ABSTRACT

This paper is written from the perspective of tutors in higher education who facilitate educational managers’ action research. I, Pam, am course director of an MA: School and College Management programme, and I, Cathie, and I, Zoe, have been tutors on the programme. We have all at one time or other engaged in learning relationships with each other and Zoe and Cathie have formally sought each other out as critical friends. The educational managers who are students on the programme are drawn from diverse parts of the education system, and are engaged in action research towards a final dissertation. As part of the programme, they are expected to establish a working relationship with a work colleague who will provide supportive but ‘critical’ friendship during the period of the research, and will take part in a meeting set up in the university to validate the research. Recently, an external examiner has questioned the course model of critical friend as one which could result in ‘collusion’ rather than ‘critique’, and he has expressed concern about the efficacy of involving work colleagues in the validation of action research. This paper examines these criticisms in the context of a wider exploration of the role of the critical friend in action research. It concludes that the criticisms are based on a mis-informed view of the purpose of critical friends within the course model; nor are they supported by teachers’ accounts of their own research or other course evaluation data. The paper

concludes by identifying the main dimensions of the critical friendship role and suggests ways in which this might be developed into a ‘learning relationship’ that is particularly congruent with the model of action research we promote.