Action Research with Teachers: Action and critique in a project on multicultural education

This chapter focuses on the explicit or implicit democratising ambitions and tendencies in many types of approaches. The author believes that democratic dialogue as conceptual orientation and practice is able to bring together different arguments for using participatory democracy as a scientific orientation for Action Research. The construction of a research unit is rather a matter of an action-reaction or response where the interactions or experience is produced particularly through dialogue or experimentation. Action Research can face politics of truth by supporting participatory democratic inquiry management, which implies that all parties have equal and thus fair opportunities for participation. A moral argument for participatory democracy recognises that knowledge and research capacity are valued goods which can serve different interests. The institutional argument takes the point of departure in the authority of common democratic traditions and inherited practices. It shows legitimacy value of democratic procedures, a type of legitimacy that has practical force because people live in a deeply democratic tradition.