Writing Up Your Action Research Project

Jean McNiff

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317573883
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Didattica
• Subtopic: Ricerca nella didattica

Many practice-based researchers have expert knowledge of doing research but often experience difficulties when writing it up and communicating the significance of what they have done. This book aims to help bridge the gap. Packed with practical advice and strong theoretical resources it takes you through the basics of designing and producing your text so that it will meet established standards and high quality assurance expectations.

Divided into 3 distinctive parts, key points include:

• 
  
  

• understanding writing practices
• engaging with the literatures
• how to write up a project report or dissertation
• how writing is judged in terms of professional and academic writing practices
• developing ideas for further study and publication

Writing up Your Action Research Project is an essential text for practitioners on professional education and undergraduate courses across disciplines who want their writing to reflect the excellence of their research. It is the ideal companion to the author's You and Your Action Research Project, now in its fourth edition.

Chapter 1 Prologue: what do I need to know about action research? Why do I need to know it?

DOI: 10.4324/9781315738499-2

This chapter acts by way of a prologue that sets the scene and provides important background information for the main story of the book. The main story is about writing up your action research project. The chapter works on the assumption that, if you want to write about action research, you first need to know what action research is, what it involves, how you do it, why you should do it, and what some of the benefits might be. The chapter is organised to cover all these points. It offers, in summarised form, the main issues from the companion book You and Your Action Research Project.

At a minimum, you need to know the following:

• what is involved in doing action research;
• how to do action research;
• why you should do action research, and some of the implications involved.

These issues become the content of the chapter. After this chapter, the focus changes to writing.

First, however, you need to think about the aim of doing any kind of research, including action research. Here are some ideas.

The aim of doing any kind of research is to find out something that you do not already know: research is about discovering existing knowledge or creating new knowledge. Discovering or creating knowledge enables you to claim that you know something that you did not know before: this becomes your claim to knowledge. Further, knowledge can contribute to theory; the word ‘theory’, broadly speaking, means ‘an explanation’. You can both say what you know now and also explain and analyse how you have come to know it. Therefore, if you can explain and analyse what you have done in your practice, you can claim that you have generated a personal theory of practice.

However, if you make a claim to knowledge, you cannot expect people to believe you unless you can show how you have tested the validity, or truthfulness, of the claim. This involves producing authenticated evidence to show that what you are saying is true, and you are not just making it up. You would describe, explain and analyse what you have done, and these descriptions, explanations and analyses contribute to verification procedures; they help confer validity and legitimacy on your research and your claim, and therefore on you, the researcher.

Now consider how these ideas inform the processes of doing action research. The first question to ask is, what is involved in doing action research?

What is Involved in Doing Action Research?

This section considers:

• what action research is, and what it is not;
• some core principles and practices of action research;
• different approaches to action research.

What action research is, and what it is not

Here are some general ideas from the literatures about what action research is. We later go on to consider what action research is not.

What action research is

Action research is a special form of research that is located in the real world, so that it becomes a form of real-world research (Robson, 2011). It is about taking action in action for social and political action, and then explaining to others what you have done, why you have done it, and what you hope to achieve by doing it. Because it is grounded in practice, action research is also often referred to as ‘practice-based research’. It is also often called ‘practitioner research’, because it is carried out by practitioners.

Action research contains two words – ‘action’ and ‘research’ – and these refer to different things:

• ‘action’ refers to what you do in your different contexts, including your personal, social, organisational and political contexts.
• ‘research’ refers to how you find out about what you do in your different contexts, and how you can find ways to do it better.

However, although separately the words may mean different things, in action research discourses they are always interrelated and inseparable: they weave together like threads in a tapestry. When you look at a tapestry you tend to see the whole picture, rather than the individual threads, but when you analyse what goes into the tapestry, you see the importance of making sure each thread is in its right place and is going in the right direction (Figure 1.1). Each serves its particular purpose and each derives its particular meaning from the other. Similarly, the ideas of action and research are always interdependent and reciprocal. As with all complex phenomena, the whole means more than the sum of its parts.

In real-world action research, we always do things for specific reasons and purposes, and reasons and purposes also refer to different things. Reasons explain what inspires or drives you to do something (‘I have started learning Norwegian for when I go to Norway’); purposes outline your goals and what you hope to achieve (‘I would like to understand others and be understood when I go to Norway’). When someone asks you, ‘Why are you doing that?’, you state your reasons and purposes; these act as framing devices for your explanations. Further, you need to check that other people agree with what you are saying, especially when you claim that what you have done or learned has influenced personal and/or social processes of improvement.

Figure 1.1 The interrelationship of parts with one another and with the whole

However, these ideas of taking action, doing research and telling others what you have done can be problematic, as follows.

Taking action

There is more than one kind of action. You can take:

• unintentional action, as when you cough or trip over; this kind of action is often accidental;
• everyday action, such as watching television or doing the washing up, though these can often be undertaken with social intent and become intentional action, as in the next point;
• intentional action, as when you set out to help someone or to improve a service; this kind of action is always purposeful and undertaken to achieve specific goals; this is usually the kind of action you take in action research. (It is worth mentioning here, however, that goals may be destructive and selfish as much as beneficent and other-oriented.)

You can also have different reasons and purposes for taking action, including:

• personal action, where you act for your personal purposes: you decide to cook a meal or study for a degree;
• social action, where you act in other people’s interests: you advise medical treatments or contribute to solidarity protests against injustices; this then becomes more than action: it becomes or leads into practice, when you act in a coherent and purposeful way for reasons beyond yourself;
• political action, where you act in the world to achieve certain principles and practices: you investigate institutional or corporate practices and ask questions about why things are as they are, where appropriate; this can involve risk to self and requires courage; it then becomes more than practice: it becomes praxis, that is, morally committed, purposeful practice in the world.

To summarise so far, here is what is involved in (a) doing research and (b) doing action research.

Doing research

The aim of all research is to enable you to make a knowledge claim. You can claim to have discovered existing knowledge, something that was known already, and you can also claim to have generated entirely new knowledge, something that no one knew before. However, if you are prepared to make a knowledge claim, you must test and demonstrate its validity (truthfulness, believability), to show that people can believe you. This involves producing evidence: you describe the actions you took, explain why you took them and what you hoped to achieve, gather data to show the processes involved, and produce evidence from the data in relation to identified criteria to show that what you are saying may be believed. You invite others to consider your knowledge claim and scrutinise your evidence so that they may agree (or not) that what you say is trustworthy.

Doing action research

As an action researcher, you hope that you have found new ways to improve your learning, so that you can claim that you have contributed to improving your personal and social practices and circumstances. Being able to claim this means being able to show how you have developed rigorous processes of observation (watching what is going on), reflection (thinking about whether it is good and why, and how it can be improved where necessary) and monitoring practices and gathering data (keeping records of what you and other people are doing). It has involved testing your provisional claims to knowledge (asking other people to look at your work, listen while you explain why you think it is worthwhile and give you feedback about whether you need to rethink some aspects). In this way, you have created new knowledge of your practice and you can explain the significance of your research for the new learning and growth of other people and yourself.

Now, here are some ideas about what action research is not.

What action research is not

Action research is not simply action learning or professional education, though it can involve these. Action learning is a distinctive form of learning where you learn in and from action; the focus is on learning, but not necessarily on research. Professional education is where you learn to improve your professionalism in a range of ways. Neither practice necessarily involves doing research, that is, monitoring the processes involved, gathering and analysing data from which you generate evidence to test the validity of your provisional knowledge claims, or establishing validation procedures to produce evidence that may withstand robust critique. Action research demonstrates a greater level of explanatory adequacy than action learning or professional education: you can explain how you have come to know what you know. The ideal situation, perhaps, would be to transform action learning into action research and to ensure that professional education should be evidence based.

Also, action research is not conventional social science research, which is about looking at a social situation from an outsider perspective, offering descriptions and analyses about it, and generating theories that explain what is happening. As noted earlier, the word ‘theory’ means, broadly speaking, ‘an explanation’: when you do research, you aim to describe, analyse and explain what is going on, that is, generate theory about what you see. This is what all kinds of research do, including action research, except that there is a difference in the form of theory. In conventional social science research, the form of theory is abstract: it exists in the researcher’s head, in a conceptual form; these conceptual theories can help your own thinking. However, you can also generate your own theories from within your practice, in a dynamic, living form. You can say, ‘I have developed my personal practical theory of dentistry practice’, or, ‘The validity of my theory of person-centred occupational therapy practice lies in the fact that patients say they feel more in control of their own movement’.

Example 1

Nqabisa Gungqisa writes of her experience of our master’s programme in the township of Khayelitsha, South Africa. She says:

In this programme of studies I have learned a good deal of things, sharing ideas, socializing, academic writings (my academic paper), the presentation of my findings, a boost in my self esteem and confidence, group discussions, tolerance, listening to other people’s ideas, respect and other meaningful values, and my computer literacy levels have been improved.

I can now make a claim that my studies have had a tremendous influence on my practice including my professional development and learning. I felt good about myself after I had made a presentation of my policy proposal and one of my colleagues on the MA in Education course gave me the following critical feedback:

‘Your presentation was thought provoking . . . I was excited to realise that your epistemological values were in line with ubuntu. The systematic issues that informed your research should be explored more to influence practice in general and specifically for the Western Cape Education Department.’

(Gungqisa, 2008: 7)

When you do social science research, you usually use what has come to be known as ‘...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Prologue: what do I need to know about action research? Why do I need to know it?
• Part I Designing and planning your text
• Part II Writing and producing a text
• Part III Reflecting and evaluating
• References
• Index