Action Research A Methodology for Change and Development

80 ACTION RESEARCH
At this stage I wrote two confidential documents in which I
described and analysed the roles of the head of upper school and
the faculty heads. Bias was knowingly included in these documents,
in that minority views were quoted, as were my own subjective
interpretations of the data. By including this kind of material
in preliminary documents at this stage I hoped to avoid producing
a final document that was merely descriptive or, at best,
bland.
These documents were then given to the people they most nearly
concerned: ‘The Role of the Head of Upper School’ went only to
the head of upper school himself; ‘The Role of the Faculty Heads’
went to all those who attend the faculty heads’ meetings with the
exception of the head of the school and the two deputies.
These confidential documents were intended to be provocative in
order that they should stimulate a response. I carried out a supplementary
series of interviews with all but one of those concerned
(the Head of PE was too busy to see me on the day arranged and
illness, together with industrial action, prevented our making an
alternative appointment). In all these interviews I was talking to
people of comparable standing to my own in the school. In all of
them we were discussing a topic of importance to the interviewee
in the knowledge that my document was confidential and would
not be seen by other members of staff without the interviewee’s
permission. In all of them I explained that I was going to ‘substantially
rewrite’ the document to incorporate the views of those
I was interviewing. As far as possible, therefore, there was the
‘symmetrical distribution of control by dialogue participants’,
which Winter (1984) identifies as being essential for Habermas’s
‘ideal speech situation’.
Notes from this second round of interviews were typed and, as
planned, were used to rewrite the two documents. The intention
was to make these new documents almost collaborative in authorship,
while still preserving the opinions of other members of staff
who had only been involved in the first stage of interviews.
At this stage, further analysis of both sets of interview notes
revealed that the vast topic of democracy could not be dealt with
in the scope of the present study, but that the data on democracy
included some fascinating insights into the roles of many members
of staff. The study as a whole finally focused on the issue of staff