Search results for: Critical practice

Critical Participatory Action Research (CPAR) requires communicative space to develop shared understandings and decisions. The authors examine the interactional accomplishment of such a space between a classroom practitioner and an academic researcher when meeting to reflect on a lesson and agree on future action to bring about change in the practitioner’s classroom practice. Conversation analysis of an audio recording of the meeting establishes how advice giving emerged and was managed as a delicate matter that required achieving shared understandings of what actually happened in the lesson, what could have happened, and what should happen in future lessons. Findings provide insights into how participants used reported and hypothetical speech to manage advice and reach agreement, produce and maintain intersubjectivity through interaction, and address epistemic asymmetry related to the differing experiences and roles that they brought to the action research study. Overall, the article contributes understandings of the ways that interactions produce communicative space in CPAR.

This paper engages with some of the specific issues that challenge critical practice. The author's argument is related to the Carr and Kemmis debate on 'staying critical'. It is the author's view that emancipatory action research, committed to the practice of social justice, with the intention of bringing about social change, is a necessary component of critical practice. The author claims that emancipatory action research is the glue that binds critical praxis in a unity of theory and action.