Guess what? It’s summer, July 2024, and the team is distracted doing summer things. So we are taking a little break this month before we sit down and get back into recording conversations with our upcoming guests for the episodes ahead. We also realized that we are in our fourth season, and we can now do what seasoned podcasters do: look back and share with you one of our team’s favorite past episodes.

With more than 30 episodes under our belt, this episode stands out to us from our first season that we recorded back on November 5th, 2020, during the height of the pandemic lockdown. And summer is a great time for reflection. With that, we give you, once again, Adam and Joe in Season 1 Episode 6’s discussion on “Reflexivity in Action Research with Dr. Lisa Starr”.

Thanks for tuning in, and now, onto our hosts.

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In this episode reprise, Adam and Joe have a conversation with Dr. Lisa Starr about the role of reflexivity in action research. To understand this complex topic, they discuss two chapters Lisa wrote using reflexive and autoethnographic methods. It just so happens (or was it more than a coincidence?) that Adam is working on the chapter in his dissertation in which he reflexively discusses his positionality, so he asks Lisa to share her expertise (12:34) on how to approach reflexivity in Action Research (15:51). Later in the episode, Joe asks Lisa about the frameworks to reflexively understand one's identity in her chapters (25:11).

If you are interested in the chapters mentioned in our podcast citations are below:

Starr, L.J. & Mitchell C. (2020, accepted for Publication). Traveling in Circles Along Roads Less Traveled in Awe of Open Spaces. In Mitchell, C, Giritli Nygren, K, Moletsane, R. (eds.) Where am I in the Picture? Researcher Positionality in Rural Studies. Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press

Starr, L.J. (2019). Locating who (I am) in what (I) do: An autoethnography encounter with relational curriculum. In T. Strong-Wilson, C. Ehret, D. Lewkowich & S. Chang Kredl (Eds.), Making/Unmaking Curriculum through Provoking Curriculum Encounters (pp. 103-115). William Pinar/Routledge for the Studies in Curriculum Theory series. New York, NY: Routledge.

In this episode, Adam and Cory co-host while Joe joins as our guest alongside Dr. Catherine Potvin. We learn about Catherine’s career as a biologist working on climate issues in solidarity with Indigenous communities. Together, Catherine and Joe explore their collaboration doing action research in both culturally grounded health care and education.

First, [2:50] Catherine and Joe center relationship-building with the Emberá community at the heart of their collaborations in Panama: it’s about persistence and long time presence. [5:02] Catherine shares an overview of her history working with Indigenous communities along with the deep shifts and re-orientations in her career: [6:24] “I realized I had everything wrong, like completely everything wrong. [...] I understood that if you want to keep the forest, you need to care for the people.”

Adam and Cory ask [7:50] about the contexts that inform the focus on reforestation and community empowerment and [11:27] the role of social scientists in working alongside biologists in these collaborations. [12:02] Dr. Potvin talks about the notion of reflexivity as “a total social science thing” and the importance of researchers positioning themselves in the work they do. She also talks about how important it has been to look at reforestation from an economics and training perspective, what Joe calls “learning for capacity building”. Their collaboration also helped support [16:20] a community-based collective decision-making process, and Joe names a few examples of its outcomes.

At this point, Joe [19:56] spends some time walking us through an understanding of culturally-grounded education and healthcare: It’s a “phenomenological pragmatist perspective” that asks [20:53] “How do we start from who we are and our experience, and then identify what matters to us?” Potvin [23:02] shares a few anecdotes from her experiences over the years of learning to approach climate science from a more culturally grounded approach, and some of the colonial systemic barriers that students and community members face.

Adam’s last big question [29:45] asks our guests: “To what extent are you identifying or acknowledging economic empowerment for the communities that you're working with in Panama as a way to conserve and preserve the community's Indigenous lifestyles and knowledge?” Potvin discusses [33:37] the need to “find a number of different economical pathways for women, for men, for youth, for elders that will allow them to live a decent life.” Joe brings the reality of “using resources from outside of the community, but also thinking about how to do that in a way that's circular and self-directed.” They both offer examples of projects from recent years.

Wrapping up, Cory and Adam share some takeaways and use the final moments to congratulate (and challenge) Potvin’s upcoming retirement. To which she responds, and we wanted to quote at length…

“You know, in ecology, when a tree falls, that's where the diversity of a forest gets recreated, right? Because there's all these new trees that will take the space of the old big tree, because the old big tree sucks up a lot of resources. And when it disappears, it creates opportunity for new trees, more adapted to the new reality to grow. So I think I see retirement that way, it's supporting and creating opportunities to go further than where I've been.”

Thank you both for sharing your work with us, and congratulations Dr. Potvin on your retirement!.

You can subscribe to our podcast on most major podcast distribution platforms, including Spotify and Apple Podcasts. Thanks for tuning in to this episode of the Action Research Podcast, created by Adam Stieglitz, Joe Levitan, Shikha Diwakar, Cory Legassic, and Vanessa Gold.

How have you found yourself in the world of action research? Want to be interviewed or share one of your projects? Get in touch with...

Adam and Joe sit down with Dr. Lisa Levinger, an educator with over 30 years of experience at all instructional levels. She also completed her PhD at Northeastern University in May of 2023 doing action research around poverty-induced trauma (PIT) and literacy. She is currently acting as the Dean of Literacy at a Diversity by Design charter school in Queens, New York.

To start, Adam and Joe spend some time getting to know Lisa [02:38] in our lightning round. We learn about a hidden talent, her connection to Adam, her recipe for good action research, and some quick advice for emerging grad action researchers.

Next [07:42], Adam and Joe dive into learning about poverty-induced trauma and how Lisa approaches literacy and action research: the contexts, the challenges and the insights. A key question that drives her work [13:37] is, “How do I teach teachers about poverty-induced trauma?” She describes what collaboration and co-creation looked like during the height of Covid and walks us through the shifts and iterative cycles [16:14] of her research. Levinger’s research focuses on helping teachers grapple with important questions that emerged in the action research process [16:47]:

• How do I think about poverty-induced trauma when I'm doing lesson plans?
• How do I select books that mirror the stories of the students in front of me?
• How do I plan for what I call pit stops—moments of reflection that ask, what's happening right now in your body? Have you ever felt this way before?

Adam [17:35] asks Lisa to outline in more detail her action research design process. She describes the methods in each cycle [18:29] as “an iterative process just like an onion that kept getting peeled away [...] and at the same time, there were all these beautiful layers that just kept being added…” Lisa elaborates her TallTales framework [19:40]—Trauma Aware Literacy Lessons, Teaching and Learning for Equity and Success—and [21:15] how she brought this work into her position as Dean. She follows up by sharing [22:56] the two major findings from this ongoing work: (1) how important it is to engage teachers in learning about PIT, and (2) how to define the TallTale framework specifications.

Finally, Joe [27:20] asks Lisa about the role of reflection and positionality in her research. She offers more advice: “If you're not in the kind of program that's asking you to reflect on your positionality for every course, just grab a journal and do it yourself, and think about who am I in this space, and what am I bringing to this story, and who are the people I'm selecting.” Lisa also circles back to earlier advice on how to keep the momentum going in your research and writing. She has the help of her [30:38] doctoral divas who cheerlead and check in on each other.

Thanks Dr. Levinger for sharing your work with us.

You can subscribe to our podcast on most major podcast distribution platforms, including Spotify and Apple Podcasts. Thanks for tuning in to this episode of the Action Research Podcast, created by Adam Stieglitz, Joe Levitan, Shikha Diwakar, Cory Legassic, and Vanessa Gold.

How have you found yourself in the world of action research? Want to be interviewed or share one of your projects? Get in touch with us.

Here are citations related to this discussion:

Levinger, L. (2023). For Teachers by Teachers: Cocreating a Literacy Framework with Educators to Serve Students with Poverty-Induced Trauma (Doctoral dissertation, Northeastern University).