My role as a practitioner-researcher

Catherine Menist, Essential Skills Coordinator at Broadway Homelessness and Support, reflects on what she has learned from her experience as a practitioner-researcher.

'If practitioners are to believe that they can build research into the infrastructure of their practice and create new knowledge in response to their urgent questions, we believe that the opportunities created to assist them must be practitioner-researcher centred.' 
(Fairclough et al. 2004) 

For the past nine months I have been working on an NRDC practitioner-led research initiative that has provided just such an opportunity. Our focus was to look at measuring soft outcomes for essential skills learners from a background of homelessness and poor mental health.   

I work as Essential Skills Coordinator at Broadway, one of a number of homelessness agencies in London. The most positive progress we see with clients in relation to learning interventions lies in the softer outcomes around confidence that lead to lifestyle changes.  While funding bodies agree that soft outcomes are important, they provide no specific funding for them and no guidelines for measuring them.   We wanted to develop a tool that would capture this kind of data meaningfully and would give us much stronger evidence to argue the case for change with the funding bodies. We recognised that we needed to have a stronger voice as a provider of essential skills to vulnerable adults. While we were wrestling with the need to deal with this problem, the PLRI (Practitioner-Led Research Initiative) opportunity with NRDC presented itself. 

Despite being very motivated by this opportunity, once we had had our bid approved, I found myself needing to address some serious questions.  

• Why research something I think I already know the answer to?
• Does research make a difference anyway?
• Should Broadway bother providing essential skills support at all?

I now have answers that are significantly different from what I thought six months ago. Soft outcomes in the lives of our clients are what enable them to move, as our strap-line says so neatly, 'from street to home'. As a learning team in a homelessness agency, we needed to develop an outcomes monitoring framework to try to capture these soft outcomes as a result of learning interventions. As a provider of essential skills under the Skills for Life framework, we needed to see if those soft outcomes could be effectively integrated into Individual Learning Plans (ILPs) and mapped to the National Curriculum. We asked 'Could this be done and is it helpful?'. 

Being such a small team there were concerns that the £10,000 research grant was not going to cover the cost/benefit to Broadway, but the argument was clear. Doing this research would take us further towards our team and client goals,  not away from them. In the voluntary sector particularly, this is important.

This is a reflection on the actual process of being a practitioner-researcher which at the same time highlights some issues around funding and essential skills that I know are shared by many of us. 

Reflecting on the process

When I joined Broadway, which has a strong research ethic of its own, the whole concept of practitioner-led research and the work of the NRDC were completely new to me. I wonder why an introduction to the action-research approach in the context of practitioner-led research is not an integral part of the basic skills teacher training curriculum, at least not in my experience. 

In engaging clients, I was very concerned that those who agreed to take part would become less important than the research. Ethically, I was concerned that it would be a benefit to us,  while they were simply guinea-pigs. However, what I believed and what I communicated to clients was the same - that the monitoring of soft outcomes was something that would be ultimately, if not initially, useful to them. They proved to be largely willing participants.   

The whole process has brought some amazing insights and in some cases, personal progression - my own included. Allowing my values and 'wrong' or 'wrong-headed' assumptions as a tutor to be challenged and changed as a result of that process has been enormously supportive and beneficial - not least to the clients I work with.   

Frameworks that free

I find it interesting that the requirements of research to develop a consistent and rigorous approach have also pointed me towards the benefits of having that sense of rigour in the initial interview stage with clients. As much of the work I do is on a one-to-one basis due to client vulnerability, I had assumed an approach of a 'free conversation' when doing the initial interview, as it felt less imposing.   

The unspoken assumption was that I would always think of the right questions to ask, ask them in the right way and always therefore have the right information in order to inform ILPs and schemes of work. Doing the action research has not entirely changed this, but the opportunity of working within the PLRI framework has brought a structure at the initial interview stage that makes me feel I have greater freedom with my approach, while being able to monitor my and my client's progress at the same time.   

I now feel a lot closer to the process of assessment, review and evaluation because we have found a framework which specifically suits our clients. It has also provided a shift away from simply evaluating what we teach to evaluating our approach to the individuals we work with.   This 'self-reflective cycle' has required me  '..to plan, act, observe and reflect more systematically and more rigorously than one usually does in everyday life'. (Kemmis and McTaggart 2000).  

This must be a good thing.

Beyond the hierarchies of the organisation

Having an action research project has given me a good reason to question my peers on their own thoughts and perspectives on our theme and to challenge their assumptions, and it has provided a framework for that discussion. Having worked for myself for many years, I was beginning to enjoy benefiting from the skills and input of others. The action research project has been the hammer to drive in the peg. 

We have had the opportunity during this initiative to host workshops at RaPAL and ReOPEN, presenting our interim findings and receiving valuable input and feedback on our processes and assumptions. Not working in an educational establishment, having this kind of opportunity to share good practice and share our project was really helpful and made me feel part of a greater whole. 

So what of my initial questions? 

Why research something I think I already know the answer to?

What I discovered was that the point in PLRI is not whether you feel you know the answer to your research question. As a practitioner, it is the taking part that counts. Yes, I do feel the benefit lies not necessarily in the conclusions we have drawn but in what we have learned from the whole process. As I said earlier, allowing my values and 'wrong' or 'wrong-headed' assumptions as a tutor to be challenged and changed has been difficult at times, yet overwhelmingly positive. And we have emerged from the process with something that will hopefully be useful beyond our own organisation.   

Does research make a difference anyway?

I had always had doubts about the benefit and validity of much research as it always seemed to be used for political gain, or simply to reinforce what we already know. The change for me is this. Research is now something I value. Yes, it has its pitfalls but it also has its merits and it does give credibility to what might otherwise be assumptions without foundation.   

There is opinion out there that suggests that homelessness agencies serve to create dependence rather than independence. There is some limited merit in that argument. We always endeavour to move clients towards accessing external services, specifically to help them work towards independence. But significant numbers of our clients, lacking in literacy, numeracy and ESOL, need the safety of one-to-one support before they are willing or able to make that step towards accessing external learning opportunities. The cost of not addressing this far outweighs the cost of more appropriate funding. If we even manage to fuel the debate about gaining more appropriate funding then perhaps this research really could make a difference. 

Should Broadway bother providing essential skills support at all?

Yes it should. Absolutely. And it should be bigger and better resourced. I am now convinced by the power of even the most basic education to impact profoundly on the wider lives of our clients. For those who engage, most benefit. It might sound dramatic or worthy, but we are in the business of changing lives, or at least contributing to that change. And the most important thing is to empower our clients to do it for themselves, to have confidence in their selves, their abilities and their opinions.   

Becoming a learner again

Being a practitioner-researcher makes you a learner again. It forces you to look more carefully at what has already been done so that, in your ignorance, you don't embark upon something cutting edge to find you have merely reconstructed orthodoxy.     

The feeling of disempowerment that comes with trying to achieve difficult targets with a chaotic client group can at times be overwhelmingly frustrating. Being involved in writing the bid and overseeing the fieldwork on our project has been enormously empowering and has served to channel much of that frustration in a positive way. And because we were doing the research from the inside, we managed to obtain data that might have been unobtainable to a professional researcher.   

The value of the whole process lies in it being practitioner-led. It has served to build research into our teaching infrastructure and has provided new knowledge in response to our questions. The benefits of taking part in this time-consuming initiative have definitely outweighed the desperation I felt when I thought 'Will this fieldwork never come to an end?'.  Quite simply, it has served to make me a more effective and reflective tutor.  And I enjoyed it.    

References

Fairclough, Galletly, Herrington, Johnson,  Llewellyn, Sahid and Sedgwick (2004)   Practitioner-Researcher Grouping:  Reflections on Process RAPAL Vol 55  Winter 2004 

Kemmis S. and McTaggart R. (2000) quoted  on pg 229 of Cohen L., Manion L., and  Morrison K. Research methods in  Education 5th Edition, London, Routledge