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Transgressing theory/practice divides through collaboration.: Building research communities with professionals
Abstract
This article contributes to discussions of transmethodology by drawing on experiences from conducting practice research aimed at the development of theory and practice through research collaboration. We analyze efforts to build research communities where researchers and professionals work together to perform analyses and develop knowledge. A collective research project exploring children’s possibilities for participation in school is used as a case for exploring how a research problem develops through such collabora-tion. This research project was designed to explore school life from the perspectives of children, parents, teachers, school leaders, and psychologists, and to analyze conflicts situated in everyday practices while considering political struggles concerning the school as a historical institution. The article emphasizes the often intangible and overlooked processes involved in research collaboration and details how we worked to build a re-search community comprising researchers and professionals that enabled collective mul-ti-perspective analyses. Building on a dialectical approach, we conceptualize conflicts as part of historical processes and as an immanent potentiality that arises from people’s engagement in common but contradictory matters. Hence, the different perspectives of those involved in children’s school life can be seen as linked through common matters, while also being differentiated by their allotted tasks in relation to children’s school life. This approach continuously challenged the researchers to analyze everyday conflicts grounded in the different perspectives of those involved, the different forms of reasoning, understandings, and standpoints, as well as how the different perspectives are connected through the participants’ engagement in a common matter – providing good schools for children. The article concludes by arguing that the discussed approach to theory devel-opment can be linked to a situated concept of generalization.
... A general problem present within, albeit not confined to, the institutional practices of the Danish Folkeskole has been labelled 'problem displacement' (Højholt, 2022). This concept refers to a common process across various practices of school life in which complex social problems are explained with reference to individual deficits, shortcomings, or a lack of competence (Højholt & Kousholt, 2019b;Kousholt & Højholt, 2022;Mardahl-Hansen, 2018). ...
This article presents a methodological approach to educational psychology research in which researchers engage in collaborative transformations of educational practice while developing theory concerning the societal and scientific relevance of these transformative processes. The theoretical inspiration for this approach stems from German-Scandinavian Critical Psychology, Transformative Activist Stance, and the Change Laboratory Framework — three research traditions with common roots in cultural-historical psychology and activity theory. Empirically, the article is based on a transformative research collaboration between the author and a 2nd grade teacher at a Danish municipal primary school. The aim was to develop an intervention framework to support the development of cultures of care within communities of children, while simultaneously producing theoretical knowledge about the conditions that enable the development of such cultures within the contradictory and dilemma-filled historical and socio-political context of Danish municipally governed schools. Empirical excerpts show how a novel intervention principle emerged as a synthesis of the researcher and the schoolteacher’s respective, seemingly contradictory knowledge contributions. Against a backdrop of historical-institutional analyses, it is argued that this intervention principle represents a novel scope of possibilities for educational professionals struggling to manoeuvre within the various contradictions and common problems inherent to Danish municipally governed schools. In the discussion, it is argued that the transformative approach presented here seems particularly promising for the democratisation of knowledge production. This assertion is supported by a demonstration of how the approach is particularly flexible to continuously integrate critique, contributions, and contestations from co-researchers within educational practice, adults as well as children.
The special issue deals with entanglements, borders, and bridges between ideas, concepts, and spheres often considered separate and distinct elements in research processes that are frequently represented as well-ordered and linear. Under the heading transmethodology, our aim has been to make space for and bring to light the often messy, non-linear, and complex research processes that form our methodologies.
This paper presents critical reflections regarding entangled relationships between access, communication and inclusion and illustrates how these play out across multiple analytical scales, ranging from interactional data analysis to engagement with policy data. The study draws on our ethnographic fieldwork from two large projects where roughly 45 18-50+ year-old people have been shadowed across settings. The study aims to illuminate dimensions of analyst’s participation in terms of the flow of the everyday lives of people they track within and across physical-online spaces and within and across education, workplaces, cultural settings, homes, leisure-time, governmental agencies, health services, social media, etc. Such a stance acknowledges the mobile yet situated, partial and limited nature of contemporary existence and that of knowledge generation within the research enterprise. By engaging with what we call a “second wave of southern perspectives” (SWaSP), the access that scholars have and the identity-positionings of people they track can be understood in terms of (non)support i.e. (non)affordances of different settings for human beings’ possibilities to engage in social practices. In addition to bringing into dialogue different theoretical clusters within a SWaSP framing, the study goes beyond essentialized ways of understanding methodologies or single project reporting, and attempts to shed light on the chained entanglements, intersections and enactments of policy and practice, artefacts and humans, including the ways in which such relationships seldom present themselves in an intuitive manner for the analyst (or project participants). A SWaSP framing is attended to as dimensions of doing multiple-scale ethnography, in terms of being positioned as scholars who are mobile across contemporary physical-online spaces, are reflexive about their mobile gaze and who follow individuals, tools and inscriptions as they emerge across online/physical/private/institutional spaces. Where someone is, how and when people meet, what such meetings offer in terms of positionality, opportunities, meaning-making and learning, are riddled with continua and disruptions that not only create analytical and methodological dissonance in mainstream scholarship but, more significantly, emerge as challenges for scientific enquiry by taking onboard the very theoretical and methodological implications of such continua and disruptions.
This article describes our transmethodological practice and the affective space of making and making sense of visual research in community. We purposefully embrace complexity and richness in visual data analysis, rather than seeking to reductively avoid doubt and uncertainty. To do this, we bring multiple ways of seeing together into a collaborative, poly-vocal construction. Our ‘studio’ is designed to be a safe space for risk and creativity. We are at different levels of experience and confidence, but we all learn from each other. Seeing collaboratively depends on translating our ways of reading visual material “out of our heads” and “into our shared space.” In the sense that we love what we are doing, we revel at opening ourselves to new possibilities. In-Progress: Victoria Restler Narrates a Collaborative Seeing Studio Session. Wendy Luttrell leads us into collaging as both metaphor and tools of Collaborative Seeing. We end with a brief reflection.
With a fundamental interest in further developing and specifying the theoretical and ethical framework of Psychology from the Standpoint of the Subject (PSS), the article at hand asks: What is the PSS researcher's position in and responsibility toward society? What does the theoretical concept of the co-researcher, which is so pivotal in this tradition, entail for conceptualizing the relationship between the academic researcher and all those others who participate from different societal positions? Is there a specific, emancipatory contribution the PSS researcher is to make to the production of societal conditions, including the production of knowledge? What is the contribution of the other co-researchers then, and how do they gain from the PSS researcher's labor, in particular her scientific explorations of the world? The article's analyses delve into various versions of understanding and implementing emancipation through psychological co-research, i.e. of how PSS research differently aims at bettering one another's living conditions. First, the original methodology developed in the Berlin context is presented, which can be roughly described as a theoretically informed dialogical exchange between academically trained people. This is secondly followed by a critique of this model, articulated by the Scandinavian Practice Research tradition and mounding in substantial conceptual and methodological developments-in particular of the understanding of the (co-)researcher relationship. Thirdly, it is illustrated that Practice Research instantiated some new ambiguities, by analyzing its methodology of fellow knowledge gaining through the lens of cultural-historical psychology and foremost Stetsenko's texts on the researcher as a transformative activist. Finally, it proposes mutual knowledge-sharing as the primary
This article serves as an introduction to the FQS special issue "Participatory Qualitative Research." In recent years there has been a resurgence of interest in participatory research strategies. The articles in this special issue come from different disciplines. Against the background of concrete empirical research projects, they address numerous conceptual considerations and methodological approaches. After reading the contributions, and engaging with the authors' arguments, we were prompted to focus in particular on those areas in which further work needs to be done. They include, on the one hand, fundamental principles of participatory research, such as democratic-theory considerations, the concept of "safe space," participation issues, and ethical questions. And, on the other hand, we focus on practical research considerations regarding the role and tasks of the various participants; specific methodological approaches; and quality criteria-understood here in the sense of arguments justifying a participatory approach. Our aim is to stimulate a broad discussion that does not focus only on participatory research in the narrower sense. Because participatory methodology poses certain knowledge-and research-related questions in a radical way, it has the potential to draw attention to hitherto neglected areas in qualitative methodology and to stimulate their further development.
How can theoretical psychology develop concepts for analyzing connections between subjective dilemmas in everyday life and contradictions in historical social practice? We discuss this question by analyzing conflicts related to problems in children’s school lives. One frequent conflict is whether school problems should be explored in relation to individual deficits and deviations, family background, how the school is organized, the societal task of education etc. However, such conflicts often become concealed by psychological concepts, which contributes to individualization, categorization and the displacement of problems. We argue that theoretical development of the concept of conflict may support the widespread endeavors to transcend such reductionism by developing contextual and dialectical understandings of personal dilemmas. Through examples from empirical studies, the article illustrates how political conflicts concerning societal institutions (such as schools) form part of both inter-subjective conflicts about common matters and personal conflicts in the conduct of everyday life.
Parental collaboration is both promoted for enhancing children’s performance and criticized for reproducing educational inequality. The issue of parental collaboration thus presents an opportunity to discuss theoretical differences in current debates about education, notably the educational consequences of social background and governmentality. The article emphasizes the conflictual nature of children’s school lives and analyzes the social interplay between the involved subjects, who are connected through their engagement in common matters and concerns. Our analysis challenges approaches inspired by Bourdieu that analyze the social reproduction of inequality in terms of discrepancies between parental style and the culture of the school. It also raises questions about the Foucauldian perspective which regards policies and practices of parental collaboration as means to govern parents. Through a discussion of these analyses, the article shows how different ways of conceptualizing parental collaboration offer different opportunities for organizing collaboration and dealing with the historical problems of the school.
In this article, we discuss issues that are rarely (if ever) talked about in research: experiences of deep insight and inspiration, of meaning-making, of embodied passion and of excitement related to the practice of engaging in qualitative research and of being a qualitative researcher. These are the ‘aha’ moments or ‘eureka’ experiences. Drawing on Frigga Haug’s collective memory work, five individual memories were articulated as text and analysed collectively over a period of six months. By analytically deploying the concept of generativity, we portray the tensions, dynamics and interactions that (co)create aha moments and movements as a way of enacting situated research(er) agency and of challenging the neoliberal instrumentalization of research and researchers. Our aim is to contribute to visualizing and fostering small but powerful steps in innovative, good quality research and bringing desire and passion (back) into research practice.
Based on Critical Psychology from the Standpoint of the Subject the article describes analytical concerns and strategies of critical psychology. In a first step, the development of critical psychologies is located in current discussions on the production of knowledge, and three different typical approaches and major steps toward situated critique as a practice of mutual recognition are delineated. This shift, it is argued, has led to a historically new relevance of critique, and two basic analytical elements of critical research are introduced: Everyday conflictuality as the initiating moment of critique as well as the importance of theory for critical inquiry. On this basis a variety of analytic strategies and concepts are presented which inform Critical Psychology from the Standpoint of the Subject and suggest a constituent move from partial perspectives toward situated generalization.
By 2015, 96% of the entire student body in the Danish public school system must receive his or her education within the regular classrooms, and referrals to segregated special education must be reduced radically. This is the consequence of the so-called ‘Inclusion Law' passed in the Danish parliament in April 2012. The law contains a political ambition that at least 80% of the students in the public school should be proficient in reading and math when measured in national tests, and the percentage of the most proficient students must increase every year. Historically, Denmark's inclusive education is informed by the rights and ethics discourse from The Salamanca Statement. However, this article explores the paradoxical policies of inclusive education in Denmark that seem to lie on a continuum that ranges from Salamanca-inspired, equity-focused inclusion to a more US-inspired, accountability-focused inclusion.
This paper explores cooperation as contradictory and therefore with a constant possibility for conflict. Consequently it is called conflictual cooperation. The notion is presented on the basis of a participatory observation in a control room of a district heating system. In the investigation, cooperation appeared as the continuous reworking of contradictions in the local arrangement of societal conditions. Subjects were distributed and distributed themselves according to social privileges, resources, and dilemmas in cooperation. Here, the subjects’ activities and understandings took form from each other, their dilemmas, and their previous experience. This meant that they had each their perspective on ongoing praxis. Three observations from the collaboration in the control room are presented, one on stabilizing the function of an object, another on standardizing a procedure, and one on regulating who can use what in what way. Contradictions in the observed activity are discussed. It is argued that for the participants the connections of acts appear in such contradictions in cooperation. This conception is discussed in relationship to the notions of practice, as expounded by Bourdieu and MacIntyre and Schatzki. As a contrast a notion of praxis is set up in which actions are reciprocally differentiated under contradictory conditions, and habitualizations, institutionalizations and conflictual cooperation are identified on this basis. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
This article presents the authors’ collaboration with a former gang leader, referred to as X, as part of a research project exploring identity transformation and mo(ve)ments beyond gang engagement. The project is based on a transmethodological approach that involves different embodied researcher positionalities, theoretical engagements, and a merging of diverse research fields. The exploration of the different movements and changes in X’s life is based on, what we call a transmethodological mo(ve)ment ethnography, exploring mo(ve)ments of transformation of identity, engagement and community in the everyday life of X, who is striving to become a good, practicing Muslim. This approach makes it possible to go into depth with key moments of change in a subject’s life and pursue them from different theoretical perspectives by integrating and transgressing concepts, analytical gazes and positionalities. To analyze and understand the former gang leader’s life and process of transformation, we utilize poststructuralist and decolonial theory and integrate these approaches with those of social practice theory and critical psychology. In this article, we examine how we as researchers can transverse different theoretical and embodied positionings, analyzing transmethodology as closely linked to the positioning of the researcher, and ultimately pointing towards an emancipatory form of research practice.
This chapter aims to discuss the contributions of González Rey’s Qualitative Epistemology and constructive-interpretative methodology for research in social sciences and humanities. Firstly, some of the main epistemological problems that have sustained the history of social sciences and humanities are discussed. Secondly, epistemological principles of González Rey’s proposal and the main definitions, characteristics and configurational logic of knowledge production of constructive-interpretative methodology are discussed as a consistent way to advance in the unity between research and professional action. We claim this approach revitalizes science as a living and creative production by considering the researcher as a subject of knowledge construction. Three epistemological principles sustain this proposal: (1) singularity as a legitimate source for scientific knowledge, (2) research as a dialogical process, and (3) the constructive-interpretative character of scientific knowledge. An important feature of this methodological approach is the rupture with the historical dichotomy between “data collection” and “data analysis”. We argue that González Rey’s epistemological and methodological proposal contributes towards a qualitative approach that considers human creativity and emotionality crucial dimensions of scientific construction.
This article discusses theoretical challenges in conceptualising the dialectical relationship between historical conditions and the situated interplay between people in concrete everyday practice. The concept of conflict may help us move beyond tendencies within psychology to separate history and situated practice, structure and activity, and micro- and macroprocesses – and to regard social life as unambiguous or as governed through hegemony. Research on the everyday social life of schools describes societal conflicts about education and how school children deal with unequal conditions when handling the conflictuality of their everyday lives. Analyses of coordination and conflicts between various parties (e.g. children, parents, teachers and psychologists) elucidate connections between intersubjective efforts to make things work in everyday practice and historical struggles related to the school as a social institution. Concepts are required that enable understanding of these processes as historical and political, driven by intersubjectivity related to concrete dilemmas, connected to personal and collaborative conduct of everyday life – processes we term the politics of everyday life. From a social practice perspective, we discuss how to grasp the ways in which people constitute the conditions for each other in a situated interplay in which they deal with common problems and – through these activities – also produce history.
Studies of children’s participation in school illustrate both societal conflicts about the school and how children in school deal with quite unequal conditions when it comes to handling the conflictuality of school life. Analyses of situated interplay, coordination and conflicts between the parties involved in children’s school lives (children, parents, teachers, psychologists, etc.) can elucidate the connections between intersubjective means of making things work in everyday practice, and historical struggles relating to the school as a societal institution. These dynamics reveal general conflicts over education policy, the distribution of responsibility and in which directions to change society. From a social practice perspective, and based on empirical studies of children’s everyday lives, this article discusses conceptual challenges concerning how to grasp the ways persons constitute the conditions for the acting of each other in a situated interplay in which, together, they must deal with shared societal and historical issues and problems.
An investigation of a design project is presented with concepts and theory developed within critical psychology in order to understand the process. Investigating the cooperation of the design of a building allows us to see that the building, its design, and its use constitute common contradictory causes. In their coordinated activities, professionals participate from each of their perspectives with different functions and priorities, and in their acts they must take the contradictions into account. Contradictions as incompatible aspects in things and activities make it difficult to keep the common cause stable. This means that the participants’ cooperation is a continuous attempt to produce stability. They are constantly confronted with the possibility of reorganization, development, and conflict in their activities. Therefore, cooperation is conflictual. The theoretical position is based on the fact that our understanding is reciprocally formed with our local, common activities. The theoretical consequences of the position are explored.
In this chapter, generalization is identified as a subjective process in praxis in which the way praxis is coordinated, the things we deal with in it, and the generalizations develop together. Further, generalizations are regarded as subjective and social at the same time. In this conception, generalizations are about common causes in praxis, and both are concrete as well as contradictory. Moreover, participants have different perspectives on the common causes, which stem from the way they participate in them. The contradictions may play out in different ways in the perspectives. Generalizations are related to concrete conditions in praxis, and as a consequence, our generalizations appear varied in particular ways according to the actual conditions. This theoretical exposition will be elucidated using examples from school life.
This article examines a general question about how we in research develop the knowledge we write about and present as ‘result of research’. It scrutinizes research processes as a social practice, where several parties participate, collaborate and learn from a process where researchers involve themselves in exploring specific problems across societal contexts. In this way, the presented discussions can be seen as a critique of tendencies to approach research as an isolated endeavour, where results are produced by applying special methods and techniques that prevent influence from the social world and, in this way, creating knowledge about the world by ‘leaving it’. The article argues for approaching the development of knowledge as a social practice in itself. Research processes transcend different contexts, involve different perspectives, and the researchers seek to analyse connections in a common world by exploring how an explicit problem is connected to social conditions and interplay, thereby achieving a deeper understanding of the problem. In the article, we build on 25 years of practice research projects and involve a specific project as an example in a general discussion of the development of knowledge. Among other things, this project inspired these thoughts because of the following exchange between a researcher and some professionals from the family centre where we were conducting our research (a residential institution for families and children in trouble).
Cambridge Core - Educational Psychology - Learning and Everyday Life - by Jean Lave
The title “Psychology: Social Self-Understanding on the Reasons for Action in the Conduct of Everyday Life” does not intend to put forward some new type of psychology in addition to those already existing. Instead, it argues that psychology in its entirety, as it has developed historically, needs to put itself under such a motto if it wants to fulfil its function within the scientific community of offering a particular access to our experiences and actions. This simultaneously maintains, ex negativo, that the prevailing psychology is unable to master this task; its research misses human problems of life and is incapable of contributing anything substantial to our knowledge in human and social sciences.
Psychotherapy in Everyday Life shows how clients employ therapy in their daily lives. The varied and extensive efforts involved in this are systematically overlooked in therapy research. The book shines important new light on processes of personal change and learning in practice. More generally speaking, it launches a theory of personhood based on how persons conduct their everyday lives in social practice. This approach and many of the book's findings are of immediate relevance for understanding other fields of expert practice.
The problems most people have in understanding Marx come not only from the complexity of his theories, but also from the frequent changes in the meanings of his concepts. The present article attributes this unusual practice to Marx’s ‘philosophy of internal relations’, which serves as the foundation for his dialectical method, and his use of the process of abstraction (breaking up our internally related world into the ‘parts’ best suited to study it). The ‘flexibility’ found in Marx’s use of language is the linguistic counterpart of the different abstractions he believes necessary in order to capture the complex workings of capitalism. Marx’s dialectical categories, especially ‘contradiction’, are good examples of this process at work.
In this article I argue for grounding psychological theories of persons in relation to structures of social practice. I introduce crucial features of such a theory of persons which is based on critical psychology and invite contributions to its further development. The theory emphasizes that persons are participants involved in personal trajectories in relation to structural arrangements of social practice. It is intended to lead to a richer and worldlier psychology. It also leads to a different understanding of professional psychological practices and of their users. To illuminate this, I present key insights from a study of clients attending therapy. Client changes do not occur only in therapeutic sessions but also in and across the contexts in which these clients live their lives in structures of social practice. In this respect, though, the structural arrangement of secluded sessions with intimate expert strangers significantly affects the mode of working of therapy in the social practice of its clients.
The search for scientific bases for confronting problems of social policy is bound to fail, becuase of the nature of these problems. They are wicked problems, whereas science has developed to deal with tame problems. Policy problems cannot be definitively described. Moreover, in a pluralistic society there is nothing like the undisputable public good; there is no objective definition of equity; policies that respond to social problems cannot be meaningfully correct or false; and it makes no sense to talk about optimal solutions to social problems unless severe qualifications are imposed first. Even worse, there are no solutions in the sense of definitive and objective answers.
Generality and particularity of knowledge
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