Rethinking the communication of action research: Can we make it dialogic?

Abstract

The paper proposes connectivity as an interactive approach to communicating research results from action research processes. It argues that action researchers tend to communicate their research results to the action research community in linear ways, which is inconsistent with the principles of action research. In so doing, action researchers miss out on an opportunity to engage in learning processes with other action researchers. Such learning processes may lead to the creation of new workable knowledge and to stronger communities of practice. The paper builds on action research (which focuses on interaction during the research process) and on participatory communication (which focuses on interaction during the communication process) to explore connectivity in practice and to contribute to its theoretical development. It presents an action research process developed in a research institute in Spain’s Basque region as a case study to elaborate that while connectivity may not be a feasible option in all cases, it does invite action researchers to rethink their expectations when writing to communicate new knowledge generated by their action research processes.

Keywords

Action research connectivity dialogue participatory communication insider action research roles

Introduction

The literature on action research (AR) has extensively covered how action researchers can contribute to the transformation of society in its different dimensions by actively interacting with stakeholders (Coghlan & Brydon-Miller, 2014). Interactive processes with stakeholders in formal AR processes are usually systematized, followed by writing and publication processes to share lessons learned with other academics and practitioners. Unfortunately, the interactive process that is a cornerstone of AR (Greenwood & Levin, 2007) is seldom present when communicating the results of many such processes. The literature has explored concepts like participatory models of writing (Johnson, 1997), novel approaches to write from experience (Light, 2018) or nonlinear processes of joint learning (Abma et al., 2017). This paper contributes to this literature by further developing the concept of connectivity defined as a dialogical approach to the transferability of academic outputs from AR processes (Karlsen and Larrea, 2014).

Instead of interactive processes with readers, written AR products paradoxically use the same channels as traditional research: publications in the form of reports, papers, and books that follow a linear path to readers. Using these communication channels is important because they grant action researchers the recognition they need to progress in their academic career. However, in communicating their academic outputs using linear formats only, action researchers miss out on the opportunity to extend AR’s transformation potential beyond the publication of results.

Based on this reasoning, we propose the following problem statement: Communicating academic knowledge from AR processes using linear formats reduces its potential to transform society, by essentially giving up interaction with the reader and giving up co-production of new knowledge. This approach to communicating academic knowledge from AR processes is inconsistent with the principles of AR.

In order to frame this problem statement, we use the concept of connectivity previously defined. The objective of the paper is to explore connectivity in practice and to contribute to its theoretical development. The practice we are inspired by is the communication process of a book (hereinafter referred as the book) entitled Facilitative Actors of Territorial Development (Costamagna & Larrea, 2018). This communication process was conceived and developed as an AR process. With the objective of reflecting on this experience, we have defined our research question as: What were the features of dialogic communication of academic outputs when communicating the book? By answering this question, the paper brings interaction to the core of academic communication of AR. This can be helpful for action researchers who aim to have an interactive approach not only with the stakeholders they work with but also with other (action) researchers who might benefit from their academic production. We consider this to be a contribution to the AR literature, which thus far has mostly focused on interaction between action researchers and direct stakeholders, and not with broader audiences who may interact with AR outputs.

The AR process conducted to communicate the book was carried out in the Basque Country (Spain) as part of the PhD process of one of the two authors. The aim of the AR process was to communicate the contents of the book, written by two action researchers, in a way that would enhance connectivity. The book co-authors acted as stakeholders and problem owners, in terms of Greenwood & Levin’s co-generative model (2007), while the PhD student facilitated the AR process. This paper is co-authored by the PhD student facilitating the process (Patricia Canto) and one of the authors (Miren Larrea) acting as problem owner. Their voices can be easily identified, clearly providing the reader with their perspectives in the process.

The result of the AR process is an interactive journey hosted in a digital platform that ends in an agora, defined as a meeting place for all the travelers who undertake the journey. The journey is available in open access on the web (https://dgroups.org/groups/perfadt) and gives all who access it the opportunity to “read” the book in a way that enhances connectivity. We encourage the reader of this paper to enter the platform and see how the processes described in the paper are being developed in practice. The original book is also available in open access: https://cutt.ly/1rPpK6T.

The paper is structured as follows. First, we present the conceptual discussion that frames the AR process. Then, we share the case in two steps: (1) a description of the context of the AR process; and, (2) a description of the AR process itself. A discussion of the case follows in order to answer the research question, along with closing reflections. We shared a draft version of this paper with the participants whose quotes are used as data in the case to make sure they feel adequately represented.

Finally, in order to connect to the discussion and the final reflection, we invite the reader of this paper to bear in mind the following questions when reading the different sections: For what aim do you write your AR experiences? Do you have any expectations regarding what readers will do with your writing? Would you like to explore novel ways of making what you share more actionable for them?

Conceptual framework

The concept that serves as a thread for the paper is connectivity, defined by Karlsen and Larrea (2014) as a dialogical approach to support the transferability of knowledge. Lincoln and Guba (1985) place the written text at the center of transferability of knowledge. They argue that transferability can be enhanced by how well a text is formulated, but that the responsibility of the author ends with the production of the text. Karlsen and Larrea (2014) agree that the written text is central but argue that researchers might

Make the choice to connect with other environments using the concepts, frameworks and cases developed and to enter a dialogue that will enhance the workability of the concepts in the new contexts. This does not mean that the researcher takes responsibility for the new process, but he or she takes responsibility for connecting with its participants (researchers and stakeholders) in a dialogue (p. 180).

The authors give examples on how this occurs through face-to-face connectivity. In contrast, this paper builds on the potential of digital environments that overcome the need to physically travel.

In order to further develop this interpretation of connectivity, we integrate some contributions from participatory communication, a field that draws from Paulo Freire’s dialogic communication approach (1996, 2008). These contributions were initially elaborated in Canto’s PhD dissertation (Canto-Farachala, 2019) that frames the AR process presented in this paper. Participatory communication emerged in the 1970s as a challenge to the top-down, linear communication patterns that dominated the international development field (Huesca, 2008) and which were criticized because they were based on a knowledge-deficit assumption (Gumucio-Dagron & Tufte, 2006). Cornish and Dunn (2009) define participatory communication as “a continual process of dialogue, listening, learning and action between people” (p. 667) and suggest that action researchers are better equipped to communicate their research in non-linear ways, such as through participatory video, radio and theater. This because researchers working with linear positivist research approaches may find adopting non-linear approaches to communication difficult.

Participatory communication understands participation as dialogue (Gumucio-Dagron, 2008). While dialogue and participation are also central concepts in AR, participatory communication focuses on interaction when communicating research outputs, while AR literature mostly emphasizes interaction with stakeholders during the research process and before academic communication occurs. This paper focuses on the dialogic communication of written outputs of AR processes, using as an example a book that was already written but not yet published at the time of initiating the present AR process.

Following Berger and Luckmann (1971), we understand that the interpretation of academic communication by researchers is socially constructed and thus can be changed. This means that research communication can shift from linear transmission of messages in packaged products to key audiences (e.g. reports to policymakers, press releases to the media, or journal articles to researchers), to communication patterns that are non-linear because they are based on dialogue. This shifts from an understanding of what is being communicated (i.e. communication as the transmission of messages), to how it is being communicated (i.e. communication understood as dialogue) (Escobar, 2011).

Holliman and Warren (2017) argue that researchers can interact with stakeholders at any stage of the research process, including dissemination. We therefore suggest that AR processes can extend participatory approaches to the academic dissemination stage. Academic production can be a vehicle to approach researchers working in other contexts through dialogue and contribute to the processes they are developing. In this sense, we see connectivity as “engaged excellence” (Oswald, Gaventa, & Leach, 2017), which involves co-constructing knowledge and building enduring partnerships that encourage action researchers not only to engage with stakeholders outside academia, but also with one another in academic environments.

Context of the case

We (both authors of this paper) came together in the PhD process of Canto, where Larrea was one of her supervisors. We agreed that the PhD would use AR to construct a dialogic communication process of research outputs generated by another researcher. When the moment came to start this process, we looked for researchers that met two conditions: (i) to be interested in exploring connectivity and (ii) to have a research output which they had not yet communicated. However, in the absence of other volunteers in the research environments we knew, we decided that Larrea (temporarily released from her role as a supervisor) would play the role of stakeholder in the AR process together with her co-author Costamagna. As stakeholders, they engaged with communicating the book, which was already written but not yet published. Canto’s role as action researcher was to facilitate this process inspired by the conceptual framework she had developed in her PhD.

Thus, the present case is an AR process developed to explore how a book initially written to be communicated in a linear way (the book) could also be communicated dialogically and increase connectivity between the authors and their readers.

Considering that the AR process to communicate the book was not created from scratch, but by intertwining two different processes already under development (the book and the PhD), in the next paragraphs each author shares our perspectives on our roles in the process.

The book

In 2010, I, Miren Larrea, met my co-author for the book, Pablo Costamagna. Our discussions on how we approached AR in territorial development invariably led to the recognition of ourselves as facilitators and to our understanding of what an AR facilitator does. We wrote the book about facilitative actors¹ of territorial development, which was later dialogically communicated through the digital platform built as a result of the AR process described in this paper. The book and its dialogic communication aimed at making a contribution to facilitators of territorial development, among which we specifically addressed action researchers working in this field. Through the book we shared with them a discussion on complexity of territorial development that made facilitation necessary and then argued for a constructivist approach to facilitation, sharing our perspective on the roles to be played and capabilities required. We defined facilitative action researchers as territorial actors who take on the role of creating the conditions that enable other territorial actors to reflect, decide and act without giving up the formers’ own interests on territorial development.

This writing was based on our AR experience interacting with stakeholders, mostly policy makers involved in territorial development policy. Although we planned to make it widely available by publishing in open access, we had not questioned its underlying linear communication pattern before discussing it with Canto. The benefit we got from this AR process as stakeholders is a version of our book located in an open access digital platform that helps us dialogically interact with our readers. Our choice has been to use this as a complement to the linear/traditional book online.

The PhD dissertation

I, Patricia Canto, had been working for nearly a decade in the communication department of a research institute before I decided to begin working on my PhD. The seeds of the PhD were sown when I successfully negotiated with a major international editorial company to keep the translation rights to Spanish, Basque and Norwegian of a book by Karlsen and Larrea (2014) that was published in English. The authors of this book were action researchers who wanted to keep those rights in order to produce open access editions for their research and training activities, considering the elevated price of their book in English.²

I translated this book to Spanish, and we produced the first online volume of a collection of books that aspired to connect the experiences of action researchers working in territorial development processes in different parts of the world. I began my PhD process inspired by the possibilities that the new book collection offered to strengthen such connections through more interactive approaches to research communication that go beyond one-way linear communication of AR results.

Description of the AR process

This section is written in the voice of Canto, the then PhD student that facilitated the AR process to dialogically communicate the book.

Pre-stage: Role definition

The AR process started with sharing my aims with Costamagna and Larrea, who readily accepted to be part of an emergent process in which we would face the challenge of communicating the book dialogically. They felt energized by the possibility to publish the book in a dialogical way and expressed their readiness to learn.

We then defined the roles that each participant would play during the process and encountered two challenges. First, we foresaw that it would be difficult for me and my supervisor (Larrea) to maintain a relationship as student and PhD supervisor and simultaneously as facilitator and stakeholder. We agreed that during the time the AR process developed, my supervisor would stop playing that role and supervision responsibilities would fall exclusively on my co-supervisor.

Second, I was a member of the communication department at our research institute, so, although I was a facilitator in the AR process, I was also a stakeholder with my own interests in the process. Initially I was not aware of this role duality (Coghlan & Brannick, 2010) and adopted Greenwood and Levin’s (2007) co-generative framework to guide the process. These authors made a clear distinction between action researchers (outsiders) and stakeholders (insiders), and I saw myself as facilitating the process as an outsider who would help the two insider “problem owners” (referred to in this section as the authors) to communicate their book in a novel way. However, the role of outsider action researcher soon felt artificial, as I had my own stake in the problem. My supervisor suggested that I read Coghlan and Brannick (2010) regarding role duality. I did so and connected with their insider action researcher framework because it made me a problem owner and facilitator. Being problem owner, I participated in the decisions made in the workshops and later acted on them.

The AR process

I discussed and co-designed the AR process with the two stakeholders (Costamagna and Larrea). Once the decision was made of having a virtual platform, we integrated an ICT expert, Rakel Vázquez, into the team. When I use the plural voice in this section referring to the sequences of reflection and action in the process, I refer to the four of us—Canto, Larrea, Costamagna and Vázquez.

Faced with the need to have a name for the potential solution to the connectivity challenge when the process was still at an early stage, we chose to call it “la cosa,” words in Spanish that mean the thing. We chose to use this placeholder name to remain open to what the space might become, avoiding terms like webpage, blog, webinar, online course, etc. The virtual platform that was finally constructed continued informally being called the thing and we will use the term in this paper too. The thing is the emerging virtual platform of the book.

We designed the process to build the thing with four workshops that took place from March to June 2017. In each workshop, we reflected about one of the theoretical elements of the conceptual framework shared in Figure 1.

Figure 1.

Conceptual framework used in the AR process.

After presenting each of the elements, we would discuss them, reflecting on how they could help us to address the challenge of connectivity and we made decisions on how to communicate the book. We had a month between workshops for acting on a decision. In my dual role of facilitator of the AR process and stakeholder in my organization, I was responsible for implementing the actions that followed the decisions made in each workshop. Besides the ICT expert, who had integrated the team, an audio-visual expert and a local artist helped me build the thing. The co-authors also provided specific inputs from their book when needed, such as short texts, questions for readers, shooting videos or photograph sessions, among others.

The AR process consisted of three stages: (1) Recruitment of stakeholders and clarification of expectations; (2) Agreement on roles; and (3) Workshops. Table 1 introduces concepts analyzed in each workshop, the decisions made and the actions that followed. The actions were always evaluated in the first part of the next workshop, following the spiral of AR cycles by Coghlan and Brannick (2010) made of four steps: constructing, planning action, taking action and evaluating action. In what follows, I describe each section in detail.

Table 1.

The AR process to build the thing.

Workshop	Decisions	Actions
March 7Connectivity is process-oriented	To design the process to avoid dialogue being too time consuming for authors.	The thing was designed as a process in two stages^a:-A reflective interactive journey-A space in which to keep writing the book
April 12Connectivity is knowledge-based	To include specific spaces for the voice of authors and for the voice of readers.	The thing has two distinct spaces, one each for: -the knowledge contributed by the authors - the knowledge contributed by readers
May 9Connectivity is inclusive	The thing should be a tribute to the diversity of views on facilitation and the variety of theoretical frameworks and life experiences behind it.	-Questions help readers connect the book’s contents with their own theoretical and experiential knowledge-Readers’ contributions remain intact, they are not edited nor summarized
June 13Connectivity is emergent	To continue writing the book with all the readers who finish the interactive journey.	An “agora” was created as a space to keep writing the book for those who finish the interactive journey

^aThis first stage was discussed in the second and third workshops. The second one was addressed in the fourth workshop.

First workshop: Connectivity is process-oriented

In the first workshop, I presented the authors with the concept of communication as a process that is not static but dynamic and focuses on how communication takes place and what is created (or changed) by it. This meant that the book was not merely a product to be given by authors to readers, but a process to be shared by authors and readers together. I asked the authors to write down and then share what they wanted to create or change through this process with their readers. Although they seemed to agree, there was an important nuance which one of the authors stated very clearly:

What do we want to build with this process? Capabilities. Unless I find that [the other author] has written something else. Capabilities. Capabilities, and in this specific case, for facilitating change. For territorial change driven by [territorial] actors.

Thus, what this author wanted to achieve by having a dialogue with readers was to help those readers develop their facilitation capabilities. But this was not unproblematic, as the other author responded:

I also wrote capabilities, but I think we should specify realistically what type of capabilities […]; we cannot be over ambitious, and I think that with the book it will be very difficult to develop facilitation capabilities … I think the book is oriented towards helping others discover themselves as facilitators, to help their inner facilitator emerge.

Both authors later reflected that:

What we are looking for is how to communicate the book through dialogue but without the intensity in dedication that face-to-face dialogue entails … Can we gain scale losing some intensity and still make it worth the effort?

(quotes taken from the minutes of the March 7, 2017, workshop)³

We decided that the thing would be a process divided into two stages. The first would take the form of an interactive journey with different stops that matched one or more chapters of the book. We decided to use the journey metaphor because it related to how the authors themselves experienced their own process of writing the book: writing had been a journey, and the thing would be a journey for their readers too (hereinafter, readers or travelers). The second stage would take the form of a space in which “to continue writing the book” through an ongoing, open-ended dialogue with those who finished the journey.

Another relevant decision was to find a concept of dialogue that addressed the time-consuming nature of face-to-face dialogue. One of the authors proposed the concept of deferred dialogue, which in the context of the thing means that travelers do not respond immediately to the voice of authors, but in delayed time whenever they find themselves doing the interactive journey (which is a literal process in which a traveler is logged on to the system to engage the material). It also means that authors respond to travelers, but not directly answering to what they wrote but through texts and videos designed beforehand for the moment travelers reach each part of the trip. During the journey, travelers are also able to nourish their reflections with the reflections shared by travelers who have already passed through the different stops before them.

An example of how a deferred dialogue develops is that in the first stop of the journey, travelers find an introductory video in which the authors explain their background. Then travelers are invited to answer the following two questions: What does the term facilitation suggest to you? Do you feel you are a facilitator? Before answering, travelers can read the reflections left by those who travelled before them or decide not to read them. However, they can only gain entrance to the agora by sharing their own thoughts. Answers to the two questions are shown below:

Facilitators make meeting spaces possible so that projects can move forward (entry in the thing on December 29, 2017)

I have sometimes had to facilitate processes without being totally aware that I was doing so (entry in the thing on December 4, 2017)

After answering these questions, travelers are invited to read the chapter where the authors speak to travelers about what facilitation means to them and how they reached the conclusion that they are facilitators. Authors thus respond to travelers’ reflections not ad hoc in each case, but within the same chapter. What makes deferred dialogue dialogic is that it is initiated by a short reflection by authors, continued by questions and the readers’ answers to questions. By the time the readers get to the chapter, they have hints of what authors think but mostly they have their own reflections in mind. It is the focus on their own reflections that is relevant to address the development of capabilities. Thus, although the chapter is always the same chapter, it is integrated in a different conversation with every reader.

Although readers can see other readers’ answers, there is no possibility to interact at this stage, as this is a phase designed mostly for self-reflection. In the “agora” stage that will be described later, authors and all readers have the possibility to interact in a more direct way.

This process of deferred dialogue overcomes the time availability challenge posed by the authors and, although with less intensity than face to face dialogue, breaks with linearity.

In the spirit of the thing we now invite you, the reader, to reflect on the following questions and scribble in the margins. When considering making the communication of your lessons learnt in AR processes dialogical, how much time could you use to engage in dialogue with your readers? Could you consider as satisfactory, a solution that reduces the time required, but also reduces the intensity of dialogue?

Second workshop: Connectivity is knowledge-based

In the second workshop, I presented the virtual tool that could serve as the basis on which to build the thing. We first reflected on the concept of knowledge, my intention being to help authors reflect on the idea that if their academic knowledge is intended to influence territorial development, it would need to interact with the knowledge of others. The authors had no difficulty acknowledging this. The workshop ended with the decision to go ahead with the virtual tool that had been presented because it offered the possibility of designing a journey with different stops and specific spaces for the knowledge (or voice) of the authors and the knowledge (or voice) of travelers.

As shown in Figure 2, during the journey, travelers are faced with a screen where they can easily find two spaces: the voice of the authors and the voice of all the travelers who preceded them, where they also contribute.

Figure 2.

The thing: Distinct spaces for the voice of authors and the voice of travelers.

We again invite you, the reader, to reflect on your own writing processes and your expectations on how your knowledge will interact with that of others in order to transform a specific situation. How is this occurring? Do you have the right means at hand to achieve such transformation? Are you really trying to transform something, or simply inform? What do you think about that?

Third workshop: Connectivity is inclusive

During the third workshop, I presented the authors with the concept of inclusion. I wanted them to reflect on what inclusive communication meant for the thing I presented Freire’s pedagogical approach as a way of making the thing inclusive by helping travelers to connect the book chapters with their own experience.

The main decision was to use the questions that had been created for deferred dialogue at each stop of the journey, to connect the contents of each chapter to travelers’ own experience. For instance:

Could you share an experience in which you faced a complex problem and you felt you lacked tools to manage?; Could you identify in yourself any of the characteristics of a facilitator?; What lessons or experiences explain how you work today?

Through responses to these questions, a deferred dialogue inclusive of travelers’ theoretical and experiential knowledge takes place.

However, the discussion that led to this decision was not unproblematic to me, because in making this decision we gave up a more ambitious interpretation of inclusivity that allows for differences to emerge and be discussed. This challenge happened right when I was feeling more confident. While both authors were always friendly and helpful, I had felt a bit intimidated by them during the first workshops. My suggestion to use Freire’s pedagogical approach was resisted by one of the authors along the lines that the thing did not offer the mechanisms to fully reflect such an approach. This made me defend my own position instead of trying to construct common ground. In my bewilderment, I failed to notice that this discussion had also made conflict emerge between both authors, one of whom felt strongly that the thing’s objective was to generate facilitation capabilities, with the other wishing to be more realistic. As illustrated in the following excerpt, conflict had to be facilitated by one of the authors after the workshop by engaging the three of us in a written dialogue through email to make what had happened explicit:

I felt that Freire did not offer the right framework and I excluded [your] proposal; he felt that my approach lacked empathy and excluded it. […] In the thing I think we should give up on trying to build one particular path and define that space as a meeting point of different paths (email from one of the authors, recorded in the PhD student’s research diary, May 14, 2017)

In other words, we realized that trying to build one path from different ones, required facilitating conflict. Indeed, following the reflection in the second workshop, we decided inclusiveness should convey some type of interaction between authors’ and travelers’ knowledge. The difficulties we experienced during the third workshop showed that if we interpreted inclusiveness as the construction of something new through dialogue that included contributions from all participants, we would need a type of facilitation that was hands-on and time consuming. Besides, we felt that the digital platform was not enough to host that type of process. An alternative was to go for a less ambitious interpretation of interaction, understanding that sharing the same space in the thing was a way to connect different types of knowledge. Following this, we decided to interpret inclusivity as a tribute to the diversity of views on facilitation (as noted in Table 1). In practice, this would mean that the contributions travelers made during the journey by answering the different questions posed, would not be edited, shortened, combined or summarized in any way, and these contributions would interact by sharing the same space and giving the new travelers the possibility of reading them as part of the same discussion.

It is time again to invite you, the reader, to reflect. How could you make academic outputs of your AR processes interact with contributions from others in a way that is inclusive? Would this challenge your definition of inclusiveness?

Fourth workshop: Connectivity is emergent

The final workshop focused on designing the second stage of the process: “to keep writing the book,” the space in which the voice of authors and the voice of travelers would interact more directly (not as in deferred dialogue) to co-generate new knowledge. In the previous workshops, we had to give up potential intensity in dialogue to gain feasibility, but my aim in the idea “to keep writing the book,” was to create a virtual community of practice which would help readers reflect in a higher intensity dialogic space.

One of the concepts I presented was emergent dialogue, in which ideas conflict, clash and combine until something new appears (Hammond, 2003). During the workshop, one of the authors said:

I like the idea of emergent dialogue because from the outset we are saying that we do not know where this space is going to lead us to … and I think this is really Freirean…. The space will be constructed by everyone. … For me we are now talking of a meeting space and not so much of a journey

(quote taken from the minutes of the June 13, 2017, meeting)

As a result of the workshop, we decided to prepare a virtual space in which to continue writing the book in the thing as a meeting place for those who finished the online interactive journey. This space, however, would not exhibit any sort of previous description since it would be built through the emergent dialogue that developed among those who gradually joined. When travelers reach the last stop of the journey, they are asked if they wish to participate in a virtual space where previous travelers and the authors of the book continue sharing experiences and reflections on facilitative actors of territorial development. If they say that they do, they are granted access to the virtual space: the agora.

All newcomers to the agora are faced with a question when arriving on how they would like the place to work. The following are contributions made by travelers:

I imagine a space for dialogue and self-discovery … Could this be a space in which to connect with our own experiences through questions?

(entry on October 27, 2017)

I imagine this as a noisy space, but also warm, like a space for recreation, to stop the daily routine and enjoy the encounter. I think of the squares in my country and they are definitely spaces in which one appropriates, occupies, protests, demonstrates, plays … intensely plural

(entry on November 30, 2017)

This is the moment to pose the last question for you, the reader, to reflect on your own experience. What kind of dialogue spaces would you like to have to dialogically communicate your learnings form AR processes?

Discussion of the case: The features of dialogic communication of academic outputs from AR

This section shares the voice of Larrea, one of the co-authors of the book and a stakeholder in the AR process shared in this paper.

In the discussion, I directly address the research question: What were the features of dialogic communication of academic outputs in the case? The answer is threefold: (i) authors are transformed into facilitators, (ii) readers are transformed into authors and (iii) AR can be the methodology to enable these transformations.

Connectivity transforms authors into facilitators of the reading experience

This feature is inspired by my experience with the journey, while the second one is based on my experience in the agora. I interpret these two spaces/processes as complementary parts of the thing.

The first paragraph in the book that we transformed into the thing reads:

This book is the result of a learning process which draws on our experience in different territorial development processes. Our main motivation in writing it is to provide a capability-building strategy which can help to overcome structural challenges that we encountered in our work in different territories

(Costamagna & Larrea, 2018, p. 15)

We wrote that paragraph with a traditional book publication process in mind. Later, the process to construct connectivity challenged us not just to state our wishes on what the reader would do with our book, but to help him or her do it. This meant changing our role from authors to facilitators of the reading processes. In a traditional book format, our responsibility would have ended when the reader got the book. In the AR process to construct the thing, we were challenged to articulate the dialogical mechanisms to facilitate a constructive “reading journey” that would improve capabilities.

I grew aware of the difficulties that this entailed in the first workshop. We could be as ambitious as we wanted when writing our wishes on paper but our commitment to act and articulate the dialogic mechanisms to build capabilities made us aware of the complexity of our aims. In order to meet the ambition of transforming practices and not just discourse, we had to moderate our discourses. We gave up our ambition to build facilitation capabilities to “simply” help readers gain awareness of their facilitation. We then chose questions as the dialogic mechanism to generate connectivity and facilitate awareness—questions which would be answered by other (action) researchers and practitioners of territorial development. As noted earlier, this is captured in Figure 2, which shows the two spaces where we participate in the thing. On the left side, we are authors sharing our experience. On the right side, we are facilitators that, through questions, generate the conditions for the readers to reflect on their facilitation and hopefully, decide and act on it.

Connectivity transforms readers into authors

This section shares an example of how connectivity transforms readers into actors. In the book that was now in the thing we had referred to the invisibility of action researchers as facilitators of territorial development processes. We argued that the appropriation of the process by stakeholders, in our case policy makers, is positive; but that facilitators should also be able to appropriate/own the process. This is often difficult for them because their visibility may be interpreteted to compete with stakeholders’ visibility. Invisibility, or lack of any mechanisms for facilitators to appropriate the process could reduce sustainability of AR processes in the long term as it reduces the identification of the facilitator with his or her own work (and thus motivation to continue working) and also renders recognition (and often promotion in work environments) more difficult. We shared two possible ways to avoid invisibility: (i) academic publishing which enhances the identification of the researcher with the process, motivates and makes recognition and promotion more feasible; and (ii) to communicate to the public, at the local level, the role played by facilitators and not only the role of stakeholders in territorial development. These arguments—challenges to travelers to react, respond and contribute—became part of the reading material in the the thing.

The issue of invisibility of facilitative actors (including facilitative action researchers) was dealt with in two pages in the online version of the book and also briefly in the thing. Then, following the agreement made in the workshop on 13 June 2017, the book continued being written in the agora section of the thing. The following are extracts from one of the discussions with 13 participants, 2 of them the authors of the book (signaled to show how authors are having a dialogue with the readers of the book). The whole dialogue would be too long to reproduce here, but we share some extracts of it. P1 stands for Participant 1, that posed the discussion, the rest follow sequentially.

P1 (November 19, 2017): I am inspired to share a very recent experience from an AR project I facilitate. In one given moment I realized that I had been made invisible as a facilitator […]

This happened when one of the policy makers in the process, in a presentation about their local economic development strategy, referred to the actions defined as the result of action research, but did not mention the space for reflection-action they share with us, researchers

P2: I still don’t understand very well why visibility is required to facilitate; I even think […] that it is possible to facilitate in the shadow

P3 (co-author of the book): The issue of visibility [in the book] emerged from action […]. It is difficult to be aware of it if you are not reflecting on a concrete experience where a facilitator was made invisible and I agree with how the discussion was posed here

P4 (co-author of the book): Being visible means to be able to present ourselves, or to be presented by others, publicly as owners (together with others) of the co-generated process. I think you can facilitate while being invisible, but if invisibility has not been previously agreed, and is a decision of the other actors, it can bring emotional pain

P5: If I think about some years ago on my work as a facilitator in some processes, I think I was proud of being invisible. Proud that the actors […] felt that the process was possible exclusively because of their work. Over the last years, through experience and dialogue […], I have reflected about the relevance of making [facilitators] work visible

P6: is it possible then that visibility/invisibility are linked to how each of the facilitative actors appropriates the process?

P1: if we are not capable of recognizing the facilitator and the process that he or she facilitates, the capacity to transform can be very small

P8: I think that […] maybe visibility of the facilitated can favor change

P6: communication and appropriation often go hand in hand. Do you think this is so?

P9: There is something that always disturbs me a bit and I share, it is the issue of finding the balance between being someone that promotes, feeds and gives impulse to reflection and action, but also generates some ‘dependency’ on actors

P10: [communication] is not enough. A way to complement communication […] is to agree on the conditions [for visibility] from the beginning […]

P4 (co-author of the book): I think that there are two positions in the discussion. One associates visibility to centrality and advises against the dangers of facilitators being too visible because they take centrality away from actors. I feel closer to the second, visibility as a claim on the role of facilitation. From this perspective, visibility of actors and facilitators do not exclude each other

P11: visibility is progressive, it grows through facilitation of the process and its forms are cogenerated in time

P12: the facilitator is visible or invisible depending on who is looking. This has to do with whether the rest of the actors recognize or not the person as facilitator, beyond whether this person wants or not to be a facilitator

These discussions (this content) are connected to our book because they took place in the agora after everybody had read the book, and they focused on and expanded upon one of our concepts, invisibility of facilitation. The new features of invisibility that emerged through dialogue were facilitation in the shadow, pride in invisibility, negotiated (agreed-upon) invisibility, progressiveness of visibility, etc. They are all published—together with the chapters of the book—in the thing and, thus, I interpret that readers transformed into authors in the agora.

Connectivity can be constructed through AR

When I look back, I have no doubt that through this process we (co-authors of the book) have changed the way we communicated our academic output based on AR. But could we have done this alone? I think not.

Our process was facilitated by a PhD student playing the role of facilitative action researcher. Being on “the other side” of the AR process was new for me and was the most enlightening part of the process. I think that growing aware of our own taken for granted assumptions on communication of academic output would have been very difficult without an AR process facilitated by someone else. Connectivity required overcoming some assumptions on how academic outputs are communicated. Playing the role of stakeholders or problem-owners in an AR process proved to be a good method for action researchers to change our communication habits regarding connectivity.

Concluding reflection

Throughout the writing process of this paper, we have lived with a permanent sense of contradiction. Although we write about a new way of communicating academic outputs of AR, this paper still follows the traditional pattern. A challenge to change this pattern is posed by Friedman, Gray and Ortiz (2018).

Should every academic output be communicated through connectivity? Our answer is no. We were a team of four people involved in the construction of the thing and we got technical support from two more people. Besides, connectivity is now requiring the dedication of the PhD student and the two authors to energize the agora and the involvement of the participants. All these efforts are not feasible after every writing process.

Still, through the questions posed to you (the reader of this paper) in the introduction, we aimed at infusing our traditional approach to writing this paper with the lessons learned about connectivity. We hope that having these questions in mind helped you connect not only with our experience but your own experience of communicating AR. For which we end, as we began, with questions:

For what aim do you write your AR experiences? Do you have any expectations regarding what readers will do with your writing? Would you like to explore novel ways of making what you share more actionable for them? What concrete steps might you take to do so?

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: We gratefully acknowledge financial support from the Basque Government Department of Education, Language policy, and Culture (IT885-16) and from the Etorkizuna Eraikiz program of the Provincial Council of Gipuzkoa for the writing process.

ORCID iDs

Patricia Canto-Farachala

Miren Larrea

Notes

Author biographies

Patricia Canto-Farachala is a researcher at Orkestra-Basque Institute of Competitiveness. Her research areas include transdisciplinary approaches to academic publishing and communication and the role of universities in regional socioeconomic development. She decided to do her PhD after having worked for more than a decade in the design and implementation of Orkestra’s communication and publications policies. Previously, she worked for 10 years in the development of public policies related to economic development in different levels of government in Mexico. She has been a lecturer at the University of Deusto and at the Monterrey Institute of Technology and Higher Education.

Miren Larrea is a senior researcher at Orkestra-Basque Institute of Competitiveness and lecturer at the University of Deusto (Spain), University of Agder (Norway) and National Technological University (Argentina). She has professional experience in local development and the creation and management of public-private cooperation networks for territorial competitiveness. Over the last decade she has worked to institutionalize action research as one of the representative approaches of Orkestra and she has coordinated several long-term projects with regional and local governments. She is one of the proponents of action research for territorial development, focused on the construction of collaborative governance for policy making. Her latest publications share action research as a common thread and address issues such as policy learning, collaborative governance, shared leadership, facilitation, participatory innovation policies or the transformation of university.

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