Doing and Writing Action Research

Doing and Writing Action Research provides a clear, comprehensive, and user-friendly guide to the practical aspects of carrying out action research.

Written with practitioners involved in workplace-based professional development programs, as well as those on research training courses, in mind, this book covers all the core issues, with guidance on how to:

• Present findings
• Produce a research report that can inform policy
• Demonstrate the quality of one′s research
• Be critical and write theoretically

The book contains many worked examples of action research projects, to help illustrate the guidance on producing successful written accounts.

Doing and Writing Action Research is an essential text for anyone working with action research, providing vital guidance on how this type of work is assessed, enabling the reader to get the best results from their project work.

Jean McNiff is Professor of Educational Research at York St John University, UK. She is also a Visiting Professor at UiT the Arctic University of Norway, and at the Beijing Normal University and Ningxia Teachers’ University, People’s Republic of China.

Jean took early retirement from her position as deputy head teacher of a large secondary school in Dorset, UK. She went into business for herself, and developed her writing. Her textbooks on action research and professional education are now used internationally on workplace-based professional education courses and on higher degree courses. Jean provides interdisciplinary consultancy work to institutions around the world where she gives lectures and conducts workshops on planning, doing and writing action research.

Jean aims to contribute to personal and social betterment through educational research. She encourages everyone to make their stories public in the form of their personal and collaborative theories of practice; and she firmly believes that each individual is able to contribute to social and planetary wellbeing by explaining how they hold themselves accountable for what they do. In this way she links education with moral accountability. She tries to bring the university to everyday contexts, and everyday contexts into the university, for it is only by involving everyone, she feels, that the world will become a better place for us all.