Allegories on creating opportunities for dialogue between childcare practitioners and parents during an action research in two out-of-school care centres

ABSTRACT

In out-of-school care centres in Flanders, building warm and trusting relationships with parents is both an important aim and a huge frustration. Practitioners often struggle with their role towards parents and feel insufficiently trained to deal with increasing expectations about cooperation with parents. In this article we describe the results of an action research on improving the relationship between practitioners and parents in two out-of-school care centres. The article focuses on showing how the work on contacts between practitioners and parents also changed the meaning practitioners attached to parental involvement in out-of-school care. We use four allegorical stories to report on these changes. These allegories show how practitioners, through their active engagement in the action research, have moved from distrust or fear of parents to dialogue, from a we/them story to a story of togetherness, and from low self-confidence to growing strength.

KEYWORDS:

• Out-of-school care
• parents
• early childhood practitioners

Introduction

“Parents are only interested in their children’s school.” “We are merely caregivers, not teachers.” “Parents consider out-of-school care as a necessary evil.”

Figure 1. Time frame of the action research in centre A and centre B.

When we started our action research on improving contacts between parents and practitioners in two out-of-school care centres, we found some practitioners whole-heartedly believed the ideas in the quotes above. These opinions seemed rooted in a feeling of inferiority and sometimes even fear of parents. During the year we worked in the centres, we saw the practitioners’ thinking about parents evolve while at the same time, the parents’ willingness to participate increased. This article tells the story of the changes in the practitioners’ practices towards parents in the out-of-school care centres alongside a story about changes in the meanings of these practices.

To understand the practitioners’ feeling of inferiority towards parents, it is necessary to provide some insights into the structure, functioning and staff requirements of out-of-school care in Flanders.

In Flanders, almost all children between two and a half and six years of age attend preschool. From six years on, school is compulsory. This means that Flemish children spend a considerable part of their weekdays at school. However, school hours are not compatible with parents’ working or training hours. Moreover, school holidays tend to be longer than parents’ holidays. That is where out-of-school care gets in. Formal out-of-school care is organised by schools or by out-of-school care centres.

Ninety-eight percent of the staff of out-of-school care centres consists of females who only have vocational training (En Gezin 2012; Vlaams Welzijnsverbond 2019). Often, working hours in out-of-school care do not suffice to provide for a full time job and are difficult to combine with family life. Out-of-school care, as childcare in general, is undervalued and wages are low (Vandenbroeck 2018). Consequently, labour turnover is high, as is the absentee rate.

The limited resources bring about an organisational structure where practitioners are constantly responsible for children. The few paid hours without children go to much-needed practical arrangements and hardly ever to reflection or learning (Daems et al. 2016). This contrasts with the growing expectations on pedagogical quality in childcare that the Flemish government has been imposing (Janssen et al. 2016; Working Group on Early Childhood Education and Care 2014). As parental involvement is considered an important indicator of quality (Urban et al. 2011; Easen, Kendall, and Shaw 1992; Kernan 2012), expectations on this subject increased as well. However, out-of-school care practitioners feel insufficiently trained and confident to deal with these growing expectations (Dom, Vorsselmans, and Willockx 2017). Their above cited statements about parents can be explained by these feelings of helplessness. But there is also an ideological cause, with historical roots. In the 19^th century, childcare was organised by factory owners or charities, to enable women to work but also to improve on their parenting, which was seen as poor. A good mother, it was believed, stays at home to look after her children, an idea that was maintained well into 1950s and 60s, and continues to influence thinking about childcare as a necessary evil for families who are unable to gain an income through one working parent (Vandenbroeck 2018; Knijn and Da Roit 2013). Childcare workers tend to project this thinking onto the families who are using the out-of-school care.

The scarce research on the relationships between families and practitioners in out-of-school shows that out-of-school care centres find it difficult to instigate warm and long-lasting contacts with parents, although they do recognise the importance of parental involvement (Van Noyen 2011). Scholarly work about parent-practitioners relationships in early childhood education and care has similar outcomes: in order to develop relationships of trust, both practitioners and parents need to invest time, engagement and dialogue (Kambouri et al. 2021; Sims-Schouten 2016).

The action research was the second phase of a larger research project on building strong relationships with parents in out-of-school care. The main research question of the overall project was: how can out-of-school care centres strengthen their contacts with parents so that all parents, including vulnerable ones, feel involved? In the first phase of the research we conducted an exploratory study to map the existing communication between parents and practitioners. The main research question of the second phase of the project, the action research, was: how can out-of-school care centres ensure good contacts with all parents? The overall research project resulted in materials that practitioners in out-of-school care centres can use to strengthen their contacts with parents: nine small videos on specific topics, such as ‘what does parent participation mean for you?’, ‘what if team members disagree?’, ‘what do parents think?’. Alongside the videos, we developed reflective questions, a collection of coaching methods, a short process manual and a poster with ten top tips for parent involvement. All materials were presented and discussed on a conference day.

For the current article, all data were analysed again, as this article deals with results of another nature. We use four allegories to tell the process of change the practitioners went through during the action research. These allegories show how specific actions not only led to practical outcomes such as a new year’s reception or a playful entry of the centre but also to changed attitudes towards parental involvement.

Method and context of the action research

The action research took place from June 2016 until June 2017. Figure 1 presents an overview of the time frame of the action research. The research team consisted of two researchers, who are the authors of this article, and a pedagogical coach, trained to support childcare staff.

The action research took place in two out-of-school care centres. Out-of-school care centres organise paid care for children between two and a half and twelve years of age, before and after school hours and during school holidays. The selection was primarily based on willingness to participate. Through several umbrella organisations we launched a call, to which ten centres responded. After that, we selected on differentiation in size, geographical location (city versus country) and social context (lower versus higher socio-economic status).

The first centre (A) is located in a small village in Flanders with approximately 3600 inhabitants. On weekdays 50 to 60 children come to the centre before and after school hours. Most of them attend the school next door. Six practitioners work with the children, all of them female and Dutch speaking. Thus, they reflect the neighbourhood as most children attending the centre live in white, middle-class families. Only a small minority of the families are foreign language speakers. Two co-ordinators are responsible for the management of this and six other centres in neighbouring villages. All practitioners and one of these two co-ordinators took part in the action research.

The second centre (B) is situated in a city of 18000 inhabitants, which is one of the poorest municipalities in Flanders. This is reflected in the families who use out-of-school care. A lot of the children speak one or more foreign languages at home and some live in difficult financial and social circumstances. The centre has two locations in town, about 800 meters away from each other. 140 children, attending nine different schools in the city, come to one of these locations before and after school hours, on Wednesday afternoon and during school holidays. Seventeen female practitioners work alternately in both locations while in each location a male co-ordinator coaches the team. Four practitioners do not have Dutch as their mother tongue. All practitioners and both co-ordinators took part in the action research.

The teams we worked with had no experience with action research, nor were they acquainted with research through their education. The project gave us the opportunity to inform the teams about action research and to explore opportunities for them to take up an active role in future changes.

Working conditions in the settings had a huge influence on the research planning. Meeting time was scarce, as well as working hours without children. There were a lot of staff changes, as practitioners switched jobs or became pregnant. Apart from these conditions we also had to consider the way practitioners prefer to learn and reflect. Most of them do not like writing, often due to less successful school experiences or to them being multilingual. That is why we chose playful methodologies: dices and boxes were used to select reflective questions, role playing and lenses to take another person’s point of view.

As the scope of the action research was quite broad, each setting narrowed it down by formulating two or three specific goals. The findings of the exploratory survey offered inspiration, as it allowed us to select 28 possible goals other centres had reported on. Although these goals were quite general, with this list we could avoid a time consuming brainstorm while teams could still decide for themselves on their main goals and chose to adapt the goals to their own contexts.

For each goal a task group was established, that would create the conditions to enable all practitioners to take up action. The task groups were supported by the pedagogical coach and the local team coordinator. We soon noticed a recurrent pattern with practitioners embarking enthusiastically on a new action until daily life took over or until the action appeared more difficult than estimated, whereupon it faded out.

The reflections on past and future actions the research team facilitated every eight weeks, often reanimated the actions. These sessions also enabled practitioners to become aware of certain attitudes and prejudices. The analysis of our reports and observations of these sessions offered knowledge on the barriers and motivations practitioners experienced and on their views on changes.

Every four weeks the research team took two hours to discuss the project (project team meetings), to exchange analyses of the social practices and to prepare the next steps. The reports we kept of each meeting with the researchers and with the centre staff, together with the full e-mail correspondence, helped us to reconstruct the process of change and to select those coaching and reflection methods that helped practitioners to deal with barriers.

Every six months we organised a steering committee meeting with policy makers and professionals in the field of out-of-school care, teachers and researchers. The committee functioned as a critical friend and helped us to look into the possibilities for changing the field (Bourdieu 1984; Kemmis 2008) and to find suitable ways to share our findings with other out-of-school care organisations.

Collecting data

In addition to the data collected during meetings, we spoke with all practitioners individually, via short semi-structured interviews, during their work. These small conversations focused on specific topics such as the time management in the project or concerns about the changes. To explore the role and possible roles of the coordinators, we organised formal interviews.

We also collected data on the experiences of parents and children. Actually, the practitioners did this, as it was important for them to discover parents’ and children’s views and we coached them to find suitable methods. Centre A chose organised group meetings with parents while Centre B organised short semi-structured interviews with parents when they picked up their children. To keep the talks informal, they were not recorded. The researchers supported the practitioners by making notes. With children, the questioning was integrated in the daily activities and mainly consisted of drawings and talks. Table 1 presents an overview of all collected data.

Table 1. Overview of the collected data.

	Centre A	Centre B
Notes of semi-structured interviews with practitioners	4 pages ^a	8,5 pages
Transcribed interviews with co-ordinators	10 pages	25 pages
Notes of short semi-structured interviews with parents		9 pages with summary notes of conversations with 17 parents
Notes of focus group with parents	2 focus groups: 9 pages
Field notes of observations	3 pages	5 pages
Notes of project team meetings	12 pages
Notes of team meetings in the centre	16 pages	20 pages
Notes and photographs of the questioning of children	40 photographs and 3 pages with children’s quotes and drawings	35 photographs and 4 pages with children’s quotes and drawings
E-mails	10 pages	10 pages

^aOne page consists of more or less 520 words.

Towards the end of the project, the teams looked for ways to proceed without the researchers’ support. Some of the actions were integrated in the intake meeting with parents, and co-ordinators continued to reserve time during team meetings for reflections on parent involvement. Additionally, the Centre A co-ordinator gave her team the responsibility to spread their new approach among the six other centres in the municipality. This expert role motivated them to keep their changes alive.

A question we reflected on after the project was whether we merely ‘worked with’ practitioners or whether they became co-researchers. It is true that the overall project objective was already chosen before the action research started. However, our practice-oriented Centre of Expertise chose its project themes in close cooperation with organisations in the field. And the out-of-school-care centres did decide to answer our general call. Still, this decision was mostly taken by co-ordinators. During the project, it turned out that most practitioners did feel it necessary to strengthen contacts with parents and were therefore willing to take up an active role.

Despite their willingness to participate, practitioners did not find it easy to become co-researchers in the narrow sense of the term, as they had no experience with research projects nor with change implementation. Therefore, we tried to create a context where practitioners could decide on the objectives, could collect data and could help us to analyse these data through their reflections. In all this we took account of organisational limits of out-of-school-care centres and the lack of any budget to give practitioners more project time. The inclusion of a pedagogical coach in our research team also contributed to the circumstances enabling practitioners to take up a co-research position, as practitioners could more easily identify with the coach who was well acquainted with their work. By the end of the project, practitioners felt more confident in their co-researching role. This could be seen at the projects’ closing conference at our campus where both practitioners and co-ordinators participated in debates and co-chaired workshops.

Three theoretical considerations on action research

Later on in this article we will discuss how concrete actions led to practical outcomes in the organisation of the centres as well as to symbolic results, changing the meaning practitioners give to parental involvement in out-of-school care. We will shape this discussion by using allegories. Before doing that, we describe how action research theory brought us to the concept of allegories.

1. A dual structure

Departing from Habermas and Bourdieu, Kemmis and Mc Taggart (2000: 1) define action research as ‘a form of collective self-reflective enquiry undertaken by participants in social situations in order to improve the rationality and justice of their own social or educational practices, as well as their understanding of these practices and the situations in which these practices are carried out.’ This definition contains a dual goal: improving practices as well as understanding them. In turn, the central concept of practice has a dual structure, as it can either refer to the external, ‘objective’, perspective of an observer – ‘practice’ – or to the internal, ‘subjective’ perspective of a participant – ‘praxis’ – or to both in a dialectical relationship (Kemmis and Mc Taggart 2000; Kemmis 2008). Practice thus functions as a motor for change and connects both to the goals on the action level and to those on the level of understanding.

In his structuration theory, Anthony Giddens (1976 to 1991) points out yet another duality of all systems and of change in those systems, the one between actors and agency on the one hand and structures on the other (Giddens 1984). These two aspects cannot exist without one another and are connected through ‘social practices, ordered in time and space’ (Giddens 1984, 2). Improving these practices then needs to take place both on the action level as on the structure level, as the structures are produced and reproduced by actors’ every day practices (Giddens 1991).

A comparable dialectic duality is described by Friedman, when he states that theory used for analysing action research ‘needs to be both sensitive to the meanings participants give to their situations, yet go beyond these to explore unseen causal dimensions of their behaviour and the environment and the interaction of the two’ (Friedman and Rogers 2009, 31).

• (2) A dual structure of understanding

Giddens not only describes the structure as dual, in that it is as much a means for change as the outcome of it, but the actors too, they have a discursive and practical consciousness. The former refers to the actors’ ability to disclose the reasons for their actions, the latter to the knowledge which enables actors to socially interact but which they cannot necessarily articulate (Munters et al. 1985). Giddens’s types of consciousness are reflected in the two types of theories Friedman, following Argyris and Schön (1974), describes for analysing action research: espoused theories and theories in use. Espoused theories are what actors say or think they do and describe or justify behaviour. Theories-in-use represent a tacit knowledge which actors are generally unaware of and which they employ almost automatically (Friedman and Rogers 2009, 35). As actors and structures are intertwined, the meaning actors give to events will influence their reactions, which will in turn influence other actors and the events, thereby creating or recreating the actors’ behavioural world (Friedman and Rogers 2009, 36).

• (3) Enabling change

The definition of action research we started out with was about improving, and thus changing, situations. This change turns out to be a dialectic process, as actors produce and reproduce structures. For the changes to be sustainable, they should go beyond the level of practice/praxis and reach that of the ‘cultural-discursive, social and material-economic fields that precede and shape the conduct of practice/praxis’ (Kemmis 2008, 124). These fields can be compared to what Giddens would call the structures.

It is the actors’ discursive consciousness or their espoused theories which enable them to act in a purposeful way and bring about changes in their behaviour and in the structures they are acting in and interacting with. Gradually, the theories-in-use will change alongside, which makes the change more sustainable.

Thus, people have the power to bring about change, in their actions as well in structures. Yet, this power for change is limited by the available resources and by relations to other actors and to the structures (Giddens 1984).

• (4) The power of allegories

Our action research did lead to changes. But when we tried to relate strategies to specific context and goals, our data showed a messy reality. Goals were not always fully achieved, strategies changed over time and not all actors showed the same strategy. Given the dialectic nature of allegory, this is not strange. But how to describe this process in a way that is fair to the complexity of the project? That is where we turned to allegory as an instrument of analysis, inspired by Latour (1993), Mol, Moser, and Pols (2010) and Law (2004, 147) who plead for ‘a more generous gathering and analysis of data in social sciences’. Law states that images can take over when theories fail to catch the richness of our complex social world: ‘Allegory is the art of creating a surplus meaning, saying something other and more than what is being said. Allegories make space for ambivalence and ambiguity’ (Law 2004, 90).

Allegories are in our opinion especially suitable for analysing action research because of their dual nature: they tell a story about actions but on another level, they tell another one. The stories are entangled and enrich each other, thereby leaving space for complexity and ambiguity. Another advantage of allegories is that they use stories, which make them more accessible for the out-of-school care practitioners than theoretical frameworks, addressing both their practical and discursive consciousness. By sharing these allegorical stories with the actors, they become social practices, mediating between the actors and the structures and enabling change by entering the actors’ discursive consciousness.

Finally, allegories do answer Friedmans’ demands of good theory that it should be able to describe aspects of social reality and explain the causal interplay of the individual and the social environment (Friedman and Rogers 2009, 36).

Results: four allegories of change

Let us present four allegories on our action research, that at the same time describe the results on the level of actions and of structures and analyse how these results could come about.

The allegory of the names

The first allegory is a story about calling people by their name. It starts at the very beginning of the project, when we organised a role play in which some practitioners took up the role of parents entering the centre, while their colleagues acted as normal. Doing this, the team of Centre A realised they would like to intensify the contacts with parents during the daily drop off and pick up, hoping this would lead to closer relationships with parents. One aspect particularly struck the practitioners during the role play: parents hardly knew their names and neither did they know parents by name. When they addressed parents directly, they called them ‘mum’ or ‘dad’. They agreed that it would be more personal to call parents by their first name. And that they wanted to encourage parents to get to know and use the practitioners’ names.

What follows, is a story of trial and discussion. The practitioners started with asking all 150 parents for their first name and studying these names by heart. Soon, it became clear that asking for parents’ names seemed to be an obstacle, especially with parents who were hasty or visited the centre less frequently. Daily routines took over and when some parents were called by their first name, others were still ‘mum’ or ‘dad’ or an address was avoided. Other actions seemed necessary. This time, the children took part, by creating traffic signs: one with ‘sir/madam’, one with ‘mum/dad’ and one with ‘first name’. The children invited their parents to pick out the sign they preferred. Almost all parents chose to be called by their first name, which the practitioners could now easily ask.

On the practical action level of this allegory, practitioners used first names of parents instead of ‘mum or dad’. But already during the role play practitioners felt that more was at stake: using someone’s first name means that you see him as a complete person, not just as a mother, father or employee. That is also what practitioners wanted to be for parents: individuals, not the people taking care of the ‘necessary evil’ of childcare. At the end of the project a practitioner could formulate this espoused theory (Friedman and Rogers 2009):

“I find in the contact with the parents, the distance is shortened, because you try to address people by the first name and that brings the people closer, I think. It has become more personal.”

Upon analysing our materials, we noticed how the new social practice of the names caused a dialectics of change: the effort practitioners made to learn the names and to find suitable actions for their plan recrafted the reality they were working in. Their efforts strengthened their resolution to make the action work but also strengthened the parents’ appreciation for their work, thus paving the road to more intense contacts between practitioners and parents (Friedman and Rogers 2009).

“There has been a positive atmosphere since we asked parents whether they can be addressed by their first name. There is even a dad who wants to apply for a job.”

And these contacts were in turn integrated in the intake procedures of the centre: practitioners would tell parents about the ‘name policy’.

The allegory of opening spaces

Law (2004) writes about how architecture can be a source of allegory, which was confirmed during our action research on a smaller scale, concerning the interior spatial arrangements of the centres. The role play at the start of the project revealed a bottleneck for smooth contacts with parents in one location of Centre B. In the multistorey building, it was customary for parents to check out on the ground floor. The practitioner at the front desk then called the colleague on the floor where the child was playing who in turn urged the child to descend. Due to this procedure, parents had to wait for their children, which caused bustle in the tiny space of the front desk leading to frustration for parents and stress for practitioners.

The solution seemed obvious: inviting parents upstairs. The task group organised an exhibition of children’s drawings and crafts on the first floor and invited the parents to enjoy this with a drink. After this first hurdle for parents and practitioners was taken, the practitioners started to encourage parents to pick up their child upstairs.

However, this action continued to spark discussion during all team meetings. What about parents who come in with a baby or who have difficulty walking? Can exceptions be made for them? What about parents who are short on time? It took a while before we succeeded in discovering that the discussions were inspired by the different theories practitioners fostered. Some practitioners felt that all parents should be treated equally, which for them meant that exceptions could not be allowed, others favoured freedom of choice for parents. In an attempt to bring those theories-in-use to a discursive level, we organised a discussion on the differences between equality and equity. Still, some practitioners hesitated to encourage parents to go upstairs.

“I am not really convinced of the idea of letting the parents go upstairs. I think that some colleagues push parents too hard for this. I wish it could be more flexible. During the last meeting with the team and the researchers, I’ve got the impression that according to many practitioners, all parents must go upstairs. I would rather suggest the parents: ‘maybe you can go upstairs’. I understand some parents don’t want to go upstairs. In the evening, everybody is tired .”

Some reflective sessions later, we realised that this was caused by another ‘theory-in-use’ about power relations, namely the one of practitioners performing the ‘necessary evil’ of childcare and therefore not being in a position to ask things of parents. Finally, this power issue (Giddens 1984) could be relieved by the coordinator promising that he would support the practitioners for a few evenings.

Gradually, more power elements appeared. By allowing parents to come upstairs, practitioners showed themselves vulnerable as parents could see them in action, working with children. But this also gave power to those practitioners who felt more confident in working with children than in talking to their parents. They could now show their strength, which gave them more confidence to enter into conversations with parents and invite them upstairs:

“I am usually withdrawn and prefer to stay in the background and now I am more spontaneous towards parents and I sometimes dare to say:” you can go upstairs”.

In the end, a change in the spatial arrangements brought about a change in practitioners’ confidence as well as in their ability to take into account ideas about equality and equity. Finally, taking the step of asking back-up from a more powerful coordinator, helped them to gain confidence and do away with thoughts on parents’ power, that never had been formulated before the spatial arrangements changed.

An allegory on time

The third story is one about a changing conception of time (Hassard 1990). Time turned out to be an important concept during our action research: can the organisation provide practitioners with enough time to try out actions, to collect data and to reflect? Not only practitioners suffer a lack of time, parents do as well. They have duties in several life domains, which they have to combine (Piessens, Raes, and Willockx 2020). Therefore, one part of the project was a search for new methods to involve parents without taking a lot of their time. As the project progressed, practitioners as well as parents seemed to gain time. One of the parents explains:

“It happened already a few times when we came here … you are so easily carried away by your daily chores and things and then you also have to pick up that little one. Then you suddenly realise that it is possible to sit here for a while, and see how your child is playing.”

That is when we realised that the story about time could be seen as an allegory, in which another lack formed the layer of meaning: a lack of comfort with the situation, a lack of consciousness of what the situation meant for the other persons involved. Thus, time could be gained by getting to know each other and each other’s life, work and everyday situation. And although this sounds ambiguous: this takes time and one has to make time for it. Again the dialects of action research and of allegory meet each other. This might probably be an example of the ambiguities Law (2004) is referring to.

So in the end of the project, time moved from a practical issue, the available amount of minutes, towards a new understanding of ‘a nice time’. We saw parents who were described as ‘parents who never have time’ deciding to spend some more time in the out-of-school care centre. Time evolved from clock-time, a commodity to be earned and spent, to social-time, ‘a medium through which a meaning structure is generated’ (Hassard 1990, 14).

An allegory of language and dialogue

The fourth story encompasses parts of the other three, as it is about language, which plays a role in each form of contact between practitioners and parents. From the very beginning, practitioners in Centre B mentioned language to be a barrier in working with parents. Many parents did not speak Dutch and most practitioners had a limited knowledge of foreign languages. That is why a task group developed information sheets with pictures and translations in English, French, Arabic and Spanish. The coordinator explains:

“These sheets are a reassurance for every practitioner. They used to have a parent on the floor and they couldn’t communicate with him and then they got stuck … Now they have a file with a sheet for every item.”

In addition, the researchers organised a workshop where practitioners met foreign language speakers who had just started Dutch classes, so as to practice making conversations.

These actions gave practitioners the self-confidence to talk with parents on their opinions and expectations with regards to out-of-school care, something neither of the Centres had a habit of doing. These conversations with parents showed themselves crucial in developing opportunities for communication between parents and practitioners. On the level of meaning, practitioners no longer started from their feelings of uncertainty but from a curiosity about parents’ experiences and views.

“Sometimes you think parents are cold, they just say good morning, but when you have a conversation with them you learn more about them, about the situation in the family, about their children. They love to tell. And that’s why I changed my mind about two parents that I might have ‘judged’ a little earlier.”

Thus, a joint communicative space (Woelders and Abma 2019; Abma, Leyerzapf, and Landeweer 2016; Habermas 1984, 1987) was established. This new social practice changed actors, who became more aware of the importance of communication, as well as structures, that embedded more opportunities for formal and informal dialogue with all parents, regardless of their knowledge of Dutch.

Discussion

The four allegories we have described all show how practitioners succeeded in changing social practices with parents and thereby in changing their own behaviour as well as structural elements in their centres for out-of-school care: introducing a policy of learning names, changing the spatial arrangements in the picking-up spaces, changing the timing of opportunities to meet parents, creating time for joint reflection. At the start of the project, a lot of practitioners hoped that we would create a neat step-by-step plan to strengthen the contacts with parents, as was the main purpose of our research. But by the end of it, they all realised that ‘the swamp of practice’ (Andriessen 2013) is complex and that the crucial questions are also: What is a warmer relationship with parents? What is an improvement in the quality of the relationship with parents? Can you even talk about quality when it comes to caring for children and families?

During the project practitioners moved from ‘theories in use’ and a practical consciousness to ‘espoused theories’ and a discursive consciousness (Friedman and Rogers 2009; Argyris and Schön 1974; Giddens 1984). A lot of these theories were about parents, about what they would want to make time for or not, about what they would think important or about their being equal or not. By creating opportunities to discuss these assumptions about parents, gradually other aspects of the practitioners’ position and job became clear. We discovered how practitioners often felt confronted with rules and power structures that forced them to take up tasks without taking into account their possibilities and job circumstances. Thus, the espoused theory about a lack of time sometimes concealed a theory-in-use, namely ‘we do not agree with this action’. Creating shared communicative spaces (Woelders and Abma 2019; Abma, Leyerzapf, and Landeweer 2016; Habermas 1984, 1987), both with us researchers as with parents, enabled practitioners to discuss their thoughts and to bring about change together, in ways they felt compatible with their work load and with parents’ possibilities.

In this search for change, another theory-in-use came to the surface: some practitioners preferred unanimous decisions and did not like it when some colleagues fostered different opinions, even when they said they would not obstruct the actions. These counter-voices and the reactions to them enforced our reflections on the process of the action research and made it clear that team work always comprises a form of ambiguity. The shared communicative space then proved crucial, enabling discussions on the importance of unanimity and a search for alternative ways to involve colleagues who did not like some actions. They could join another task force, they could concentrate on working with children for a while, they could look for yet undiscovered ways to strengthen contacts with parents. In one of the movies about the project, two practitioners declared that their different opinions had enriched the process instead of obstructing it.

Constructing and reconstructing the allegories, we found the latter one, on the shared communicative spaces, to play a key role. These communicative spaces allowed practitioners and researchers to look into the dialectics between praxis and practice (Kemmis and Mc Taggart 2000; Kemmis 2008) and to reflect on their actions and on the structures they are situated in, as well as on the joint social practices. Moreover, they brought about the structural change of planning more time for reflection. For our research, these spaces revealed that during an action research the researchers’ reflection does not suffice to bring about changes nor does reflection by participants. It was only when the researchers’ reflections met those of the teams that the cycle of reproducing the structures could be broken. This enforces not only the participative and democratic nature of action research but also the importance of this type of research in general.

Next to this key role, we saw one common change in all four of the allegories: practitioners gained self-consciousness and no longer saw their job as a ‘necessary evil’. They also became aware of the values they foster in their job: kindness, generosity and compassion, but also fairness and equality. By the end of the project, practitioners spontaneously considered whether possible actions would meet these values.

One allegory for the road

In conclusion, change became possible through a dialectics between actions to involve parents and joint reflection between practitioners and researchers on these actions and the contexts they were happening in. Each of the four allegories shows one way in which these dialectics occurred. Looking over these allegories, a fifth one comes to surface, telling the story of the researchers. On the level of actions, we were often struggling to keep the process going, when a task group was delayed, when practitioners resigned and were replaced, when practical issues hindered us to try new actions, when it was difficult to moderate reflective sessions. On the level of meaning, we were struggling with translating the theory of action research to the specific context of the out-of-school care centres. Theories of action research assume that participants have enough self-confidence to step into a cycle of trial and error and dare to inhabit the little discretionary space a structure is providing. None of this was the case in the out-of-school care centres. This brought us to give less attention to the theory and focus more on the peculiarities of the structure, thereby almost preventing change. Looking back, the dialectics between action research theory and the context did make changes possible.

In this allegory, time again played a role. The mere continuance of the project and the time we spent together with the practitioners, sometimes just being there, created the opening for the shared communicative space. There and then we could, inspired by Aldridge (2017) find suitable ways of project planning (written on posters on the wall) and documenting actions (in booklets, or by taking notes and photographs ourselves), for reflection (by playing games) and for analysing the process and making our analysis accessible through the allegorical stories. Thus, our research story could come to a happy end, in four allegories and this extra one. So along with Reason and Bradbury (2008, 5) what we’ve learned ‘is the result of the transformation of our experience in conversation with both self and others that allows us consistently to create useful actions that leave us and our co-inquirers stronger’. We hope that this article might also be read as the allegory of our growth within action research as a method and of our growth as researchers and human beings, through action research.

Acknowledgments

We want to thank the co-ordinators, practitioners, the parents and the children from the two out-of-school care centres. We also want to thank our colleague Sarah Vorsselmans, pedagogic coach.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

PWO (Practice-oriented research) projects—competitive internal funding Karel de Grote University of Applied Sciences and Arts.