Practice in planning and planning in practice: re‐assessing and clarifying action research in a multi‐national context

Abstract

This paper responds to a call seeking presenters for an action‐research event for elementary‐school science teachers in Venezuela. The authors planned on the assumption that the participants would wish to leave with plans for introducing action‐research approaches into their practice. In previous writing on action research, the various protocols for action‐research planning and practice emphasize norms and regularities rather more than their opposites. This paper shows, however, that planning is transformed by multiple views of teaching and learning to create a multi‐level, multi‐faceted event within a particular context. The activity of planning parallels the pedagogy enacted in the event. The interactions of presenters and participants, of their purposes and actions, create the complex reality that is action research, where the learning and the events are often asynchronous.

Keywords:

• Action research
• Science education
• Venezuela

Acknowledgements

We thank UPEL for the invitation and financial support for this event, the British Council for a travel grant to Charly Ryan, Russell Feingold for letters of introduction for James Kusch, and John Bentley, Paula Godkin, Thomas Popkewitz, and an anonymous reviewer for their insightful comments on drafts of this paper.

Notes

1. CARN (2003) was originally established around a nucleus of people in projects run by Lawrence Stenhouse and collaborators.

2. ‘Students do indeed learn much more and much less than teachers intend. Educators should all be grateful for that’ (Eisner 2000: 34).

3. Elliott's thought was helpful during the event because we linked our workshop practice with what participants said they did in their own instruction and planning. Indeed, at least four of the participants met with the presenters on two different occasions over supper to clarify their classroom practice in terms of the directions the workshop had led.

4. In the conduct of the event, we adapted our plans to take time to discuss participants' consciousness—with narrative retelling of stories by participants, as well as deferring our original plans to extended question‐and‐answer sessions and to small‐group discussions.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jim Kusch

Jim Kusch, 1706 Helena St., Madison, WI 53704, USA (e‐mail: [email protected]) has lectured in many universities in different countries and writes and conducts ad hoc research, frequently for local school districts and teacher unions. He is currently writing on intercultural learning and on the uses of literature reviews in qualitative research. His recent papers appear in Journal of Educational Thought and Educational Action Research Journal.

Geisha Rebolledo

Geisha Rebolledo graduated from the Universidad Pedagógica Experimental Libertador (UPEL), Caracas, Venezuela, and completed her doctorate at the University of East Anglia, UK. She works in teacher education at the Pedagogic Institute of UPEL. Currently, she is teaching science at a bilingual middle school in the USA, researching evaluation from the point of view of the children.

Charly Ryan

Charly Ryan completed his doctorate at Oxford University and has worked in teacher education for 30 years. He has carried out many projects in Europe and the Americas. He is currently working on the long‐term effects of professional journals and on the roles of teachers' knowledge on classroom practice.