Becoming a Teacher through Action Research: Process, Context, and Self-Study

Becoming a Teacher through Action Research is specifically written for those students seeking initial teacher licensure. Written to support these pre-service teachers, it recognizes that the process of doing action research can serve as a vehicle for assuming the professional identity of a teacher and deals directly with challenges and dilemmas of doing action research as a student teacher. The book is divided into three roads:

• the main road, 'Doing Action Research' provides direct instruction for developing a critical question and research design, followed by instruction on how to interpret data
• the side-roads, 'Cultural Context' and 'Self-Study' support teacher identity development by allowing opportunities for the reader to analyse and deconstruct both self and cultural paradigms surrounding teaching/researching
• the final chapters of the book support the reader in going public with their action research and using the process of action research to move into the first year of teaching and planning for continued professional development.

The book is interactive, inviting the reader to respond to text by writing and/or drawing responses. The companion CD allows the reader to either read and interact with the text completely electronically or use a combination of paper text and CD. The CD also includes downloadable templates, interactive charts/graphs and full text examples of student written action research papers.

Donna Kalmbach Phillips is Associate Professor of Education at Pacific University, Oregon.

Kevin Carr is Associate Professor of Education at Pacific University, Oregon.