Mary McAteer

The CARN/ARNA Inaugural Study Day Inquiry: What Happens to Action Research after the Master's Degree?.

The Collaborative Action Research Network (CARN) held its first American study day on the east coast of the United States in conjunction with the Action Research Network of the Americas (ARNA) 2014 conference in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, USA. Study day participants visited three American secondary schools, one each in Pennsylvania, New York, and New Jersey, where graduates of Moravian College’s action-research based Master of Education program explained how action research continued to guide his or her professional practice after the awarding of the master’s degree credential. While continuing to embrace action research in different ways within their respective contexts, the host teachers continued the process of developing new insights from their inquiries, while the public dissemination of their research occurred within – rather than beyond – their respective secondary school communities. To exert influence beyond these local contexts, however, teacher researchers and their university-based tutors are encouraged to continue their collaboration after the master’s degree to work toward greater dissemination of ongoing teacher research contexts and findings.

The Collaborative Action Research Network: Historical and Philosophical Perspectives

The Palgrave International Handbook of Action Research offers a vivid portrait of both theoretical perspectives and practical action research activity.

Maintaining a Network of Critical Connections over Time and Space: The Case of CARN, the Collaborative Action Research Network

Here, three members of Collaborative Action Research Network (CARN)’s Co-ordinating Group reflect on CARN’s history as a developing network. We outline its philosophical and value-based underpinnings and its growth across different professional and practice contexts. We present a narrative of change, tracing tensions over its governance, its response to crisis, its intent to embrace diversity, and, more recently, the challenges posed by upholding its values in a world increasingly dominated by market forces and computer-mediated communications. We discuss these in relation to the CARN Study Day scheme and our recent action research consultation with members and supporters. Despite the amplification of offline hegemony in the online world, we argue that networks such as CARN have distinctive insights for developing new communicative spaces that combine virtual with face-to-face contact.

‘Just thinking about stuff’: reflective learning: Jane’s story

Reflection as a practice development strategy is an integral part of many professional development programmes. This paper documents and explores the reflection occurring at a range of levels as part of an action research study for an MA Education final dissertation. Triggered by reflective discussions that took place between Jane (the teacher and MA student) and her pupils, and Jane and Mary (the MA tutor), the paper explores and articulates the potency of reflection as a shared and collaborative activity. Drawing on the Ghaye and Ghaye typology for reflection, analysis of the challenges and benefits of helping her students to reflect on their own learning was to show unexpected outcomes on their achievement. As Jane articulated, ‘In order to learn, there is more at play than the transference of subject based knowledge. Good teaching involves helping students to recognise how they can learn and make sense of their experiences.’

How are action researchers contributing to knowledge democracy? A global perspective

ABSTRACT Although action research has been widely recognized as an appropriate methodology for promoting the democratization of knowledge, it is not always conducted from an emancipatory and transformative paradigm. Using AR in a technical way, renders it no more than a researcher-driven, problem-solving heuristic that perpetuates the intellectual colonization of local knowledge. This begs the question: how can action researchers work in ways that are contextually and culturally relevant, and generate knowledge that enables people to take control of improving their own lives as they see fit? This paper presents a thematic analysis of the narrative reports from seven participatory workshops held around the world for the purpose of dialoging around this and related questions. Findings indicate that, generally, action researchers are indeed facing challenges on many personal, institutional and epistemic levels as they endeavor to promote knowledge derived from the principles of authentic participation and dialogue with those whom it is intended to benefit. However, the analysis also reveals creative responses of practitioners to these challenges. In keeping with the special issue theme, we offer this analysis as a starting point for further discussion around how we can mobilize knowledge for equitable social progress.

Levelling the Playing Fields in PAR: The Intricacies of Power, Privilege, and Participation in a University–Community–School Partnership:

When academics, who occupy a traditional position of power and privilege, engage with community members whose thinking, attitudes, and responses have been shaped by ongoing sociohistorical oppression and disadvantage, democratic participation is not easy to attain. Yet, unless community members feel able to participate freely, the valuable local knowledge they bring to the project will be lost and the learning will again be based on theories that may have little relevance for them. We explain how power relations can be leveled through the utilization of specific strategies within a participatory action research design. Seven community members and five teachers collaborated to develop a program that the community members would later use to educate parents about how to better support their children academically. Informed by a qualitative analysis of visual and textual data generated in several working sessions for this project, findings indicate that, while the flattening of power relations is an ongoing and complex task, specific strategies can be used to “level the playing fields” and negotiate the intricacies of power, privilege, and participation.

To Believe, To Think, To Know…To Teach? Ethical Deliberation in Teacher-Education

In this chapter, we wish to summarise our recent work on promoting and developing ethical deliberation in teacher-education (TE). We first provide some background to our personal interest in the role that ethics and moral philosophy can potentially play in TE, before briefly summarising the philosophical and theoretical frameworks through which we have approached the topic. Next, we outline the various research methods and trials that we employed in exploring, first, the demand for, and, second, the most effective ways of promoting and developing ethical deliberation in TE. Finally, we highlight and reflect upon the difficulties that we experienced in employing the (almost default) methods of role-play and dialectic, and recommend the consideration of what we call meta-discussion as a valuable tool for developing ethical deliberation.