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CHAPTER FOUR: RESEARCH METHODOLOGY Many of these characteristics are relatable to my research project and reinforce the decision to investigate my research guestion in an action research framework. I explore possibilities of making my research participatory by offering partnership to participants in exploring the research guestion at certain points. Kemmis et al. offer a list of five things that only participatory research can do. One of these is that they claim only “participatory research creates the conditions for practitioners to understand and develop the ways in which practices are conducted ‘from within’ the practice traditions that inform and orient them”. Understanding ‘from within’ is an important element of drama not only for the participants, but also for the facilitator, as both educational and artistic practices contain intuitive, creative and non-rational elements which are born out of impulses from being within the process. To develop practices, these need to be researched from within as well. The relation to social change is a central element of differentiating between two camps of action researchers, the reflective practitioners and the critical theorists. “For the former, action research is an improvement to professional practice at the local, perhaps classroom level, within the capacities of individuals and the situations in which they are working; for the latter, action research is part of a broader agenda of changing education, changing schooling and changing society”.’” The sixth edition of the widely used Research in Education lists seventeen points of criticisms levelled at emancipatory action research collected from a host of authors ranging from it being “elitist while purporting to serve egalitarianism” to it representing a “narrow and particularistic view of emancipation and action research”.°°® My research is based on a socio-political problem that manifests itself in drama in education, namely that the dominant socio-cultural narratives and how our perception of reality is formed remain unexplored in most contemporary drama in education approaches. My research explores how this social problem can be dealt with in drama education, how the combination of two practices can create elements of a methodology that reflect on this problem. My aim is the development of methods and possibilities that raise students’ awareness of social structures through drama lessons that can be used in the wider field of drama education. From this aspect my research can be aligned more with the critical theorist line of action research, as it has an emancipatory aspect in relation to the field and also to some extent towards participants. The constricted scope of the research and its focus on a small element of a huge social problem affiliate it more with the reflective practitioner strand of action research. 554 Kemmis—McTaggart—Nixon: The Action Research Planner, 5. 55 Cohen-Manion-Morrison: Research Methods in Education, 303. 556 Tbid., 304.
