Action Research A Methodology for Change and Development

5 Action Research for
Organizational Development
in Higher Education 1
What are the processes for managing change in higher education? How
does an organization with traditions of academic freedom respond to a new
government policy for teacher education? Can action research support the
processes of change more effectively if senior managers and professors carry
out action research into their own role as change agents? In 1989, while I
was still working on the PALM Project but aware that my contract would be
coming to an end the following year, I heard about the newly published
Trotter Report on Information Technology in Initial Teacher Education
(DES 1989a) at the Association for IT in Teacher Education (ITTE) conference.
The Trotter committee had been set up after an education minister
had been embarrassed by roars of laughter when he announced at a conference
that newly qualified teachers, skilled in using information technology
(IT), would be able to take the lead when they took up their first teaching
posts in schools. The report confirmed suspicions that the provision of
training in how to use IT for pre-service teachers was generally poor,
‘patchy’ at best. Reading the report in detail I found that it included a recommendation
that ‘NCET should take steps to expand and broaden the
advice and assistance that it offers to initial teacher education institutions,
especially in the area of staff development’ (DES 1989a: 22). Knowing a lot
about the challenges and possibilities that the IT innovation was posing for
schools, I was interested in looking at the same innovation in the very different
context of teacher education. I went home and wrote a proposal to
NCET outlining an action research project to explore how to support the
development of IT in teacher education. I received no response for several
months. The Trotter report attracted considerable interest among policy
makers however, and as a result, new guidelines for teacher education produced
by the Council for Accreditation in Teacher Education (CATE)
included requirements for all newly qualified teachers to be able to:
1 I would like to thank the 14 members of the Project INTENT team with whom I worked for
their enormous contribution to the ideas contained in this chapter.