The student-centred education project is an action research project conducted by lecturers at an institution of higher education and university researchers over a 2-year period. Valuable experience has been gained about working with lecturers on projects that affect their beliefs about learning and instruction in practice. This article focuses on…

The author examines the development of her thinking in regard to the value, the purposes, the process and the outcomes of teaching an undergraduate course in action research for the past 4 years. The emergent understandings were informed by recurrent hermeneutic cycles of interpretative readings of the formal written and oral feedback conducted…

During action research projects a great deal of written material is produced. Some of this is data generated about the project, some about the process of the research and some is reflective writing about the researcher(s). In this article I propose that a deliberate focus on the tracking of texts might be helpful in action research, particularly…

This article highlights important and enduring contributions of the text to the development of action research, while also pointing to the need for attention to theories informed by a politics of difference. The re-examination of "Becoming Critical" (Carr & Kemmis, 1983) is set against the backdrop of rereading Doris Lessing's…

High school dropout rates in many major urban settings in the United States have remained above 50% for more than three decades. This dropout crisis should now be considered evidence of an endemic lack of appreciation for formal education in city locales. United States federal policy initiatives have concentrated the nation on notions of teacher…

This article describes a national school improvement project involving five compulsory schools for hard-of-hearing pupils, located in different parts of Sweden. Using action research, the teachers tried to change the communication patterns among the pupils by changing their own classroom practices, In this process the teachers tested and used…

Describes an action research inquiry conducted by a primary science tutor, focusing on his work with preservice and inservice teachers. The paper examines parallels between the research process and the researcher's approach to teaching adult learners. Both were underpinned by explicit epistemological assumptions based on a constructivist view of…

The purpose of this study was to track the development of fifth-graders' reading and writing skills in the context of ecosystems science content using an action research design. A collection of students' work, a researcher journal, video-taped class sessions, student science journals and a weekly book choice checklist were used as data sources.…

In this article, I reflect on the events and experiences that occurred during (and after) my studies for a Diploma in Teacher Education. The elements required for the award of Diploma included a professional development journal, a number of peer teaching observations and an action research project. At an early stage, I selected vaguely "peer…

This article reports upon a 3-year action research programme intended to provide trainee teachers with peer support in planning and carrying out class teaching. It was hoped that this would provide an additional encouragement for trainee-teachers to broaden their teaching repertoire, together with better opportunities to reflect on and evaluate…

This article reports on selected findings from an action research study that looked at the lessons learnt from setting up a new in-patient stroke service in a London teaching hospital. Key participants in the design and evaluation of this 2-year study included members of the multi-professional stroke team and support staff within the unit, the…

Describes a project that trained institutional policymakers in action research regarding problems in developing training policies about young people's needs, examining attempts to collaborate and dialog with stakeholders and discussing how project members became enmeshed in complex sets of relationships calling for construction of dialog in…

Based on information gleaned from questionnaires and interviews with teachers who engaged in action research as a capstone to their Master's program during the years 1992 through 2001, and on data from these teachers' administrators and colleagues, six assertions are reported. (1) Teachers sustained the "inquiry mindset" gained while learning the…

Numerous scholars have promoted "practitioner research" or "teacher-research" as a way of facilitating professional development for pre-service and in-service teachers, promoting change and reform in K-12 settings, and giving voice to teachers" personal and professional knowledge. In this article, the authors consider what…

In England school teachers and head teachers are faced with a myriad of challenges in coping with the pressures of managing the dynamic and diverse institution which is their school within an imposed, centralized, standards-driven change agenda. It could be argued that many of the national policies and initiatives over the last 15 years have…