You and Your Action Research Project

2006-12-02T15:05:00.000-08:00

Empowerment
I have just finished reading the book "You and Your Action Research Project" by McNiff, Lomax and Whitehead. Reading this book gave me a new perspective into what research can be -- a first person exploration of one's own work in collaboration with a variety of peers in an attempt to improves one's own practice. This is a near perfect description of my own intentions and as a result I would like to look carefully at the use of "action research" in my own work.

In reading the latter half of this book, I initiated a form of notebook. Here are some thoughts that occured to me while reading.

I will consider the use of audio and video interviews in the course of this research. Both forms of research often requires extensive transcriptioning, but this can be minimized by only transcripting parts of the tape that will be quoted from, summarizing the rest.

I may want to take first steps in this direction by having our partners tape stories by refugees that can then be transcribed for RESPECT Ezine and converted to MP3 for inclusion on a CD for distribution. I would need to be careful to include a media release form and be very clear about the potentional uses for their stories. This will not neccessarily be part of the eventual research, but it would help me to experiment with different methods of collecting research data. For example, I might work to collect interviews of youth that have participated in RESPECT to describe the importance of RESPECT in their lives for promotional use, not specifically for research use. That said such biased interviewed could be used as a form of raw data to be mined for future research.

It is important to have your research validated by persons both internal and external to the organization of RESPECT. One way of achieving validation from the practitioners involved in the study is by submitting draft results from the preliminary research to practitioners for input. This input could be used as another source of "data" that can both add to the study and potentially reshape it.

One way of piloting an interview or other data-gathering technique is to employ it on myself. For example if the question "Tell me how you came to be involved in RESPECT" were to be a question on a future questionnaire, it could be a question I ask myself videotaping myself. Looking at my own responses may help me to tweak the questions for others. This process could be repeated with RESPECT volunteers in the USA, Canada and elsewhere as an experiment in collecting data from abroad and further refining the questionnaire.

I thought it might be useful to use some form of grid for identifying questions that would brush out the potentially fascinating biographical stories of participants in this study and determine their relationship with RESPECT activities. One idea for this would be a two-dimensional grid:

Past Present Future
Biography Tell me the story of your life. Tell me about your average day. What do you think will happen in your future?

Attitudes What kind of relationships have you How does your community interact What kind of relationships would you like
had with people in other countries before with people from around the world your community to have with people in
getting involved in RESPECT? today? other countries in the future?

RESPECT How did you get involved with RESPECT? How are you involved in RESPECT now? How would you like to see RESPECT better serve your
Tell me a story. How does this affect your life now? needs in the future? What ideas do you have for RESPECT to
improve.

The specific ideas listed above are just "off the top of my head" but the idea of using a grid model for creating a survey may prove productive.

I might possibly consider doing research in cycles one community at a time instead of doing all communities simultaneously. This would have the dual benefits of allowing me to use the results from the first cycle to inform the research of the second style while allowing me also to tailor research stlightly differently for each community.

One potential research question might be: "How do I improve the positive impact on war-affected communities by connecting these communities with non-war affected communities as part of refugee-awareness training?"

*Side-note: It might be interesting to try to set up an Action Research Group as part of Adult Secondary Education Council Manitoba (www.asecmanitoba.ca)
"Action Research in Education for Adults" (AREA)

RESPECT

Transformative Education, Jack Mezirow

2006-11-06T17:21:00.000-08:00

I bought a number of titles on Amazon related to topics of interest and future research. The first one to arrive is called "Transformative Dimensions of Adult Learning" by Jack Mezirow. Any comments on this book or topic would be greatly appreciated. As an adult educator myself with a particular interest in the concept of transformation through education I've always found this an attractive topic. Through my work as the president of Adult Secondary Education Council, Manitoba (www.asecmanitoba.ca), it is my hope that we can holdworkshops on transformative education in the near future.
RESPECT works to increase awareness of refugee issues around the world in part by introducing refugee students to non-refugee students by pen-pal letter exchange. (www.respectrefugees.org). This, I believe, is a form of transformative education as the experience is intended to transform the youth that it touches.

Empowerment

2006-11-01T19:51:00.000-08:00

Greetings. My name is Marc Schaeffer. I am embarking on a journey of learning, growth and exploration as I intiate an interdisciplinary Master's degree related to my volunteer work with refugee and IDP communities. Here I plan to document my growth and learning through reading, researching and reflections. Please feel free to post your own comments, questions and thoughts.