Journal of Education & Social Policy

Official Educational Policy and Action Research in the Era of Crisis: The Case of Greece
Eleni Katsarou, Vassilis Tsafos

Abstract
The basic aim of this article is to investigate whether and to what extent the institutionalization of action research in the contemporary neo-liberal educational context affects its nature and orientations. So we study in a socio-cultural theoretical framework the way action research was used in basic components of the school reform of 2011 in Greece: in the Program of “School Self-Evaluation” and in the “(Meizon) National Teacher Training” Program. Analyzing the ways action research was used in these institutional texts, we find contradictions between their rhetoric and their hidden discourses and we realize the ways these discourses create a technocratic orientation, which is appropriate for the current neoliberal educational context, but at the same time substantially alters the real nature of action research which is political and emancipatory. Finally, we conclude by proposing ways through which this erosion may be reversed and action research reclaimed, resisting this way to neoliberalism.

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