What is Action Research?
Action Research Introduction
Jean McNiff
McNiff, J (2022) ‘Action Research: Introduction the first edition’. Available at: https://www.jeanmcniff.com/ar-booklet.asp (Accessed at: 30th September)
- ‘Encourages practitioners to be in control of their own lives and contexts’
- ‘Principles:
the need for justice and democracy
the right of all people to speak and be heard
the right of the individual to show how and why they have given extra attention to their learning in order to improve their work
the deep need to experience truth and beauty in our personal and professional lives’
- ‘Researchers do research on themselves’
- Why – actions and being
‘Why you do the things you do’
‘Why you are the way you are’
- ‘It is a strategy to help you live in a way that you feel is a good way’
Like living into your values
- Stages of the process:
‘Identifying a problematic issue
imagining a possible solution
trying it out
evaluating it
changing practice in light of the evaluation’
Design
Gather
Analyse
Practice
- ‘The meaning it has for you emerges as you do the research and explain what you are doing and why you are doing it.’
- ‘We all share and value one another’s learning.’
- Improve
‘Improve what you are doing ‘
‘Improve your understanding of what you are doing’
- ‘Influence on the people you are working with’
- ‘Are you really influencing your situation or are you fooling yourself?’
- ‘Accept responsibility for your own thinking and action’
- Process shapes:
‘A series of cycles’
‘Processes of developing practice’
‘A zig-zag process of continual review and re-adjustment’
‘Expanding spiral’
- ‘For me, all open-ended systems have the potential to transform themselves into richer versions of themselves. Humans and human interactions, by the fact that they are living, are open systems.’
- Action research can help us make sense of our lives.
- We need to move beyond the surface structure of method (although this is still important) and look at the deep underlying structure of our values and intentions in living our lives.
- Values
‘Action research begins with values.’
‘Sometime we say we believe in something, but we are unable to live according to what we believe for a variety of reasons.’
‘A point of entry for action research would be to find ways of overcoming the contradiction so that we might live more fully in the direction of our values.’
Integration
- Proof
‘You can’t prove anything. The word ‘prove’ does not exist in action research. You can however produce reasonable evidence to suggest that what you feel happened really did happen, and you are not just making it up.’
- Criteria
‘Traditional scholarship to new scholarship.’
‘Technical criteria and qualitative, experiential ones, such as whether people can relate to and learn from your report.’
- Critical friends
- Validation group
- ‘In action research, practitioners take responsibility for their own work and negotiate their own criteria’
- ‘Learning as a lifelong process that is as natural as breathing.’
- ‘One of the strengths of action research is that it begins in practice, and people generate their own theories out of their practice. Actions researchers are real people in real situations.’