These
methods place the practitioners at centre stage in the educational
research process and recognize the crucial significance of actors’
understandings in shaping educational action. From the role of critical
informant helping an ‘outsider’ researcher, it is but a short step for
the practitioner to become a self-critical researcher into her or his own
practice. Fifth, the accountability movement galvanized and politicized
practioners. In response to the accountability movement, practitioners
have adopted the self-monitoring role as a proper means of justifying
practice and generating sensitive critiques of the working conditions
in which their practice is conducted.27 Sixth, there was increasing
solidarity in the teaching profession in response to the public criticism
which has accompanied the post-expansion educational politics of the
1970s and 1980s; this, too, has prompted the organization of support
networks of concerned professionals interested in the continuing
developments of education even though the expansionist tide has
turned. And, finally, there is the increased awareness of action research
itself, which is perceived as providing an understandable and workable
approach to the improvement of practice through critical self-reflection.