This book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 LicenseThe challenges of action research.................................................................................................................
Well and good, you may say. Action research offers teachers a way to hear each other, to learn from their own
and other's experience. But there are also a few cautions to keep in mind, both ethical and practical. Look briefly at
each of these areas.
Ethical cautions about action research
One caution is the possibility of conflict of interest between the roles of teaching and conducting action research
(Hammack, 1997). A teacher’s first priorities should be the welfare of his or her students: first and foremost, you
want students to learn, to be motivated, to feel accepted by their peers, and the like. A researcher’s first priorities,
however, are to the field or topic being studied. The two kinds of priorities may often overlap and support each
other. Vivian Paley’s observations of children in her classes, described earlier, not only supported her children’s
learning, but also her studies of the children.
But situations can also occur in which action research and teaching are less compatible, and can create ethical
dilemmas. The problems usually relate to one of three issues: privacy, informed consent, or freedom to participate.
Each of these becomes an issue only if the results of a research project are made public, either in a journal or book,
as with the examples we have given in this chapter, or simply by being described or shared outside the classroom.
(Sharing, you may recall, is one of the defining features of action research.) Look briefly at each of the issues.
Insuring privacy of the student
Teachers often learn information about students that the students or their families may not want publicized.
Suppose, for example, you have a student with an intellectual disability in your class, and you wish to study how the
student learns. Observing the student work on (and possibly struggle with) academic activities may be quite
consistent with a teacher’s responsibilities; after all, teachers normally should pay attention to their students’
academic efforts. But the student or his family may not want such observations publicized or even shared
informally with other parents or teachers. They may feel that doing so would risk stigmatizing the student publicly.
To respect the student’s privacy and still study his learning behavior, the teacher (alias the “action researcher”)
therefore needs to disguise the student’s identity whenever the research results are made public. In any written or
oral report, or even in any hallway conversation about the project, the teacher/researcher would use a pseudonym
for the student, and change other identifying information such as the physical description of the student or even the
student’s gender. There are limits, however, to how much can be disguised without changing essential information.
The teacher could not, for example, hide the fact of the intellectual disability without compromising the point of the
study; yet the intellectual disability might be unusual enough that it would effectively identify the student being
studied.
Gaining informed consent
Students may not understand what is being studied about them, or even realize that they are being studied at all,
unless the teacher/researcher makes an explicit effort to inform them about the action research and how she will
use the results from it. The same is true for the students’ parents; unless the teacher-researcher makes an effort to
contact parents, they simply will not know that their child’s activities are being observed or may eventually be made
public. Students’ ignorance is especially likely if the students are very young (kindergarten) or have intellectual or
reading difficulties, as in the example we described above. As an action researcher, therefore, a teacher is obliged to
Educational Psychology 371 A Global Text