passionate purposes of individuals whose lives and work construct these practices.’
(p. 3) These ideas also show the potential or the actual different uses of action
research. Some view it primarily as a collection of methods and some as a vehicle
for radical participatory change.
It was this issue of these different traditions that led Nofke ( 2009 : 7) to undertake
an historical analysis and from this emerged her distinction between the profes-
sional, personal and political dimensions of action research. The professional
dimension is concerned with the nature of research as well as the debate around
who creates the knowledge. Keyfigures in the UK who engaged in educational
research of a professional nature are Lawrence Stenhouse, who argued that teachers
needed to research in order to understand classroom practice, and John Elliott, who
saw teacher research as able to generate alternative challenging knowledge and able
to promote a reflective professional able to theorise and engage in major curriculum
development. In Australia, Carr and Kemmis also focused upon transforming
educational research into a more critical and participatory tradition. The personal
dimension is where the transformation of individuals is emphasised, as well as the
collaboration with others, including university-based colleagues. Nofke would
argue that the political dimension is part of everything, as power is an inevitable
aspect of all three dimensions. However, the political dimension also alludes to
explicit political purposes such as the promotion of democratic practices in schools
or engagement with marginalised peoples. These three dimensions are also arenas
of change too and when a fairly large-scale educational reform is undertaken then
all of the three dimensions are engaged with—the professional, the personal and the
political. These three areas will be explored in more detail later in this chapter.
39.3 Change and Educational Reform
Fullan ( 2013 ) argues that not many large-scale reforms have been undertaken
successfully, although he says there are recent examples in the UK and elsewhere.
His analysis of the success of reform is that the major challenges are not around
policy formation but around the point of implementation of policy (Fullan 2013 :
13). This is now well known. It is understandable since this is where the real change
is made possible or not. It is entirely dependent on the teachers’understandings,
values and practices, as well as their perceptions of the worthwhileness, or not, of
the change. For it is...‘the intimate and passionate purposes of individuals whose
lives and work construct these practices,’(Somekh 2009 , p. 3) which will determine
what happens in the classroom. This does sometimes gets forgotten in our time of
global concerns.
We live in an era of international comparison tables, the search for the perfect
practice and major accountability measures. Most recent educational reform ini-
tiatives have been driven by policy makers and in a top-down fashion. Often in
these change or reform initiatives teachers are positioned as‘a problem’as Fullan
and Langworthy ( 2014 ) note,‘One of the most frequently cited barriers is the
584 C. McLaughlin