Action Research A Methodology for Change and Development

DOING ACTION RESEARCH DIFFERENTLY 33
ing at lunch time to make room for the ‘afternoon’ cohort – and many children
did not attend school at all as was clear from watching the child
labourers working on the construction site that adjoined the school where
I visited for a day. My own assumptions and values were jolted out of
Eurocentric complacency by this visit. My political, ideological and educational
assumptions shifted ground. I was intrigued and excited to learn that
if Lula won the election he intended to appoint Paulo Freire as Minister of
Education. I was surprised and impressed to find that philosophy was a
subject on the high school curriculum, something that I had never at that
time encountered in Britain and that was certainly not the case in the
newly established national curriculum for England and Wales.
In 1993, I visited South Africa immediately following the election of
Nelson Mandela as President in the first democratic elections. This time the
purpose was to assist in building research capacity among academic staff at
the University of the Western Cape where Melanie Walker was at that time
head of the Department of Academic Development. UWC had played a
leading role in the ‘struggle’ against apartheid in support of the ANC
(African National Congress) and several members of its senior management,
including the Rector, had just left to join Mandela’s government as senior
advisers. I spent the majority of my time working with four female
members of academic staff on an evaluation of the Communities
Partnership Project (CPP), which was funded by the Kellogg’s Foundation to
improve the quality of professional education in nursing and occupational
therapy. Specifically, CPP was developing community-based professional
education for student nurses and occupational therapists (OTs) who as a
result were based for a substantial part of their training in a nearby black
African township called Mfleni. The day ended early because travel home
across the Cape Flats to Melanie’s house where I was staying was dangerous
after dark. In the evenings I was entertained by my working colleagues who
belonged variously to the different previously segregated communities of
white, Asian, black and coloured, and were experiencing the shifts in power
that were signalled by the recent elections for each of their groups. I was
introduced to several people who could tell stories of their time in prison
on Robben Island, one of whom on hearing I was half Irish told me how he
and fellow prisoners had been inspired by reading the poetry and plays of
Yeats, O’Casey and other Irish writers from the time of the 1916 ‘rising’
against the English colonial power.
In Brazil I had only been able to visit schools and talk to teachers from
schools and the university, but in South Africa I engaged in an evaluation
of CPP over a two-week period in partnership with staff from the faculties
of nursing and OT at UWC, with two months further follow-up time to
write the report together, using email to keep us linked, after I had returned
to England. We used a highly collaborative approach, designing the study
together and analysing data in group workshops. Our research team visited