I enjoy photography and was struck recently by a series of photographs of blackboards showing very faint chalk writings and drawings. The photographer presented his work under the theme of The Impermanence of Knowledge. His accompanying story referred to knowledge once writ large but inevitably wiped clean. While I think he wanted to emphasise the more romantic idea of knowledge being refreshed, it struck me as a rather apt metaphor for the way we in local government often manage our knowledge. The only difference is that the blackboard has been replaced by the ubiquitous PowerPoint presentation! 

The aptness of the blackboard metaphor lies in its impermanence. I have been to many seminars, conferences, special interest group meetings and so on and seen presentations from local government practitioners. In most cases there is an evident passion and energy driving the desire to share valuable practical wisdom. Momentarily the white screen is bursting with knowledge, but the session inevitably concludes, the PowerPoint presentation evaporates and an empty white screen prepares itself for another impermanent experience.  

The small group of people who saw the presentation were lucky enough to receive and interact with the knowledge, but where is that knowledge one month, one year or one decade later and is it in a form that can be applied effectively? As a sector I believe one of our key knowledge challenges is to care more about ensuring the value, endurance and availability of knowledge. If we do not care enough about what we know and understand, we will not create a sufficient and permanent legacy of knowledge and insights about our practice. 

I am sure that the French philosopher, sociologist and anthropologist Pierre Bourdieu had local government in mind when he observed 'Practice has a logic which is not that of logic'.¹ Certainly the idea resonates with many in local government in Australia (and probably beyond) given the uniqueness of the sector as a level of government. And while there are many fora for sharing knowledge and insights about practice within this unusual tier of government, they are all too often defined by their impermanence and not strongly enough buttressed by disciplines to strengthen the robustness, endurance and availability of the knowledge.  

I am not suggesting that nothing is happening in the sector in relation to knowledge creation and retention. There are a number of activities such as the development of guides and toolkits by peak sector bodies as well as regional groups of councils doing research drawn from practitioner knowledge and published through various means. Some in the sector are involved in the more traditional forms of academic research and do have work published in theses and journals. However there remain many untapped opportunities.

I would argue that practitioner research is able to make a strong and distinctive contribution to knowledge for three key reasons. First is its inherent capacity to explore, describe and explain from the viewpoint of the lived experience of practice. This tends to give practitioner research a well‐grounded and practical sense, focused on informing practice and decision‐making.²

Secondly, because it has the potential to be '…a form of inquiry that is collective, collaborative, self-reflective [and] critical....'³ it helps to build and sustain professional communities of interest who have a genuine commitment to self-examination and learning. Thirdly, practitioner research is characteristically inclusive of many avenues of inquiry.⁴ This means that knowledge from a diverse range of discovery activities such as conducting a program evaluation, undertaking and interpreting a community survey, developing a regional submission to another tier of government or writing a case study to be shared at a conference, can become, when combined with a measure of review and permanence, part of the knowledge legacy of the sector. Enter the Australian Centre of Excellence for Local Government (ACELG). 

The remit of ACELG is to enhance professionalism and skills in local government, showcase innovation and best practice, and facilitate a better‐informed policy debate. The knowledge, understanding and insights of practitioners are critical to this mandate. It is a commitment of ACELG to encourage and support practitioners to record their practice in a variety of different ways and to provide opportunities/platforms to develop, share and retain this knowledge. Some of this work has already been undertaken.  

However right now ACELG is shaping a specific program to encourage practitioner research and is looking at what resources can be marshalled to better enable practitioners from the sector to develop their ideas and insights using a diverse frame of applied research approaches. The intention is to support a wide range of research outputs. We are considering a variety of strategies such as:  

• A mentoring program to assist practitioners to develop and structure ideas
• Staging small‐scale research forums especially for practitioners to discuss and present their work
• Publication of practitioner papers on ACELG websites to ensure their availability across the sector
• Assistance from a practical, plain English guide which describes approaches to developing and documenting research.

¹ P. Bourdieu (1990) as cited by B. Flyvbjerg, Making Social Science Matter: Why Social Inquiry Fails and How it Can Succeed Again (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
² W. Lawrence Neuman James, Social Research Methods: Qualitative and Quantitative Approaches, 4th ed (Needham Heights, Massachusetts: Allyn & Bacon, 2000).
³ G. McCutcheon and B. Jung, "Alternative Perspectives on Action Research," Theory into Practice, 29(3) (1990): 144‐51.
⁴ Cochran‐Smith and Lytle (1999) as cited by C. P. Lim and H. M. Cheah, "Situating Practitioner Research in Future Schools." In Research by Practitioners for Practitioners: A Schoolis Journey into the Future, ed. L. Y. Tay et al. (Singapore: Pearson, 2010), 2-14.

Tim Robinson is Director, Sector Engagement and Teaching at the UTS Centre for Local Government, and UTS’s representative to the ACELG Research Advisory Committee.   This think piece was originally published in July 2012 to initiate discussion on how practitioner research might be encouraged and supported by ACELG.

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