Evaluating Quality in Doing and Writing Action Research in Schools,
Neighbourhoods and Communities
This interactive course provides opportunities for
beginning and experienced action researchers, studying and teaching on higher
degree programmes, to explore issues of quality and validity in designing,
doing, and writing action research. Specifically, it focuses on assessing
quality in the three related areas of what counts as (a) quality practice; (b)
quality research; (c) a quality report. Participants will explore the kinds of
values-based criteria and standards of judgement appropriate for judging
quality in action research and the validity of research claims, and how these
can be communicated effectively through written and multimedia reports. The
course itself will take the form of doing action research, as participants ask,
‘How do I~we improve my~our practice?’ (where ‘~’ indicates transformational
potential), and show the dynamic relationships between
their values and research-based practices. Using a range of data gathering
techniques, including video, to communicate the experience of the course, they
will be able to test the validity of their claims to achieving quality in
practice-based research, and explain the transformational potentials of their
living theories of educational influence for sustainable local and global
wellbeing. Participants will be encouraged to explore how the most advanced
social theories of the day can be integrated within the living theories of
individuals, working collectively.
The idea of self-study action research is well
established globally as a powerful means of professional education, with
potential transformational influence for sustainable communities of practice at
school, neighbourhood and global levels. What is not so well established are
the means of making judgements about the quality of the research and the
practice in which it is grounded, or of the accounts produced to offer
descriptions and explanations for the research, in the form of the living
theories that practitioners produce as they research their practices.
Establishing this quality has important implications for claiming validity for
the research claims, which can be further strengthened through the production
of high quality research accounts. The course therefore focuses on how quality
can be judged in practice-based research and the reports it generates. The
course will explore the potentials of transforming the values that underpin the
practice into relationally-dynamic standards of judgement that can be used to
assess quality and the validity of research claims and research accounts. It
will also explore ideas to do with individuals’ transformational educational
influences through the production of their living theories of educational
practice as their contributions to a critically-oriented public knowledge base
(Snow 2001).
This proposal is for a one-day course that will enable
50 participants, working collaboratively, to:
· explore the potentials of asking critical questions about their practice
as they ask, ‘How do I~we improve my~our practice?’ (Whitehead 1989);
· produce their own living theories of practice to show and explain how
they have done so;
· engage in their action enquiries, through their experience of the
course, and test their emerging claims to knowledge against the critical
feedback of other course participants who are similarly engaged;
· explore ideas to do with their potentials for educational influence in
their own learning, and the learning of colleagues, with transformational
implications for the education of the social formations in which they live and
work;
· investigate what counts as a quality report, as they produce their
individual and collaborative accounts of the experience of the course, and
submit them to the critical evaluation of others, focusing especially on the
procedures they have developed to enable them to claim quality for their practice
and research, validity for their research claims, and communicability for their
research accounts;
· use the internet to bring their learning back to their own contexts, and
to develop neighbourhood and global networks of educational influence.
By the end of the course, therefore, participants will
be able to:
The organization for this course is grounded in key
theoretical frameworks. Overarching frameworks draw on the work of Whitehead
(1989) and Whitehead & McNiff (2006), about the living nature of
educational enquiry; the work of McNiff (2007) about the generative
transformational nature of educational relationships; and the work of Biesta
(2006) on educational responsibility. These broad frameworks embed secondary
frameworks, which are themselves in a dynamic transformational relationship in
the generation of living educational theories:
The course will take the form of an interactive
workshop, with group and pair work, personal and small group presentations,
mini-lectures, mini-writing and reading sessions, demonstrations using video,
role-play, and performance. Participants will be invited to engage
interactively throughout the day in investigating their understanding of their
practice as they explore the potentials of conducting an action enquiry, that
focuses on the production of their claim to know their practice as they ask,
‘How do I~we improve what I~we are doing?’ Especially they will focus on
demonstrating and testing the validity of their claims to knowledge, through
the production of evidence whose quality they can test on the spot against the
critical feedback of their peers, acting as critical friends and validation
groups. They will experiment with different forms of data gathering, including
video recording, and negotiate values-based standards for generating evidence
and judging its quality in relation to their knowledge claims. They will also
experiment with different forms of reporting, including the production of video
narratives, and justify their choice of form of representation and its content
as demonstrating communicative adequacy. They will test the quality of their
research and their form of communication through mini-presentations to other participants
acting as validation groups and peer referees.
Participants need a working knowledge of the
principles and practices of action research. They need to be committed to
engaging in participative forms of enquiry, a willingness to experiment with
innovative forms of thinking, an openness to the risk of making their
experimental thinking public and testing their provisional claims to knowledge,
and a general capacity for open forms of thinking and the development of new
epistemologies. The action reflection procedure we use includes a process of
adaptation to different backgrounds and needs. We have experience of responding
to groups that include beginning researchers, individuals and groups on masters enquiries, and individuals and groups exploring
doctoral research programmes.
Course materials will be made
available in the form of
Information and materials will be made available on
the websites www.actionresearch.net
and www.jeanmcniff.com
in advance of the course, and potential participants alerted through
communication via e-lists and established self-study action research networks.
The course syllabus will provide a systematic
framework for the day, as participants work through the following critical
questions:
Activities will be organised according to the plan for the day (see Appendix 1). We will prepare a course booklet for participants, which will include the day’s action plan. We place the action plan in this course outline for comprehensiveness, and to show the kind of participant-friendly materials we will distribute at the beginning of the course.
The course will be organized and conducted by Jean
McNiff and Jack Whitehead. A summary of their capacity and expertise follows.
Jean is an independent researcher, working with
schools, agencies, and higher education institutions in international contexts.
She has wide practical experience of conducting workshops and seminars in how
to do and evaluate action research, as well as in teaching creative academic
writing for publication. She has worked in Canada, Iceland, India, Ireland,
Israel, Northern Ireland, Palestine, the People’s Republic of China, Italy,
South Africa, and the United Kingdom. She is currently active in Ireland, where
she supports the workplace enquiries of teachers working with the National
Centre for Guidance in Education, and the doctoral enquiries of practitioners
at the University of Limerick, where she is adjunct professor; in Iceland,
where she works with higher education personnel on teacher professional
education programmes for higher degree accreditation; in South Africa, where
she supports the masters degree programmes of thirteen teachers in a township
near Cape Town, as well as supporting the action enquiries of a group of ten
higher education practitioners at the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University
(where she is a research associate) as they supervise the higher degree studies
of teachers; and in the United Kingdom, where she is a part-time professor of
educational research at St Mary’s University College, supporting the masters
and doctoral enquiries of ten members of staff. These practical activities are
in turn supported by her writings. She produces her own educational writing
that offers a systematic account of her theorizing as she seeks systematically
to improve her work and learning, as well as textbooks, written collaboratively
with Jack Whitehead. These textbooks are used widely on higher degree courses
around the world, and have proven influential in
disseminating ideas and establishing the legitimacy of self-study forms of
educational action research for demonstrating accountability in personal and
social practices. She is active in delivering workshops and lectures around the
world.
Jack’s educational research programme at the University of Bath has focused on the development of the living educational theories of individuals and the development of appropriate action research methods for enquiries of the kind, ‘How do I improve what I am doing?’ His Presidential Address to the British Educational Research Association was on research-based professionalism in education and this is consistent with the form and content of the workshop. He has organised similar workshops in Japan, China, Ireland, Canada, the US, the UK and in South Africa. He pioneered the use of visual narratives in research degrees at the University of Bath. He is a former distinguished scholar in residence of Westminster College Utah and a visiting professor at China’s Experimental Centre for Educational Action Research in Foreign Language Teaching at Ningxia Teachers University. His award winning web-site http://www.actionresearch.net is an international resource for practitioner-researchers. It includes examples of the beginners, masters and doctoral accounts he has supervised at the University of Bath. He is the convenor of the 2007-8 British Educational Research Association Practitioner-Researcher SIG e-seminar on What standards of judgement do we use in evaluating the quality of the educational knowledge and educational theories we are creating as practitioner-researchers? He is a founder member of the AERA Self-Study of Teacher Education Practices SIG and of the BERA Practitioner-researcher SIG.
Bateson, G. (1972) Steps
to an Ecology of Mind. New York, Dutton.
Berlin, I. (1998) The
Proper Study of Mankind: an Anthology of Essays.
London, Pimlico.
Biesta,
G. J. J. (2006) Beyond Learning;
Democratic Education for a Human Future. Boulder, Paradigm Publishers.
Buber, M. (1937) I and Thou. Edinburgh,
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Chomsky, N. (1986) Knowledge of Language: Its Origin, Nature and Use.
New York, Praeger.
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(ed.) Power/Knowledge: Selected
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Fromm, E. (1956) The Art of
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McNiff, J. (2007) ‘My story is my living educational theory’ in D.J.
Clandinin (ed.) Handbook of Narrative Inquiry:
Mapping a Methodology. Thousand Oaks, Sage, pp 308–329.
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Snow, C. (2001) ‘Knowing what we know: children,
teachers, researchers’ in Educational
Researcher, 30 (7): 3–9. Presidential Address to the American Educational
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Whitehead, J. (1989) ‘Creating a Living Educational
Theory from Questions of the Kind, “How do I improve my practice?”’, Cambridge Journal of Education, 19 (1):
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Whitehead, J. (2004) ‘What counts as Evidence in the
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Hamilton, V. K. LaBoskey and T. Russell (eds) International Handbook of Self-Study of Teaching and Teacher Education
Practices. Dordrecht, Kluwer Academic Publishers.
Whitehead, J. and McNiff, J. (2006) Action Research: Living Theory. London,
Sage.
Zimmerman, M. E., Callicott, J. B., Sessions, G., Warren, K. H. and
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Part I of the workshop will focus on how to do action research to generate new claims to knowledge, and making decisions about judging the quality of those claims and validating them, prior to putting them in the public domain.
Part II will focus on making decisions about how to write reports about those claims, and how to judge the quality of those reports.
8am–8.30am Introduction to the day
Welcome!
What the course is about
Please write down in your reflective diary what you hope to get out of this workshop. Tell your neighbour. Say why it is important that you get this. Report back to the whole group.
Think about this
Evaluating something means making a judgement about its worth. We make prospective judgements about the quality of a coat before we purchase it, and retrospective judgements about the quality of a television programme when we have watched it. These judgements enable us to decide whether or not we will commit to the thing, i.e. purchase the coat, or comment favourably on the programme.
We ask:
9.00am–10.30am Doing action research (Refer to Worksheet
1)
For this exercise, think of the values involved in action research. This means engaging in the experience of doing action research.
Please do the following:
Please respond in your reflective diary to these questions:
10.30am–11.00am (BREAK)
11.00am Reconvene
11.00am–11.45pm Group discussion/presentations
Now tell the group the story of the research you have just done. Explain to your small group how you can make judgements about (1) the quality of the practice, (2) the quality of the research. Use these questions as prompts:
We shall ask for two individuals to talk to the whole group about the research project they have just undertaken. The whole group will act as a validation panel, to make judgements about the quality of the practice, the research, and the account.
Points for discussion
12.30pm–1.30pm BREAK FOR LUNCH
1.30pm Reconvene
1.30pm–2.15pm Reflective activity
Please remind your neighbour of what you did in Part I, and what you learned.
Please write a brief report on what you did and what you learned (about half a side of office paper). Please use your reflective diary to do this. Use the following points to guide your writing.
Action research reports are distinguished mainly by the following
features
Please discuss the ideas above with your neighbour. Do you agree with what you have read? What further points can you add?
2.15pm–3.00pm Exercise
Now, please read Worksheet 2. Working in twos, tell you neighbour which of the two accounts is, in your opinion, a better quality research report. Why? What standards have you used to judge the quality of the report?
How do you judge the quality of the communicative adequacy of the report? Think about Habermas’s (1976) four criteria for judging communicative validity. He says that a speech (or writing) act needs to demonstrate the following qualities:
Does the report you are reading stand up to these validity tests?
Six pairs of volunteers to report back to the whole group.
Can we consider these issues:
4.00pm–4.30pm Evaluation: self evaluation, course evaluation
Evaluating the
quality of your research-based practice during this workshop
Please tell your neighbour:
Where do we go from here? How will we ensure that we remain in touch as a support group? How will we disseminate our accounts of practice?
Farewell!
Worksheet 1
I began my research project in April 2007, and continued until September 2007. I was investigating how I could raise examinations scores in maths in my primary school. I decided to work with ten children from Class AB who were achieving the lowest scores in progress tests.
I gave them a pre-test to see what their level of ability was. Their scores indicated that they needed additional help in areas of basic numeracy, so I set about teaching a programme that would enable them to learn key skills. I focused primarily on the areas of addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. The programme lasted for six weeks, after which I gave them a post-test. The post-test showed that their scores had improved. I therefore decided to continue with the programme, and set periodic tests.
I began my research project in April 2007, and continued until September 2007. I was investigating how I could find ways of raising examinations scores in maths in my primary school. Mathematical literacy is a curriculum priority area, along with reading literacy, both of which are key skills in enabling primary school children to make a head start in education, and I needed to find ways of helping children to improve their capacity in these areas. I decided to work with ten children from Class AB who were achieving the lowest scores in progress tests because I believe that it is my responsibility to ensure that all children achieve their maximum educational potential in school. I wanted to find ways of enabling them to achieve to the best of their ability.
I gave them a pre-test to see what their level of ability
was. Their scores indicated that they needed additional help in areas of basic
numeracy, so I set about teaching a programme that would enable them to learn
key skills. Becoming proficient in key skills would, I reasoned, give them a
basis for the development of more refined skills as their learning progressed.
I focused primarily on the areas of addition, subtraction, multiplication and
division, basic computation skills that are essential for mathematical
literacy. The programme lasted for six weeks, after which I gave them a
post-test, to see whether they had improved their level of attainment. The
post-test showed that their scores had improved, so I reasoned that my
intervention was successful in achieving my pedagogical values. I therefore
decided to continue with the programme, and set
periodic tests to assess learning progress.