Action research challenges and confronts the conventions of much policy, organizational, and program research. Rather than reserving “research” to the domain of the expert trained in methods and a discipline, action research argues that knowledge about the world – and how to change it – can be created by practitioners, and done in a way that is not separate from work but integrally woven into it. Social change, in this formulation, is research; research, in this formulation, is social change. Inherent to action research is a challenge to normal science’s assumptions about who gets to define questions worth answering, who gets to determine appropriate methods, and who gets to decide what data mean and what to do as a result of inquiry into the world around us.

This course serves as both introduction to action research as methodology and survey of specific examples and cases where action research has had important social justice outcomes that other approaches would struggle to produce. The course is a kind of hypothesis: we seek to inquire – in a collaborative manner with graduate students – how and if action research is useful to generate complex system changes. What, specifically, is action research good for?

The course can be taken alone, or it can be taken as a “Capstone springboard course” by DPP students. If taken as a capstone platform course, students would also sign up for the 2-credit Capstone Springboard Project (MPAG 8604). Students doing this would be using action research as a central aspect of their Capstone project.

Learning Objectives

By the end of the course, students will be able to:

1. Compare and contrast action research – as methodology -- to other kinds of research common in social change programs and policy initiatives;

2. Identify program, policy, and socioeconomic/political/cultural contexts where an action research approach is and is not a good choice;

3. Identify structural (political, financial, epistemological, ontological, social, cultural) barriers to deploying action research approaches;

4. Implement cycles of reflection in a collaborative and rigorous manner;

5. Bring together different kinds of data – quantitative, qualitative, visual, verbal, emotional – and draw persuasive and actionable conclusions from them;

6. Analyze data in a collaborative manner and in a way that surfaces and deals with a variety of forms of bias;

7. Identify and use specific strategies for dealing with power differentials within action research initiatives; and

8. Craft arguments for mainstream funders to influence them to support action research approaches