Action Research A Methodology for Change and Development

INTRODUCTION 3
ways that participant–researchers can generate and communicate knowledge
to those who seek it out of need. Early in my research career I learnt
something important about the generalizability of knowledge generated
from research. Here is the story:
During 1985–6 I was working at the Cambridge Institute of Education
on the ‘Support for Innovation Project’, 1 which involved supporting senior
management teams and their staff in 12 high schools in the professional
development of teachers engaged in implementing a large number of innovatory
programmes simultaneously. I had been working on the project for
about six months when I received a phone call from the Deputy Head of
another high school in a neighbouring county who said he had heard about
our project and would like me to visit the school and talk to the senior
management team about possible strategies for undertaking similar work of
their own. It was perhaps my first consultancy, at any rate I was very
nervous when I set out to drive to the school. The meeting took place in the
Head’s office and involved a discussion between myself and four or five
senior managers (I think, from memory, all men). As soon as they began
talking about the issues that confronted them, I found the need to question
them to find out more. Were teachers likely to say … ? Did the pupils tend
to respond by … ? Did they find that heads of department felt that … ? Was
one of the problems for the senior management team that … ? They
responded very openly and I easily recognized the underlying significance
of points they were making and empathized with their assumptions and
constraints. I was able to offer advice based on my knowledge of what other
schools were doing in similar circumstances. Central issues included: communication
(who had access to what information and how could they
broaden access); territoriality (who ‘owned’ which rooms and could these
boundaries be made more flexible); and informal power networks (who
influenced who, and how could the creative energy of individuals be harnessed).
At the end of the meeting the Head said to me something along
the lines of, ‘It’s amazing, I can’t believe you have never been to our school
before, you seem to know so much about the way our school works.’ I
remember walking to my car feeling so tense after one and a half hours of
total concentration and fright-induced adrenalin in my bloodstream that I
was literally sick on the way home. But I had learnt that the knowledge
acquired from qualitative research is generalizable to similar settings (this
school was similar in size to the project schools and governed by the same
regulatory and political context) and that knowledge acquired from
1 SIP was funded by Norfolk and Suffolk County Council Local Education Authorities from the
government’s TRIST grant for in-service training of teachers.