Action Research A Methodology for Change and Development

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ACTION RESEARCH FROM THE INSIDE: A TEACHER’S EXPERIENCE 87 mous amount of evidence embedded in day-on-day experience, which is available to the teacher – or any other professional – to confirm the findings emerging from action research. This breadth of evidence is never available to the researcher coming in from outside; but its usefulness to ‘insiders’ in terms of knowledge generation is relatively low until some involvement in systematic research provides key leads and markers to make its meanings visible. Partnership seems the critically important feature of action research. Indeed, partnership seems an inevitable result of engaging in action research, in the sense that it fundamentally changes all one’s relationships. Initially, it is true, my study of poetry was very much a lone venture, but it resulted in very fundamental changes in my relationships with my pupils. By the end of the study it would be much truer to call them partners in the research rather than informants. Ethically, I think that the time I spent on research while I was teaching them was well justified, because as I learnt more about the pedagogical process I was able to feed back this new knowledge immediately into changes designed to bring about improvements in their learning experiences. In terms of my deliberate intention to intervene in the processes of power and decision making in the school as a whole, I am a little less certain in claiming ethical justification. When the Head of Maths said he was uneasy about my research because it ‘has become a piece of Parkside’ he was pointing to something I had intended to happen. I had negotiated what I was doing with colleague at every stage, sought permission from the appropriate committees and, in effect, managed to put myself in the position of carrying out research semi-’commissioned’ by the school. Nevertheless, as the work evolved I found that, by undertaking this kind of participatory action research, I had much more potential power to affect change than I had anticipated and I was aware of an increasing responsibility to ensure that the intervention brought about benefits and caused no harm. I was very fortunate that I had already had some research training before I carried out this work, through studying full time for a year for an advanced diploma at the Cambridge Institute of Education. Such opportunities are no longer available to teachers today. Otherwise, however, there are many similarities between my experience of carrying out action research as a teacher and those of teachers and other professionals I know who are currently carrying out action research. It is not important to collect large amounts of data – what is important is to read, reread and interrogate two or three small bodies of data related to the same events and to use them to develop alternative explanatory theories that can be tested out in practice. My study of poetry was based, from memory, on two or three tape-recordings of lessons (80-minute periods), at most, and photocopies of pupils’ writing carried out as part of their normal school work. Once the recordings are on tape and the photocopies made, the time-consuming task of
88 ACTION RESEARCH transcribing can be carried out over a period of time. It is not necessary to transcribe everything, indeed often it is better to listen to the tapes several times and select three or four 10-minute sections for transcription and indepth analysis. Whether you are a teacher, a nurse, a teacher educator, a senior manager, a social worker, a police officer or any other professional, the rewards of working in this way are personally high and the value to the profession of knowledge generated by professionals, from the inside, is invaluable. For me, there was an outlet for publication in the CARN Bulletins, and for others carrying out similar work today there are journals like Educational Action Research (www.triangle.co.uk/ear/). There is an urgent need for more work of this kind to be published.
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ACTION RESEARCH A methodology for c
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Action Research: a Methodology for
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For Robert
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Acknowledgements I would like to th
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2 ACTION RESEARCH action research d
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4 ACTION RESEARCH research involvin
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6 ACTION RESEARCH groups. An import
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8 ACTION RESEARCH Action research i
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1 Agency, Change and the Generation
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AGENCY, CHANGE AND THE GENERATION O
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2 Doing Action Research Differently
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DOING ACTION RESEARCH DIFFERENTLY 3
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DOING ACTION RESEARCH DIFFERENTLY 3
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Research issues for the COMEX centr
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7 Action Research in the Evaluation
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ACTION RESEARCH IN THE EVALUATION O
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8 Action Research and Innovative Pe
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ACTION RESEARCH AND INNOVATIVE PEDA
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REFLECTIONS ON THE PROCESS OF WRITI
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REFLECTIONS ON THE PROCESS OF WRITI
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REFERENCES 201 Berge, B-M. and Ve,
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REFERENCES 203 Elliott, J. (1976) D
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REFERENCES 205 Groundwater-Smith, S
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REFERENCES 207 McClellend, D. (1978
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REFERENCES 209 Somekh, B. (1983) Tr
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REFERENCES 211 Taylor, F.W. (1992)
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Index academic-administrator tensio
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communicative validation 29-30, 78
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Freire, P. 33, 34, 39, 43, 50, 60 F
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James, A. 189 Jessel, J. 114 John R
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National Writing Project in England
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esearch question 96-7 residential t
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Thaler, M. 29, 149 themed framework
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Conducting Educational Research ser
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THE MORAL FOUNDATIONS OF EDUCATIONA
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