Where the Action is: On Collaborative Action Research in Education

Abstract

This paper was first given as a plenary address at a conference on qualitative research in music education. As I began the talk, I asked members of the audience to reflect by writing on a piece of paper the first words that came to mind as they thought of the word Then I polled the audience for what they had written. They mentioned the following words in this order: compromise, relationship, cooperation, interdisciplinary, time-intensive, problem-solving, identification of useful groups and individuals, cooperative learning, listening, and dialogue. Notice that compromise is the only word mentioned that points to what might be called the dark side of collaboration. The other words imply a more optimistic sense of what collaboration would entail. Collaboration literally means working together. But we all know that isn't necessarily easy. The articulation of joint effort in a social group always involves issues of the distribution and exercise of power. Indeed, this is a matter of what Foucault calls power/knowledge; the epistemological notion that whatever we can know is inextricably situated in and, thus, shaped by the power position and power interests within which the knower inquires (Foucault, 1979). When I hear the word collaboration, I often think of Quisling, the Norwegian government official who cooperated actively with the Nazi occupation during World War II. I think of what the French Resistance meant pejoratively by the term collaborator. Another word that comes to mind when one thinks of collaboration is co-optation. Thus, collaboration is neither a simple notion nor an un-mixed blessing.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 14 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.