Participatory action research and the public sphere

In our (2005) article 'Staying Critical' in the issue of the Educational Action Research Journal commemorating the twentieth anniversary of the publication of 'Becoming Critical', Wilfred Carr and I argued that we had been surprised by the extent to which action research became widespread to the point of faddishness in the years that followed ' not due to our advocacies alone, of course. We were also surprised by the extent to which other more technical approaches to action research had been adopted by many educational action researchers rather than the critical form of action research we had described. Although Wilfred Carr and I did not make the point in quite this way, I believe that some ' perhaps most ' action research no longer aspires to having this critical edge, especially in the bigger sense of social or educational critique aimed at transformation of the way things are. Much of the action research that has proliferated in many parts of the world over the last two decades has not been the vehicle for educational critique we hoped it would be. Instead, some may even have become a vehicle for domesticating students and teachers to conventional forms of schooling.