, so I met and audiotaped their oral reflection, typing, editing, and then sending it back to them to review. A third teacher asked to be in conversation with me to help them articulate ideas, so I audio-recorded conversations between us, transcribed, edited and sent them back for their approval. A fourth teacher was unavailable for much of the period we were writing, so I patched together their story through our individual meetings. A writing challenge of this particular project resulted because this was my dissertation work (Stapleton, 2015), which was necessarily single authored. For this reason, I wrote the district context, methodology, and marginalization stories based on heavy input from the teachers through group and individual meetings (and at their request). The teachers wrote vignettes about their action projects, which I inserted into the dissertation, along with commentary about my work with each of them.

A challenge particularly unique to PAR work resulted because the teachers opted to disclose their identities in our work. This was encouraging yet complicated. First, using their real names honored them as coresearchers with intellectual ownership over the AR projects. Moreover, giving them pseudonyms could have undermined their positions as co-researchers. Perhaps most importantly, using their real names has allowed them to be recognized as co-authors on several publications (Stapleton et al., 2017; Stapleton & Cole, in press). However, this disclosure proved challenging when trying to include their testimonies of marginalization (especially about their frustrations with how poorly they have been treated in their jobs) and I wrestled for months with how to tell about their struggles in a way that protected their individual identities and job security. I finally decided to employ poetic inquiry to share their words in ways that captured emotions and quotes, yet did not identify specific individuals.

Impacts, knowledge, and insights from our TPAR project

Patricia Maguire has noted that, “Action researchers are doers” (Brydon-Miller, Greenwood, & Maguire, 2003). Consistent with this aim of AR, the teachers’ AR projects resulted in actionable change in their schools, from the creation of an afterschool garden club, to the creation of a high school backpack feeding program with locally sourced vegetables, to the creation of a food-based, culturally reflective curricular unit. More details about the impacts and knowledge gained from these AR projects are described in Stapleton et al. (2017).

We have also written and presented for academic audiences. The team was invited to present for two consecutive years at a Workshop on Food Justice held at our local state university. The teachers each presented about their AR projects and the audience members—activists and academics in food justice—seemed to be quite moved by their perspectives. It was clear that the positionality of teachers afforded them a unique view on complicated issues such as food insecurity within schools and for individual students. The teachers are also coauthors on two book chapters which feature their AR projects and perspectives as teachers on food justice in their urban district (Stapleton et al., 2017; Stapleton & Cole, in press).

A recognition I made in the course of the work was the extent to which the teachers’ positionalities and identities shaped the AR projects they devised. This speaks to the importance of giving teachers space to create projects themselves rather than having a central plan of action or one developed by a researcher. The teachers each approached AR in slightly different ways, some more theoretical, others more focused on curriculum, while others were more practical.

An additional finding that came out of our work together was the influence of place and neoliberalism on the teachers’ situations and projects. The combination of accountability policies that heavily impacted schools serving predominantly low-income students resulted from larger demographic conditions and forces affecting the city and state. For this reason, I recommend an analysis of context be included in TPAR projects.

Meeting the “double aim”

Perhaps the most important criteria on which to judge a PAR project is whether it meets a “double aim” (Fals Borda, 2001; McTaggart, 1997b; Miller & Brewer, 2003) to not only produce knowledge, but to empower (Miller & Brewer, 2003), change (McTaggart, 1997b), and transform (Fals Borda, 2001) the participants. I took seriously this PAR goal of improving the lives of participants by treating the teachers as professionals, valuing their perspectives, expertise, and time. As a result, I gave teachers space and autonomy to invent projects of their own design. Perhaps consequently, the teachers expressed excitement and motivation to execute these projects with little assistance or encouragement from me. Despite being overworked, teachers showed eagerness and enthusiasm to engage in the project. I wanted to capture emotions the teachers expressed about the project in juxtaposition with those felt toward their jobs, so I asked them to email me any number of words that represented their feelings about these two domains. Their words are presented via word clouds in Figures 2 and 3.

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Figure 2.

Word cloud of teachers’ words describing their teaching jobs.

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Figure 3.

Word cloud of teachers’ words describing the TPAR project.

Figure 2 consists of the words the teachers reported feeling about their jobs. Of the 35 terms, only three are positive feelings, four are neutral (e.g. kids, problem-based learning) and the remaining 28 are negative (e.g. overwhelmed, unappreciated, devalued, and illegitimate). One word, “exhausted,” was repeated by two teachers, but appears only once in the collage. Figure 3 represents words the teachers attributed to our PAR project. Of the 29 terms in this image, all are positive emotions except for “tough” and “scattered”, (not necessarily negative emotions). Words presented here such as “hopeful”, “honored”, “needed”, “exciting”, “energized”, “innovate” are encouraging signs that the TPAR project met its “double aim.”

Moreover, the teachers volunteered to be part of this project with no external rewards (e.g. stipends, professional development credit, etc.). A few months into our work together, a dissertation fellowship allowed me to give small stipends to the teachers. In response, one of the teachers emailed:

I’m not sure you can fathom how much it means to me, in what is definitely my most challenging time in education. To feel appreciated and honored for what I do as a professional has become a rarity, and your confidence in, and respect for us throughout the early stages of this project have given me energy and inspiration…Again, thank you! You really made my day (month is more like it!), and I know the rest of the group feels likewise. Your gesture was a welcome ray of light in a challenging time. (Email correspondence, 26 August 2014)

In addition to kind words, the teachers gifted me multiple items to show their appreciation over our time together including homemade quiche, homemade pie, beer, coffee, flowers, local meat, maple syrup, even a lawnmower. Several took personal leave from school to attend my doctoral graduation ceremony and my dissertation defense. Creating a TPAR research team meant not only that we worked together, but that we developed relationships of trust, mutual respect, and even deep friendship.

Concluding thoughts

Based on empirical work with a team of veteran teachers, I offer TPAR as a model for collaboration between university-based researchers and teachers that acts in decisively political ways. TPAR can be a useful framework for teachers who work with marginalized youth for its potential to both highlight ways in which teachers are marginalized by association and help to improve their situations by giving them professional respect and voice in research. TPAR can also provide a needed outlet for overworked teachers to air their frustrations and receive support. While TPAR projects must be specifically designed to suit their contexts and participants, three core elements define TPAR: 1. teacher AR project(s), 2. analysis of the context in which the teachers work, and 3. recognition of the ways in which teachers are being marginalized based on their positions. Finally, consistent with any PAR project, TPAR projects need to commit to performing real action in the world and to improving the lives of the teacher participants throughout the process.