Rowell and Hong

Knowledge Democracy and Action Research: What Works and Who Says?

Lonnie Rowell, University of San Diego, San Diego, CA, USA; Eunsook Hong, Social Publishers Foundation, La Mesa, CA, USA.

This workshop introduced a new platform for supporting and disseminating practice- based action research and strengthening knowledge democracy. In the current climate of educational and human service research and practice, the wisdom of experienced practitioners is most often overlooked in favor of the views of university researchers, corporate reformers, and conservative think tanks. Teachers and other helping professionals are reduced to being technicians in what Henry Giroux refers to as a vast “disimagination machine” (2014, p. 25). This workshop addressed a platform for knowledge generation by practitioners and dissemination of their research outcomes, which is intended as a way to recognize the capacity of educators, counselors, and other helping professionals to be knowledge producers and to push back against those who would have public education primarily working in the service of “a dumbed down and compliant work force” (p. 29).