Research Feedback as a Strategy for Improving Participation and Social Transformation
This is an advance summary of a forthcoming article in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Education. Please check back later for the full article.
Educational policies have long recognized the importance of family participation and involvement in schools to facilitate school success for all students, and both research and policy have highlighted the role of research and research feedback as important for improving family involvement. However, in practice feedback is given in very different ways with different intended functions and effects. From a positivist and also reconstructed positivist perspective, for instance, feedback is used primarily as a strategy for improving research validity, while from a critical perspective the intention is to induce deeper and sustained levels of participation and critique and influence. From a philosophical foundation concerning the significance of not only understanding contemporary educational empirical reality under neoliberal forms of capitalism, but also developing critical consciousness for the transcendence and transformation of this condition, research feedback sets out to engage teachers and parents as co-researchers and reflective agents capable of understanding and changing education, not only being recipients of it. Change is encouraged, moreover, both within the framework of the investigation and with respect to broader social relations. This use of research feedback may enhance critical awareness and social transformation. Different examples of research feedback, in research on the participation of families in schools, show details concerning the use of feedback for processes of engagement, social critique, and educational change.