Journal of Curriculum Studies

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Rethinking teacher agency: cybernetics, action

research, and the process-oriented rationality

Sun Young Lee

To cite this article: Sun Young Lee (2021) Rethinking teacher agency: cybernetics, action
research, and the process-oriented rationality, Journal of Curriculum Studies, 53:6, 821-840, DOI:
10.1080/00220272.2020.1858451

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/00220272.2020.1858451

Published online: 06 Jan 2021.

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JOURNAL OF CURRICULUM STUDIES
2021, VOL. 53, NO. 6, 821–840
https://doi.org/10.1080/00220272.2020.1858451

Rethinking teacher agency: cybernetics, action research, and the

process-oriented rationality
Sun Young Lee
Department of Teacher Education, Moyes College of Education, Weber State University, Ogden, UT, USA

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
Teacher agency is often depicted in terms of autonomy, empowerment, Action research; cybernetics;
and participation. This article examines how those democratic visions of teacher empowerment;
teacher agency are (re)constructed during the post-World War Two period participant observation;
research methodology;
when social scientists were eager to find organized procedural reasons. To
education reform
explain this, I historicize the shifted teachers’ role from a ‘participant’ to
a ‘participant observer’ in action research. The analysis focuses on this shift
of teachers’ positionality as embodying cybernetics rationales, which
conceptualized the role of the observer as the agency for systemic change
and knowledge production. The findings show that teachers, who parti­
cipate in action research as teacher-researchers, follow mechanically
applicable rules (e.g., action-oriented methodological principles) while
having freedom to select the targets of the inquiry. Whereas it has
empowered teachers to have an autonomous sense of agency, the empiri­
cal, methodological, and procedural orientation in action research leaves
teachers’ agential roles to be bounded with the self-referencing process to
believe what is seen, rather than to consider the empirical representations
in relation to cultural, historical, and social conditions. The study provides
alternative ways to critically examine an individual’s participation in orga­
nizational systems and reforms, methodocentrism in education research,
and the role of observation for knowledge production.

Introduction
Recent education policy and reform in many countries highlight the role of teacher agency in school-
based curriculum development (Krzychała, 2020; Priestley et al., 2015). As part of the global trend to
construct the ‘instructionally focused education systems’ (Peurach et al., 2019, p. 33), teacher
education has become a new centre of education policy and curriculum reform to pursue excellence
and equity in all students’ educational experiences and outcomes (Cochran-Smith, 2005;
Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development [OECD], 2017). Teacher agency, in this
context, is understood from an ecological perspective (Biesta et al., 2015); it highlights teacher’s
agential role as ‘actors’ to ‘act by means of their environment’ who can interactively execute the
individual efforts ‘in particular, and in a sense, always unique situations’ (Biesta & Tedder, 2007,
p. 137). This temporal, relational, and place-specific notion of teacher agency has directed reformers,
policymakers, and practitioners to take the bottom-up approach for sustainable education change
(Kneyber & Evers, 2015). Now, teacher agency is attributed to a social and professional responsibility

CONTACT Sun Young Lee sunyounglee@weber.edu Department of Teacher Education, Moyes College of Education,
Weber State University, 1351 Edvalson Street, Department #1304, Ogden, UT 84408, USA
This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.
© 2021 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
822 S. Y. LEE

that impacts not only individual students but also the processes and outcomes of the education
system.
If we take a historical perspective, this emphasis on teacher agency sounds similar to the
education reforms of the 1970s-80s. Take action research as an example of the bottom-up move­
ment, which offered an ‘exciting new beginning’ (McKernan, 1991, p. 3) in curriculum development
and teacher education. The importance and contribution of action research came from the shifted
teachers’ role as an active knowledge producer whose participation and self-studies were used to
change classroom practices better than any other prescribed curriculum agendas (Manfra, 2019). The
participatory legacy of action research continues today. Understanding the role of action research
from an ‘ecological ripples perspective’ (Trickett & Beehler, 2017, p. 525), teachers’ agential roles are
considered as the main actor to change the community and the organization, beyond the individual
realms.
At the centre of highlighting teacher agency for education change is a taken-for-granted idea
about the system (Popkewitz et al., 2021; Thoutenhoofd, 2018; Vanderstraeten, 2002). The term
‘system’ is frequently used in multiple levels of education, which has led one to feel hard to think of it
as an entity that impacts the practices in education. The system and its related attributes such as
feedback, process, and model are too commonly used, and we believe them as ‘neutral.’ The
neutrality of the system is translated into ‘general-ability’; it promotes the ways to decontextualize
particular practices in the forms of models, frameworks, or principles that need to be (re)contextua­
lized based on local needs when applied to particular situations. In this neutral, generalized system,
the role of teacher agency is achievable through the ‘process’ (Lee, 2021, p. 159), whose profession is
less concerned about critiquing the conditions that enable certain processes guaranteed or justified.
Being ignored about the conditions that make the particularities of time/space, subjects, and
practices ‘insignificant in the face of universal statements about the child, learning, and best
practices’ (Rüsselbæk Hansen et al., 2015, p. 48), teacher agency functions in a system that auto­
matically and procedurally connects individual actions to organizational change.1
This article asks about the commonsensical notion of the teacher agency, focusing on how the
teacher came to see the teacher-self as the agency for change by relating individual actions with
institutional changes. The study begins with the premise that every practice occurs on the episte­
mological conditions, which engender certain possibilities to think about, see, and act on (Popkewitz,
2009). Teacher agency, as this article will make clear, occurs on the epistemologically competing
condition: On the one side, teacher agency embodies a democratized principle that empowers
teachers’ autonomous role for change; on the other side, teacher agency has been inscribed
reasoning to follow the pre-given methodological rules, which limits teachers’ intellectual freedom
to examine the underlying commitments beyond what is empirically represented. This epistemolo­
gically competing condition puts the teacher in a paradoxical situation; while teacher agency is often
depicted in terms of autonomy, empowerment, and participation, their role as an agent for change is
restricted as embodying the self-referencing processes that emphasize to believe what is seen, not
prepared to think about how the empirical representation is constructed within the cultural,
historical, and social influences.
To explain this, I historicize the emergence and changes of action research as embodying
epistemic possibilities and constraints of cybernetics. The relationship between action research
and cybernetics is examined to show how the idea of an individual’s agency and their participation
in the systemic change become possible on certain epistemological possibilities, which I call the
process-oriented rationality. As part of the historical concerns of the post-World War Two social
sciences to organize the methodologically applicable principles, rather than relying on individual’s
subjective rationality (Heyck, 2015), cybernetics has provided new epistemic possibilities to view
individual’s actions as part of the institutional, organizational, and systemic change. Kurt Lewin, who
is considered as the originator of action research, was a member of the Cybernetics Group that
 JOURNAL OF CURRICULUM STUDIES 823

provided ways to understand individual actions as part of the system and its change (Heims, 1991).
By tracing the less-explored relationship between action research and cybernetics with a focus on
the individual’s agency in a system, the study makes it intelligible how the taken-for-granted idea of
the individual’s agential role in the system not only generates but also omits other trajectories
towards the change.
Teacher agency, which ‘we tend to feel without history’ (Foucault, 1980, p. 139), is a product of the
historically constitutive setting that gives particular conditions of im/possibility. Sharing the con­
cerns about the constructive nature of teacher agency for justice education is limited to follow the
linear, structural, and efficiency-oriented processes as curriculum principle (Lechtenberg, 2020), the
historical analysis of action research raises important questions that education researchers should
ask today: In the apparently neutral notion of teacher agency, what particular possibilities of change
are assumed and ignored? In particular, what has made it possible for one to believe the process,
structure, and method at the centre of practice-based research, and what are the limits of this
process-oriented rationality? To discuss these questions, the following section first explains how
I historicize action research as embodying the epistemic possibilities and constraints of cybernetics.

Teacher agency and their observation as a matter of concern: How to historicize

action research
Historicizing, or ‘a history of the present’ (Foucault, 1977), starts with questions posed in the present
and seeks to show how the less visible or sometimes contradictory past has influenced the truth that
we hold in the present. This article concerns the paradoxical nature of teacher agency today; despite
the widespread expansion of practitioner-directed research and educator empowerment for justice
education, teachers are required to follow the procedural, behavioural, and efficiency-focused
instructional structure, which raises questions about the role of teacher agency. By examining this
current issue through a historical problematization, rather than taking empirical critiques or ideolo­
gical critiques that dominate education research (see Brass & Lynch, 2020), the study seeks to
unsettle the certainties that we have about teacher agency in the present.
I question the notion of teacher agency by thinking about how a teacher came to ‘see’ the
teacher-self as the agency for change by relating individual actions with institutional changes. Now,
we commonly believe that the teacher can see the self. However, this idea of teacher’s seeing the self
was something impossible to think of, for example, for those who were teaching at the turn of the
twentieth century. Of course, the Cartesian scheme of the modern self-awareness has guided
teachers to think about the self both as ‘subject-who-reflects and object-who-is-reflected-upon
simultaneously’ (Fendler, 2003, p. 17) in the history of teacher education. Yet, this type of teacher
reflection for self-awareness neither necessarily required the empirically justified evidence as a way
to see and think of the self, nor regarded the teacher as a component of the organic system whose
observation, interpretation, and reports reflexively constitute both the self and the system in the
society. Despite the historical presence and use of observation for teacher training, it is pretty recent
to think of the teacher able to see the teacher-self and their teaching practice as an object of
observation by systematically connecting the observing practice to teacher development and
organizational, social changes (Lee, 2021).
The relationship among the observation, the agency, and the systemic development is explored
by historicizing the emergence and changes of action research as embodying cybernetics rationale
that emphasizes both democratic and systematic principles. Cybernetics refers to self-regulating
mechanisms that operate through the systems of control and communication, according to Norbert
Wiener (1948) who first publicly used this term. It provided the epistemic implications to include the
observer as part of the system whose action necessarily entails reflexivity. As Hayles (1999) pointed
out, cyberneticians’ theorization of the observer’s perceptions that ‘construct reality’ (p. 143), not
passively perceive it, provided the ways to understand the society as an autopoietic system that
824 S. Y. LEE

‘produces the components that produce its organization’ (p. 141). The observing self, who is not
merely representing but also intervening the reality through the very act of observation, becomes
the agency for changes. It is because their visualization, perception, interpretation, engagement, or
development are not solely individual but their interactions and transformations in the system
continuously regenerate the network of processes that produce the reality in the very process of
constituting the agency themselves.
Teacher agency, in this regard, is closely related to their role as a ‘participant observer,’ whose
observing practice contributes to changes in the system which the observing action is already part
of. In this article, the participatory role of teacher agency is examined in the context of action
research, focusing on the teacher’s changed position from a ‘participant’ to a ‘participant observer’
in action research. The teacher as a participant observer is directed to see and think of the teacher-
self as an origin of change whose actions and outcomes should be re-located back. This idea that
the teacher-self could be seen, even the inside of the teacher thinking, has provided the current
ways to develop teachers systematically, for example, by using the observation data as information
and evidence for constructive feedback to inform the following actions (Kelly et al., 2020); and for
this systematic change, the participation and collaboration of multiple agents are emphasized
(Hayes & Lillenstein, 2015). However, the participatory rationale embedded in contemporary
education reforms is framed and produced through the cybernetics thinking that provided the
epistemic conditions to value the self-referencing system and its representational truth. By point­
ing this out, I make it intelligible how action research as a science for knowledge democracy
(Feldman & Rowell, 2019) became possible through socio-technical entanglements (see Stephens
et al., 2009). That is, education reforms and research have linked the social, humanistic, and
emancipatory nature with the technical, mechanical, and process-oriented rationality, which is
often regarded as separate and not much questioned its binary distinction. The participatory role
of the agency in education embodies democratic values as well as technical elements that work
simultaneously.
To be clear, this article is not historiography of action research that searches for its origin and
evolutionary development, or to guide teachers to better use systems analysis to understand the
problems of practice through action research (for this, see, e.g., Wood & Butt, 2014). Rather, my
interests in action research are to examine its epistemic possibilities and constraints that can
exemplify how we came to have the idea that systematic change could be made through individual’s
autonomous and participatory agential roles along with democratic and collaborative values. As
researchers identified, teacher autonomy is key for the success of action research, who can use the
methods of science for creating democracy in the classroom (Noffke, 1990; Stapleton, 2018). In this
article, I turn this ideal of teacher autonomy for democratic visions in education as a product of the
historically constitutive setting that gives particular conditions of im/possibility. This endeavour will
not culminate in making an inductive generalization from empirical data. Instead, my effort is to
make comprehensible how the conventional concept of teacher agency and its related notions like
teacher autonomy, teacher empowerment, teacher as a researcher, and teacher participation are
functioning to order and regulate what the teacher should be (Popkewitz, 2009). By taking this
approach, I articulate how the participatory rationales embedded in action research, and its knowl­
edge production and professionalization are more than empowering teachers with autonomy; these
are framed and produced through the systems of reasoning that make the teacher as a participant
and a researcher.
The article is organized as follows. First, I historically locate action research as a post-World War
Two social science, which gives a hint to connect the emergence of action research with the
invention of cybernetics. In the following section, I discuss action research in education reform
and teacher education of the 1950s and the 1970s-80s, focusing on the changes of the teacher
position in action research from a ‘participant’ to a ‘participant observer.’ Then, I inside out action
research into its connection to cybernetics, to highlight the epistemic implications of understanding
the role of the participant observer in the theory of change and knowledge production. It is followed
 JOURNAL OF CURRICULUM STUDIES 825

by the discussion on how action research has contributed to teacher agency, who has the freedom to
select the objects of action research while being inscribed the self-referential methodological
certainty that values to believe what is empirically seen and represented as a way to generate the
truth, knowledge, and theory. It concludes with a suggestion to historicize the notion of ‘research’ in
research-based education reform and policy today. By historically theorizing the democratic ideal of
action research, the study contributes to critical conversations on how the mutually reinforcing
values of science, democracy, and education continue today through the empirically-oriented
methodological principles, along with the languages of participation, autonomy, and empowerment.

The practical concerns of action research as a post-World War II social science

According to Kurt Lewin, who originally suggested the idea of action research (Adelman, 1993),
action research is defined as ‘a comparative research on the conditions and effects of various forms
of social action and research leading to social action’ (Lewin, 1946, p. 35). This link between ‘research’
and ‘social action’ was related to the practical nature of social science that Lewin valued. Born in
Prussia and moved to the United States during the interwar period, Lewin had a deep sensitivity and
interest in social problems, particularly the minority issues in the U.S. (Rogers, 1994).2 He believed
that the research that produces nothing but a book is not sufficient; instead, the process and
outcomes of the research should have implications for social actions. For this reason, Lewin
emphasized the training of social scientists to handle ‘scientific problems’ who are ‘equipped for
the delicate task of building productive, hard-hitting teams with practitioners’ (Lewin, 1946, p. 42).
To prioritize the practical job of action research, what Lewin (1946) suggested was the process of
action research as ‘a circle of planning, action, and reconnaissance or fact-finding about the result of
the action’ (p. 38); and this process was to help practitioners’ actions in the practice, not only to guide
the social scientists’ research work. As Cartwright and Zander (1953)—Lewin’s students—recalled, it
was presumed that offering the process of action research would serve as the means of systematic
enquiry, in which all participants could be engaged in the quest for greater effectiveness through
democratic participation. It aimed to re-educate practitioners by involving them in the processes of
effective change, particularly to increase their self-perceptions that would enable individuals to
overcome inner resistance against the change (Bargal, 2006). The practitioners’ democratic partici­
pation as the means of systematic enquiry was considered as an important process of effectuating
the change, which would lead to the institutional change through the individual’s participation,
research, and re-education.
One of the forgotten histories regarding action research is that Kurt Lewin was a member of the
Cybernetics Group (Heims, 1991). The Group met in a series of meetings at the Macys Conferences on
Cybernetics between 1946 to 1953 in the United States. Lewin’s contribution to this group was to
add the interdisciplinary character of the meetings, by combining psychology with sociology as
a new direction of human science research. Questioning the behaviourist assumptions in experi­
mental psychology that searched for the theory of learning through the relation of stimulus-
response and individual’s behaviour, Lewin suggested considering ‘group’ as a unit of change,
which paved the ways of social psychology as a discipline (Lewin, 1947).3 Although Lewin’s sudden
death of a heart attack made him contribute to the Cybernetics Group only for a short period of time,
his involvement signals the possibility to re-visit the action research as a ‘Cold War social science’
(Solovey & Cravens, 2012).
The Cold War social science is characterized as its rationalization of research methodologies and
the development of action-oriented initiatives (Solovey & Cravens, 2012). Behind the national and
philanthropic supports for social science research were the political contexts of the Cold War United
States, which enabled social researchers to search for the ‘open mind’ (Cohen-Cole, 2014) as a unique
hallmark of American virtue. This is because the open mind would serve as American democratic
solutions to the threats to the community system; that is, as a way to offer social cohesion while
826 S. Y. LEE

respecting ‘individuality, tolerance of difference, appreciation of pluralism, and appreciation of

freedom of thought, unlike the totalitarian or authoritarian societies’ (Cohen-Cole, 2014, p. 2).
It is within this political, historical, and social context that Lewin suggested action research as
mutually reinforcing values of science, democracy, and education (Argyris et al., 1985). Action
research’s democratic values to engage participants in scientific inquiry were the reflection of
what Erickson et al. (2013) termed the ‘Cold War rationality’ that reconceptualized human reason
in terms of making the most efficient decisions. After watching the irrational human behaviours that
had resulted in disastrous events during World War Two, social scientists came to doubt human
reason. The Cold War social scientists formulated the decision-making process into simple but
sequential steps, which led one to understand the processes of decision making in the forms of
algorithms, that is, through step-by-step procedures. As historian of science Heyck (2015) succinctly
articulated, social scientists of that time were ‘as optimistic about the power of organized reason as
they were pessimistic about the overall rationality of the individual human’ (p. 138).
The process of action research was a general model of the organized use of rational thought
(Flood, 2010). Despite a variety of specific processes of action research, what they commonly
pursued was the ‘unity in structure’ (Flood, 2010, p. 272). For example, if the individuals continuously
follow the cycles of plan-act-observe-reflect, the qualitative changes are likely to occur through the
process of action research (Lomax, 1989; Rowland, 1988). Moreover, if the cycles of action research
become the spiral process of ‘planning, acting, observing systematically, reflecting and returning to
the next planning strategy’ (Burton, 1989, p. 71), the individuals not only contribute to research but
also bring changes into social actions.
This practical nature of action research has caught education researchers’ attentions to re-educate
teachers with the action-oriented methodological principles; however, equipping teachers with
research methodologies, as a way of democratizing the research and empowering the agency for
change, leaves the questions of teacher’s role as a participant in research and change for social
actions in and beyond the classroom. To build this argument, in the following section, I look into the
adoptions and changes of action research in teacher education.

Action research in teacher education: Teacher from a ‘participant’ to a ‘participant

observer’
One of the biggest contributions action research has made to education reform is that it has
democratized the research, so teachers can have the agency for changing their own practices in
the classroom. Teacher educators and curriculum reformers in the 1950s quickly adopted action
research, seeing its potential to re-educate teachers. The re-education of teachers focused on
providing the democratized methodological structure of action research, which teachers could use
for their own research by following the processes of problem identification, problem analysis,
formulating hypothesis, experimentation and action, and evaluation (Taba & Noel, 1957).
While those steps were to engage teachers in action research, there was a concern that ‘teachers
may not have seen all the dimensions of their problems’ (Taba & Noel, 1957, p. 12). In Shumsky
(1962)’s terms, the teacher, doing research in their own classroom, ‘does not see himself as an
observer, but rather as a participant’ (p. 138; emphasis added). This incomplete role as an observer of
the teacher-researcher came from a teacher’s unique position in action research; teachers see
classroom practice as a potential problem for research purpose, while being concerned with the
meaningful significance to the learner in the classroom. Teacher’s dual position in action research
had led teacher educators to believe that teachers could ‘not state their concerns and the conditions
that surround them fully enough’ (Taba & Noel, 1957, p. 12), which required external supports, for
example, a curriculum consultant who could support teachers to fully see the problems of the
practice:
 JOURNAL OF CURRICULUM STUDIES 827

It may be extremely difficult for the teacher-researcher to understand the causes of his frustration, especially
since he is emotionally involved in the situation. The consultant should help the teacher-researcher determine
where the root of his difficulty lies. (Shumsky & Mukerji, 1962, p. 86)

Despite action research’s promise to democratize and empower the research process, the perpetu­
ated views on the teacher as a practitioner remained in understanding teachers’ role as a participant,
rather than fully taking the researcher role in action research.
The various concerns regarding action research had made it in decline and under attack by the
end of the 1950s (McKernan, 1991). Many researchers related the devaluation of action research with
the methodologically poor and unscientific approach (Hodgkinson, 1957), and the postwar triumph
of statistical testing and experimental psychology in the United States (Danziger, 1990). Practitioners,
including teachers, also questioned whether action research has helped them improve school
practice (Kemmis, 1985/1987).
However, the practical nature of action research has caught again teacher educators’ attention in
the 1980s. Teacher education programmes in the United States, including University of Florida,
University of Pennsylvania, University of Houston, and University of Wisconsin-Madison, adopted
action research as part of the new orientation of pre-service teacher training (Clift et al., 1990; Ross,
1987; Zeichner & Gore, 1999). The new focus was to see the teaching not only as the sites of practice
but also as the potential for producing theory, by asking teachers to see their own teaching practice
as a place to develop the theory on practice.
In a broad sense, the revival of action research was part of the teacher research movement in the
1970s and 1980s (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 1999), which changed the concerns of teacher education
from a ‘teacher training’ problem to a ‘teacher learning’ problem (Cochran-Smith, 2005). The teacher,
taking the roles not only as an educator but also as a researcher and learner, was trained to have an
‘ethnographic character’ (McKernan, 1991, p. 63) as a professional, who can use qualitative research
methodologies for observing, analysing, interpreting, and changing the problems of practice in the
classroom. This was an enquiry approach to teacher education, which enabled the university-based
teacher education programmes to provide critical seminars on campus (Zeichner, 1981). It asked pre-
service teachers to bring what they observed, noticed, and experienced in the elementary or
secondary classroom into the university seminar. It was pre-service teachers’ observation and
experience that were used as knowledge to develop the professional skills, which Frank (1999)
termed this new teacher education trend as developing the ‘reflective practice through ethnogra­
phy’ (p. 66).
Teachers with ‘ethnographic eyes’ (Jennings, 1998, p. 13) observed their teaching practice (even
teacher-self), as a target of observation, reflection, and change, guided by the systematic process of
action research. This type of teacher observation was different from what Shumsky (1962) earlier
viewed teachers’ engagement in action research as a ‘participant’ (p. 138). In opposition, with the
support of the ethnographic methods, not the external human supports like curriculum consultants,
teachers were able to develop as ‘reflective, questioning, investigative, and flexible teachers’
(Andrew & Teitelbaum, 1983, p. 233). What characterizes this change is the teacher as an autono­
mous agent who is empowered to see, reflect, and change; it is the teacher-self who conducts action
research with autonomy and empowerment.
How can we explain this shift in the practices of observation of the teacher-researcher? To be
more specific, how can we understand the shift of the teacher’s role in action research from
a participant—who was not able to state the problems of practice fully enough because of their
emotional engagement in the practices—to a teacher-researcher who can fully observe, reflect, and
change the problems of practices through the systematic process of action research? It needs to be
explained by focusing on the conceptual shift from the observer-participant split into the participant
observer, which provided important methodological and epistemological insights for pre-service
teachers to engage in classroom practice both as an educator and a researcher. To explain this, in the
828 S. Y. LEE

following section, I inside out action research as embodying cybernetics rationale, which theorized
an individual’s agential role as a participant observer whose observing practice, and its representa­
tion and interpretation as part of and contribution to ongoing change.

Action research as a cybernetics system: Conceptualizing the participant observer

and their agential roles
We do not see what we do not see, and what we do not see does not exist.
(Maturana & Varela, 1992, p. 242)
As noted previously, teachers’ role in the earlier action research was based upon an assumptive split
between a teacher as a ‘participant’ and an external professional as an ‘observer.’ It relied on
a positivistic assumption that the integration of different perspectives would lead the teacher to
see and state the conditions fully enough to identify the problems in the classroom. Here, the
observing practice was considered ‘indisputable’; that is, what is observed functions as the basis for
confirming the problems in the practice, the process of action research, and the production of new
knowledge for future actions, which didn’t question the role of the observer.
This section outlines how this positivistic view on observation has changed by pointing out the
conditions that allowed teachers to shift their role in action research from a ‘participant’ (who is
insider to the system and distinguished from the outsider observer) to a ‘participant observer’ (who is
both insider and outsider as part of the system). For this, I look into cybernetician’s theorization of
observation through three stages: (1) Recognizing the observer’s positionality in a system; (2)
observation and feedback as a self-referencing system of change; and (3) observer’s autonomy
and responsibility as the agency. Building upon this, I point out how the notion of a ‘participant
observer’ has provided new epistemological and methodological possibilities in action research.

Recognizing the observer’s positionality in a system and knowledge production

According to Katherine Hayles (1999), it was cyberneticians who first theorized the common
practices of observation in terms of knowledge production. Cybernetics was originally used to
refer to self-regulating mechanisms in the animal and machine that operate through the systems
of control and communication (Wiener, 1948). Gradually adopted to social systems (see, e.g.,
Luhmann, 1977), cybernetics provided the ways to understand the human organization as a self-
evolving system, in which changes happen through its components, sub-systems, and surrounding
environments as well as the interactions among them. This new orientation of the human organiza­
tion as a self-evolving system was made possible by recognizing the epistemic implications to
include the observer as part of the system whose act necessarily entails reflexivity. That is, theorizing
the observer’s perceptions that construct reality, rather than passively perceive it, cybernetics
provided the ways to understand the human organization as an autopoietic system that ‘produces
the components that produce its organization’ (Hayles, 1999, p. 141).
Concerning the autopoietic system that changes through the knowledge about itself, observation
and its reflexivity were the key methods for knowledge production (Zehetmeier et al., 2015). The idea
to include the observer as part of the system and its knowledge production was first suggested by
Heinz Von Foerster (1972/2003), who differentiated first-order cybernetics and second-order cyber­
netics. According to his distinction, first-order cybernetics was the ‘observed systems,’
whereas second-order cybernetics refers to the ‘observing system’ (Von Foerster, 2003, p. 286).
What distinguished second-order cybernetics from first-order cybernetics was its need for ‘a theory
of observer’ (Von Foerster, 1972/2003). In Notes on an Epistemology for Living Things, Von Foerster
(1972/2003) raised questions about ‘an objective description of the world’ in a classical concept of
science, which didn’t recognize the ‘subjects’ (p. 247) as part of knowledge production. Instead, he
 JOURNAL OF CURRICULUM STUDIES 829

suggested an ‘observer’ as a subject be accounted for ‘the truism’ in that ‘a description (of the
universe) implies one who describes it (observes it)’ (p. 247):

(i) Observations are not absolute but relative to an observer’s point of view (i.e., his coordinate
system: Einstein);
(ii) Observations affect the observed so as to obliterate the observer’s hope for prediction (i.e., his
uncertainty is absolute: Heisenberg).

What Von Foerster (1972/2003) suggested was, first, to include the observer as part of knowledge
production and second, to consider observer’s role as subjects whose perspectives, experiences, and
hopes affect what are observed, which questioned the idea that the observer who could objectively
see and represent, and articulate the reality. This recognition of the observer and their interpretive
role in a system enabled cyberneticians to question the notion of certainty (Hayles, 1999); this was
rendered by reconceptualizing the feedback in the operation of the system, which gives an observer
more authority to participate in the process of knowledge production.

Observation and feedback: Self-referencing system of change and knowledge production

Cyberneticians have elaborated two types of feedback; one is known as ‘negative feedback’ to
balance the system and the other as ‘positive feedback’ to amplify the system (Flood, 2010). When
Norbert Wiener (1948) first used the term cybernetics as ‘circular causal and feedback mechanisms,’
the feedback meant the circularity of input and output to sustain the homoeostatic status of the
system. A famous example is a thermostatically controlled heating system, in which the difference
between the specified pre-set temperature and actual room temperate makes the running of the
heating system. In this system that operates through negative feedback, it does not consider the
interpretive role of an observer in the production of knowledge.
The function of positive feedback, on the contrary, re-formulated the function of feedback in
a self-generative way. As a cultural anthropologist and a member of the Cybernetics Group Margaret
Mead described, feedback not only functions in a closed system to run it; feedback also makes the
system changed by providing information on the effects of system operating (Brand et al., 1976). In
opposition to the negative feedback that the recursive input-output runs the homoeostatic system,
the positive feedback is used to ‘change the system itself’ by recognizing the existence of an
observer in a system that already makes changes in the operation of the system. Here, it needs to
be reminded that Von Foerster (2003) distinguished second-order cybernetics as an ‘observing
system’ from first-order cybernetics as an ‘observed system.’ In an ‘observing system,’ the role of
observation is counted as part of knowledge production, contributing to the changes of a system in
a self-reflexive and self-productive way. The self-productivity of observation implies that the obser­
vation continuously produces the constituents and components of the system, which becomes the
system itself while the observer participates in the operations and productive processes of the system.
The self-productivity of observation can explain how the autopoietic system operates. When
Chilean biologist Humberto Maturana was invited by Von Foerster to a conference at the University
of Illinois Urbana Champaign in 1969, Maturana unveiled his ideas about treating cognition as
a biological phenomenon in the name of autopoiesis system. Originally suggested as a biological
concept, what Maturana attempted was to define living systems not as objects of observation and
description, nor even as in interacting systems, but as self-contained unities whose only reference is
to themselves (Maturana & Varela, 1972/1980). This autonomous, self-referring, and self-constructing
system, in Maturana (1993)’s terms autopoietic systems, indicated the generation of the domains of
interaction among the systems, which is later used to understand how language, description, and
thinking work through the systems theory.
What is important for the purpose of this article is that the self-referentiality of observation makes
the observer in an ongoing process of change; that is, through the recursive interactions and
830 S. Y. LEE

transformations, the observer continuously realizes and regenerates the processes and relations that
produce the observer and that constitutes the system. In this self-referential system, the observer
and the system are inseparable. As Maturana and Varela (1972/1980) articulated, once an observer is
perceived ‘as a domain of interactions with representations of interactions’ in a system, ‘the system
operates as an observer’ (p. 121), since the domain of ‘such recursive interaction’ with ‘its own states’
is infinite in principle unless autopoiesis is lost.
This self-referentiality and ontogeny of observation have shifted the conception of reflexivity
from personality to positionality (Hayles, 1999). In the Freudian concept of the self, for example,
the reflexivity orients the person to search for personality by looking at their life history
(McAdams, 1996). In the contexts of cybernetics, the observer generates the cognitive reality
as a target of reflection, constructed through the observer’s eyes and interpretation; that is,
through the very practice of observation at the moment. The cognitive reality, which is una­
voidably ‘related to the observer’ (Maturana & Varela, 1972/1980, p. 121), locates the observing-
self in relation to the reality observed, and this process emphasizes the observation and
representation of the present moment, rather than making relations to the past. In this inter-
related and inseparable function of the observing-self and the reality observed, the observers not
only see the system, but they also look into the observer-self who is already part of the system.
Through the continual process of seeing between what is observed and the observing-self, the
observer automatically connects the observing practice with the reflection, which continues over
time.

Observer’s autonomy and responsibility as agency: ‘Process’ and ‘participation’ as a new

theory of change
It is this interactive process that makes the observation and the reflection ‘structurally plastic’
(Maturana & Varela, 1972/1980, p. 29). What is important for the discussion of the revival of action
research in teacher education is that observation does not mean that the observer remains separate
from what is being observed; instead, the observer can observe only because the observer is
structurally coupled to the phenomenon that the observer sees. The conception of ‘structural
coupling’ reformulates the idea of change, in that the ‘environment does not specify the adaptive
changes that will occur’ (Maturana & Varela, 1972/1980, p. 135), like the behaviourist psychology that
theorized the learning process as stimulus and response. Instead, the shifted foci are in the relations
of components to the environment or other components within the environment, and those
processes become the agency of change.
What makes the ‘structural coupling’ significant for the discussion of action research is that it
allows the self to entangle the observation, reflection, feedback, knowledge production, and change
through the mode of self-reflexivity. The observer now has ‘autonomy’ (Von Foerster, 2003, p. 225), in
the sense that he or she could ‘see’ the purposes, assumptions, and frameworks that enable them to
observe what was invisible so far but affecting the visible. Whereas first-order cybernetics only
allowed the observers to see and enter the system by ‘stipulating the system’s purpose,’ second-
order cybernetics enabled the observers to enter the system by ‘stipulating his own purpose’
(emphasis original in Von Foerster, 2003, p. 286). Within the interactively open but organizationally
closed system of second-order cybernetics (Maturana, 1981), the observers not only see the system
apparently external to them but also the internal systems of observers. The ‘structural coupling’ blurs
the boundary between the external world and internal self, since the observation not only changes
the world observed but also the observing self.
Expanded to social ethics, the autonomy of observation gives the observer the social responsi­
bility for the actions. This is because the observer is not external to the world observed, but
participating in it; that is, as a participant observer. Once first-order (observed system) and second-
order (observing system) are recognized through the processes of observation, which affects the
observing practice as part of the observed system, and when the observer is able to stipulate their
 JOURNAL OF CURRICULUM STUDIES 831

own purpose with autonomy, he or she has the capability not to ‘obey orders’ as being ‘responsible’
(Von Foerster, 2003, p. 286). This ethical significance makes the observer as part of the system not
only to smoothly move but also to change the system as the agency.
This is how I connect cybernetics with the revival of action research in teacher education of the
1970s-80s. As a participant observer in action research, the teacher’s observing practice is already
part of changing the system through the very practice of observation. The recognition of observer’s
existence and their interpretive role in a system’s operation and change helps understand how
teacher-researchers learn the ways to see the teacher-self by looking at those apparently external to
the teacher-self (e.g., students’ behaviours or outcomes, classroom management). By making intel­
ligible the interactive processes of teaching and learning as the target of analysis in action research,
teachers are instructed to see the teacher assumptions, which were invisible so far but actually
functioning in their influence on the other problems of practice. That is, teachers are trained to see
the teacher-self through the mediation of the non-teacher-self.
It leads one to question what it means for the teacher to have the agency with autonomy, which is
a grounding of action research. The common idea of a teacher as an autonomous agent is depicted
as those who are empowered to change through the process of action research; that is, who can
figure out the problems of practice, reflect on it, and creates and implements future plans for change.
However, as discussed in this section, the autonomous role of human agency is bounded within the
autopoietic system, which maintains the interactively open but organizationally closed system
(Maturana, 1981) through self-referential and self-producing processes. In this system, teacher
agency does not see the systematic conditions that enable them to see what is observed in particular
ways because their observation, reflection, and interpretation are directed to the ‘inside’ of the
teacher-self through observing the system apparently external to teacher-self; and, this happens by
empirically searching for evidence to support teacher-researchers’ action research. It raises questions
about what kinds of change are assumed in teacher agency in action research. In the following
section, I discuss how the democratized scientific principles in action research constitute the teacher
as a subject who is trained to follow the self-referential and self-producing methodological rigour
but left without understanding how the teacher is made to see within the historical and cultural
conditions.

Teacher-Researcher with the self-referencing methodological rigour: Democratized

scientific principles of action research as socio-technical entanglements
Cybernetics has provided new insights on the vision as rationality for knowledge production (Heims,
1991). One of these epistemic implications was the constitution of a participant observer in a system.
With an understanding that the observing practice is structurally coupled with the observed system,
and the observation itself is already part of changing the system, we now believe that the observer
(e.g., teacher-researcher) cannot be separated from the system observed, which has a significant
implication for the democratic dimensions of action research.
Action research was part of the social, critical, and interpretive turn in teacher education, which
provoked the teacher research movement and enquiry-based teacher education to prepare teachers
with ethnographic methodologies (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 1999). While this new orientation raised
questions about the positivistic ground of knowledge production by calling for a teacher’s role as
a reflective practitioner and researcher, it assumed the certainty of research methodology and
methodological rigour. In this section, I discuss how the democratized scientific principles of action
research are based upon the certainty of technical rationality, the very view that it seems against.
I develop this argument through three steps; (1) teachers’ searching for the self by observing the
non-self, (2) the temporal dimensions of action research and its paradox, and (3) the limits of self-
referencing methodological rigour that leads teachers to believe what is empirically seen as the
groundings of truth. Through this, I explain how the social, humanistic, participatory, emancipatory,
832 S. Y. LEE

and autonomous nature of action research is assembled with the technical, mechanical, and process-
oriented rationality, whose distinction is often taken for granted and not much questioned so far.

Searching for the self by observing the non-self

When action research was revived in curriculum reform and teacher education in the 1980s, its focus
was on the systematic self-study (Stenhouse, 1975) or self-evaluation (Kemmis, 1985/1987), directing
teacher’s observation as a central point of systematic change. The observation in action research,
either in the form of self-observation or collaborative observation, aimed at orienting teachers to see
their teaching as a target of change for making a better future. For example, collaborative aspect in
action research was not only for a deeper understanding of the task and children by adding the input
of different perspectives. The ‘valuable alternative views and observation’ from others were used as
information of ‘most of all myself [teacher-self]’ in the form of ‘reflexivity’ (Burton, 1989, p. 71).
Teachers searched for the self by observing the non-self. Apparently, the general steps of action
research—plan, act, fact-finding (Lewin, 1946)—do not ask teachers to see the self. The definition of
action research, given by Kemmis and McTaggart (1998), also seems not to designate the self as
a component or product of action research, since it aims to improve the practitioner’s own social or
educational practices, their understanding of these practices, and the situations in which the
practices are carried out. In this sense, action research appeared more to focus on understanding
and improving the practices rather than the teacher-self.
However, the outward inquiry of action research directed teachers to re-locate the processes and
results of action research into the inward inquiry in search of the self. The observation was a process
for ‘reciprocal relation’ (Rowland, 1988, p. 64) between awareness of ‘the learning of others’ and
teacher-researcher’s ‘own learning,’ enabling teachers to use what is observed as information to
connect the outside with the inside of the teacher-self. As teacher-researcher Rowland (1988)
reported, the conduct of action research as a classroom inquiry enabled the teacher to come to ‘a
number of conclusions of learning, not only children’s learning but also my own,’ for indeed ‘I have
learned a great deal about myself’ (p. 64). The practice of ‘observing children (or other teachers)’
reminded the teacher of ‘my own past and present experience’ of learning, which eventually led
them to have a ‘new understanding of experience’ (p. 64).
Teachers’ eyes became a site to see and change the inner self that was visualized through the
processes and outcomes of observing the non-self. The emphasis on the systematic self-study
rendered teachers to have the habits of self-monitoring (Gore & Zeichner, 1991), which empowered
teachers to have autonomous professional skills through self-study and self-evaluation (Noffke,
1990). Unlike other types of social science research, teacher-researchers were directed to find and
change the self-awareness. This orientation of action research towards self-monitoring and self-
development was made possible based upon a particular temporality that enabled teachers to see
the present for the future change; that is, teachers’ seeing of my teaching as a reference point of
change enabled them to be in an ongoing process for professional development. In the following,
I discuss how temporal dimensions of action research have inscribed a paradoxical nature of
development—to look at the past to develop for the future—as a major rationale to make the
teacher an autonomous agency for systematic change.

Temporal dimensions of action research: The paradox of teacher reflection to look at the
past for the future
As indicated earlier, the virtue of action research as a tool for professional development was to use its
steps and cycles as the spiral process for ‘a continuum of ongoing experience’ (Rowland, 1988, p. 64).
One cycle of action research (e.g., plan-act-observe-reflect) does not end there; the previous cycle of
action research is to be used as a new beginning of the following cycle, directing the intervals
between the continual cycles of action research as a space for the concurrence of research and
 JOURNAL OF CURRICULUM STUDIES 833

development of teachers (Jacullo-Noto, 1984). The strategies in the following cycles, such as ‘redefine
problem,’ ‘new hypotheses,’ or ‘revise action plan,’ exemplify how the intervals are used as
a developmental strategy to lead teachers to an ongoing process of change.
To spiral the present cycle into the next cycles of action research, teacher-researchers conduct the
evaluative activity on the actions of the current cycle (Kemmis, 1985/1987; Lomax, 1989), which is
termed as teacher reflection. Teacher reflection at the intervals of the cycles directs teacher-
researchers to find the ‘failures’ (Ebbutt, 1985, p. 165) of the actions, which visualizes the gap
between the problematic present and the desirable future. In this sense, how the teacher-
researcher connects the present to the future entails a particular temporality; the finding and
correction of the failures or errors in the present will lead to a better future. This particular way of
thinking about the future has been taken-for-granted in teacher education to think about change,
development, and the future; that is, the actions in the past become the object of reflection to
produce authentic knowledge for making the future. This temporality has guided the teacher to
become a ‘self-monitoring teacher-researcher’ by ‘carefully reflecting on actions’ (McKernan,
1991, p. 18).
At the centre of this productive function of teacher reflection is the observation that provides
teachers with an agential role as reflective practitioners. According to Schön (1983, 1987), who
famously developed the concept of ‘theory-in-practice’ in opposition to ‘theory-on-practice,’
a teacher as a reflective practitioner must be ‘skilled at describing what he [sic] observes’ (Schön,
1987, p. 322). Rather than applying the theories that are ‘simplified models of experience’ and that
have ‘time-lapse’ between the time when the theory is made and the time when the theory is
applied, the ‘effective theory of practice’ is to be created and organized by the practitioners ‘under
real-time conditions’ (Argyris & Schön, 1974, p. 157):

. . . developing one’s own continuing theory of practice under real-time conditions [. . .] means that the profes­
sional must learn to develop micro-theories of action that, when organized into patterns, represent an effective
theory of practice.

The effective theory of practice that the teachers are expected to develop is to see and find the
‘patterns’ of the practice. This is also what Joseph Schwab suggested as an art of eclectic in his series
of articles on the practical (Schwab, 1969, 1971, 1973).4 What they commonly point out is the
questioning of the theory as bodies of knowledge to be perfectly applicable to practical problems.
Instead, the information, knowledge, and decisions that are generated by teachers’ observation and
reflection should become a new ground to create a theory of practice, which is to organize the
patterns—the commonalities of the practices.
To find the effective theory of practice, teachers are directed to see their own actions through the
‘time element’ (Issac & Ashcroft, 1988, p. 86), which produces a paradoxical way of thinking about the
practice. According to Noffke (1999), teachers’ observation and reflection in action research have
enabled them to see their practice as ‘always partially correct’ and ‘partially in need of revision’ (p. 5).
In a temporal sense, action research directs teachers to see the actions in the past or present as
partially problematic as well as the potential to be improved in the future. The self-referencing
process of action research, which begins from personalized questions and whose findings should be
back to improve the practices (Linter, 1989), has empowered teachers to see, research, and change
the practices as an action researcher; yet, in this process, paradoxical reasoning is inscribed for
teacher-researchers to see the practice both as a problem and potential for the future.
The ‘ethnographic character’ (McKernan, 1991, p. 63) of action research brings into a twofold goal,
which is inseparable; for the teacher-researcher to take on the role of a participant to educate the
students in the classroom while inquiring about the practices like an ethnographic researcher. This
notion of the teacher as a researcher has been intertwined with the goal for professional develop­
ment in teacher education. Viewing the teaching practice as a potential to produce the theory, rather
than applying the pre-made theories, teacher education programmes had been re-designed to
834 S. Y. LEE

centre ‘a reflective practicum [that] would bring learning by doing into the core’ (Schön, 1987, pp.
310–311). However, the idea of ‘learning by doing,’ which is a grounding assumption to guide
teachers to be the reflective practitioners through the cycles of action research, has located the
teacher’s role as the agency to paradoxically see the practice, both as the problematic and the
potential. In the following, I discuss how this new emphasis on ethnographic research methods has
strengthened empiricism in teacher education through the process-oriented rationality, margin­
alizing the other possibilities for the teacher to develop.

Process-oriented rationality: Self-referencing process of action research as socio-technical

amalgam
To be sure, the kinds of future that teachers achieve through the process and outcomes of action
research are not pre-determined; teacher-researchers have the freedom and autonomy to decide the
problems of practice as a way to begin and proceed with the action research. However, the ways to
change the problems of practice are to act decisively and procedurally, following the action-oriented
methodological principles. Although specific variations exist, action research consists of ‘a diagnostic
stage’ and ‘a therapeutic stage’ (Blum, 1995, p. 1); a diagnostic stage is when the problem is being
analysed and hypotheses are being developed, followed by a therapeutic stage when the hypoth­
eses are tested directing the changes in social life situations. In teacher education, particularly in
classroom-based action research, teacher-researchers repeat this diagnostic and therapeutic stage,
which leads them to be the change agent.
Teacher-researchers, as a change agent, conduct self-directed action research, which was based
upon the skills of ‘systematic self-monitoring’ (Elliott & Adelman, 1996, p. 13). Here, the systematic
means that the teacher-researchers are structurally coupled with the system, in that the teacher as an
educator is already contributing to the system’s operation (e.g., classroom instruction), while the
teacher as a researcher also generates cognitive reality, new interpretation, or new theories through
observation and reflection on the practice; which are inseparable (see, e.g., Rasmussen, 2001). This
peculiar relationship is how action research is used for both professional and scientific purposes
through its democratized rationale of teacher participation.
The way how teacher-researchers develop self-monitoring skills is by distancing the teacher-
researcher as the ‘teaching-self’ from that of the ‘observing-self.’ Through the spiral process of action
research, teacher-researchers continuously look back on the implemented actions to revise them
and create new action plans. In this very common process, what actually happens is to momentarily
‘time out’ (Munby, 1989, p. 32) the teaching-self by taking a positionality as the observing-self. That
is, in order to reflect on actions, the teacher momentarily differentiates the self as the teacher-
practitioner (who implements the actions) from the teacher-researcher (who plans the actions)
whose action should be back to the teacher-practitioner. By considering teacher-researcher’s dual
positionality as continuously changing but always influencing, action research has been undergirded
by the certainty of technical rationality, the very view that it seems to challenge.
Of course, the certainty of technical rationality is not the instrumental kind of view on professional
knowledge that applies the pre-made theories or bodies of knowledge into the practice, which
Schön (1983) and others have critiqued decades ago. However, the ways of finding the solutions to
the problems of the practice in action research are to follow the causal mechanisms between the
actions and its consequences, or the problems and the solutions, in that the processes of action
research direct teacher-researchers to plan, implement, and evaluate the actions by finding the
problems of practice to plan for the future actions. This is not merely for teachers to find the
immediate consequences of the actions. As Elliott and Adelman (1975) articulated, action research
is to promote teachers’ understanding and implementation of ‘the more remote consequences of
possible actions’ and thus helping them to ‘choose . . . actions wisely’ (p. 105).
 JOURNAL OF CURRICULUM STUDIES 835

What is unquestioned in the participatory rationale of action research is to lead teachers to

believe what is empirically seen and thus what is represented as evidence as to the origin of truth.
The processes of action research emphasize that teachers observe the practices to find the problems
to be improved, and reflect on and interpret what is observed, generate and implement action plans,
which repeats through several cycles. In this self-referential process of action research, it fails to
recognize how the practices happen within the impacts of the external references, for example,
cultural and historical conditions that make the particular practices happen. As Erickson et al. (2013)
point out, the self-referencing system does not allow one to see the historical and cultural connec­
tion to the practice that is happening in the present, which restricts the possibilities of the changes
that teacher-researchers can make.
The participatory, autonomous, and democratic agenda in action research is achievable in
association with the process-oriented rationality, in particular, the methodological procedures and
its technical quality, which highlights empiricism in knowledge production and teacher professio­
nalization. Action research has indeed empowered teachers with autonomy so that teachers have
the agency to generate knowledge, theory, and wisdom, rather than applying the theories given.
However, to perform this empowered agency, teacher-researchers should follow the methodological
principles that orient teachers to empirically collect the data, followed by reflection and interpreta­
tion of empirical evidence, as the only way to understand and generate the knowledge. In this sense,
the democratic vision of action research is made possible by the systems of reasoning that delineate
teacher participation and their autonomous role to follow the process-oriented rationality and its
methodological rigour while being generative in determining what should be the target of analysis.

Conclusion
In this article, I called into question the taken-for-granted idea of teacher agency and its related
notions such as teacher autonomy, teacher empowerment, teacher participation, and teacher as
a researcher. To explain it, I historicized the emergence and changes of action research as embody­
ing cybernetics rationale. Cybernetics has provided the epistemic implications to theorize the
participant observer as the agency; that is, the observing practice cannot be considered to objec­
tively represent or report the observed reality since the observation itself is already part of operating
and changing the system where the observer is already part of. This structurally coupled relationship
between the observer and the system is discussed with particular attention to teacher education.
Unlike other social science researchers, the processes and outcomes of teacher-led action research
direct the teacher-researchers to see and be aware of the teacher-self, which enabled action research
to be used for teacher professional development as well as for democratized scientific research.
Behind the democratized scientific principles of teacher participation in action research is an
assumption that teachers’ agential roles are made possible by following mechanically applicable
rules—the procedural, methodological principles—, while having the freedom to select the research
topics or the target of inquiry. Despite action research’s concerns about social problems, the social,
cultural, and historical dimensions of the practices are not much emphasized in action research. To
be specific, the social, cultural, and historical dimensions of the practices are not much used as
a mode of inquiry but mainly for teacher-researcher’s decision making, for example, to select the
marginalized populations as a target of action research. Teacher-researchers follow the procedures
of the action-oriented research methodology, which values the empirically oriented knowledge
production to create, collect, analyse, and interpret the data. While this has led teachers with an
autonomous sense of agency through self-study, action research, and reflective practice, the empiri­
cal, methodological, and interpretive orientation in teacher education raises two critical questions in
terms of teachers’ intellectual freedom. First, teacher professional development is bounded within
the self-referencing processes that administer teachers not to question the epistemological founda­
tions of research methodology. Second, teachers are not much trained to think about how the
836 S. Y. LEE

processes and outcomes of the empirical representation are constructed within the cultural, histor­
ical, and social influences.
The findings of the study suggest future researches examine curriculum reforms and teacher
education reforms during the post-World War Two periods in its relation to the present, to disrupt
what has been taken for granted in education. As discussed in this article, many of the notions that
we now do not much question (e.g., observation, feedback, system, autonomy, agency, participation,
perspective, positionality, future, time, process, research methodology, etc.) have been (re)concep­
tualized during the post-WWII period. By searching for the ways to critically understand the
grounding conditions that have not only generated but also limited the practices in the present,
we can reimagine the role of curriculum and teaching.
One contribution of this study is to rethink the notion of research in research-based education
today. While this article has focused on action research, it is not an exclusive example to equip
teachers with action-oriented methodological principles. Consider the justice-oriented curriculum,
which provides teachers with procedural instructional guidance to be applicable in the local contexts
of the classroom (Lechtenberg, 2020). The general framework has offered coherent structures and
languages developed by researchers or curriculum specialists. Yet, what it charges for teachers’
agential role is to use the pre-given frameworks and its mechanical, procedural, and technical rules
for having classroom discussions about social justice, racism, and privilege, without questioning how
those procedural rules reconstruct and reinforce the dominant system of knowledge production.
While teachers’ participatory roles are now much highlighted, their agency and social, professional
responsibility are developed on the basis of the self-referencing system and its representational
truth. By challenging and historicizing how today’s research-based education embodies both epis­
temic potentials and limits, this study contributes to the conversations on alternative trajectories of
knowledge production and professionalization.

Notes
1. In addition to the teacher, recent studies highlight youth as important agency, particularly through Youth
Participatory Action Research (YPAR; Anderson, 2019; Keddie, 2019). While the article solely focuses on teacher-
directed action research, its findings help one to reconsider the participant’s use of research methods for solving
the problems of practice in relation to the cultural, historical, and social conditions in which the problems emerge.
2. The concept of action research was originally developed at the Research Centre for Group Dynamics, University
of Michigan and at the Commission for Community Interrelations of the American Jewish Congress, founded by
Kurt Lewin who has contributed to social-psychological and sociological research (Blum, 1995).
3. The Lewinian conceptions of social psychological experimentation suggested the use of ‘larger units of
observation’ (Danziger, 2000, p. 342) as a methodology of action research. Lewin (1946)’s idea was to suggest
two types of questions in social research distinctively for ‘general laws’ of group life and the diagnosis of ‘a
specific situation’ (p. 36). His concerns were to counter the behaviourist assumptions in experimental psychol­
ogy that searched for the theory of learning through the relation of stimulus-response. Rather than under­
standing human relations as the relations among individuals, Lewin brought the ‘holistic presumptions’ to
action research (Ash, 2010), based upon his training in Gestalt psychology in Germany, which later affected the
foundation of ‘ecological psychology’ in the 1960s (see Barker, 1968).
4. Schwab (1969) suggested the idea of being eclectic for more practical oriented curriculum studies, meaning ‘the
arts by which unsystematic, uneasy, but usable focus on a body of problems is effected among diverse theories,
each relevant to the problems in a different way’ (p. 1). Deliberation was a recommended method for being
eclectic, treating both ends and means as mutually determining one another.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
 JOURNAL OF CURRICULUM STUDIES 837

Notes on contributor
Sun Young Lee, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Teacher Education at Weber State University, U.S.A.
Her research lies at the intersection of visual cultural studies in education, curriculum studies, and teacher education to
examine how the common practices of ‘seeing’ contribute to producing certain knowledge in/valuable and the
differences of human kinds. Her current project historically and contemporarily explores the algorithmic systems of
reasoning in the U.S. and global teacher education as a way to re-think today’s evidence-based education policy, reform,
and practice.

ORCID
Sun Young Lee http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0726-8515

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