Anne Burns: The potential of action research for telling classroom stories
Submitted by Elena Oncevska on Wed, 2010-04-07 18:24
The main focus of Anne's presentation was on how to conduct an action research inspired by a critical incident in a narrative from our own teaching practice. Arguably, reflection-on-action can lead to more practical and better-structured research and more articulated theories on what practice means.
Action research involves a self-reflective, systematic and critical approach to enquiry by participants who are at the same time members of the research community. It functions as a planning-acting-reflecting/observing cycle, its basic characteristics being: focusing on a particular situation, establishing a dialogue, intervening deliberately into a situation and collecting data systematically (as opposed to unstructured and/or informal reflection). Action research, as Anne put it, ‘tests practical knowledge and theory by feeding them back into changes in the teacher’s practice’.
The session featured examples of real action research narratives, which served as an invitation for all to externalise and supply some structure to their reflections and follow up on them with appropriate action in order to produce a personalised professional narrative.
1 April 2010
2 years 6 weeks
Indeed an interesting topic. I would like to get more details on the actions in the classrooms using stories...
5 March 2010
2 years 4 weeks
Surendragohil,
Many thanks for your comment. In this presentation the very classroom research (its findings and proposed solutions) has the force of a narrative - i.e. a research story.