Action Research A Methodology for Change and Development

ACTION RESEARCH AND INNOVATIVE PEDAGOGIES WITH ICT 179
In the design of PELRS we sought to work with teachers as coresearchers
rather than asking them to take the leading research role and
providing external facilitation and support. Primarily this was because we
started with a strong vision of the possibilities for transforming the learning
process with ICT and the knowledge that most previous research into
ICT use in which teachers had taken a leading role had focused on ways of
using ICT more effectively to support traditional pedagogy rather than
using it to support the introduction of new pedagogic practices (Sutherland
et al. 2004; Ruthven et al. 2005). We believed this was because teachers,
encultured by the education system into practices they had developed and
refined through experience, would inevitably be agents of cultural reproduction.
We started with the intention to intervene in existing practices
and question prevailing assumptions and experiment with possibilities and
we recruited teachers who were interested in working with us to this end.
Two of the schools we originally approached had very strong traditions for
innovatory uses of ICT, two others were participants in an education action
zone, which had a vision for technology as a means for transforming education
and had created the role of ‘ICT innovator’ for selected teachers, the
fifth, recruited to replace one that had dropped out, was a school where the
head wished ICT to be a key driver in the school’s success and saw
the project as a means of strengthening its proposal to become a specialist
technology college.
The second reason for wanting to work with teachers as co-researchers,
rather than facilitating their research, was our consciousness of the extraordinary
pressures under which teachers now work in England, compared
with their work conditions at the time of the PALM project (see Chapter 4).
It made sense to suggest that we should work in partnership, developing as
far as possible a culture of equity and dialogue between ‘insiders’ and
Matthew and myself, and consciously dividing up responsibilities for each
stage of the research so that teachers could participate and exercise some
control without having to take on too much additional work. First, we
developed a draft framework for innovative pedagogy and then discussed
and adapted this with the teachers before working with them to develop
further frameworks with specific themes (‘pupils as teachers’; ‘pupils as producers
of media’; ‘learning on-line’). The teachers then took a leading role
in planning and implementing a learning event with the children, on an
aspect of the curriculum of their choice, using one of the pedagogic framework
themes. Matthew collected data having first consulted teachers on the
specific areas of focus and the kinds of data likely to be most useful (usually
involving videoing the learning event as it took place, conducting brief,
informal interviews with pupils while they worked, and consulting/interviewing
pupil researchers in focused follow-up sessions). From the very
extensive data collected, Matthew selected video-clips and key points from
interviews with pupils (with the pupils’ help) and presented these to their