Interlude
I found McNiff’s piece to be very interesting in both its composition (as representative of her point about narrative) and her critique of the primacy of social science research and its influence on action research conducted by educators. This past fall, I took a course on inquiry (TE 808) in which I conducted my own action research and wrote a research paper. At the beginning of the process, I approached the task with more of a social science mindset, hoping my implemented strategies would provide a certain result. It took reading more about action research (texts such as The Power of Questions , Falk and Blumenreich, 2005) and continued prompting from my professor to focus on the process of inquiry and not be so outcome oriented in order to shift my mindset. I think that many teachers are conditioned in their preparation programs (and often then in their professional lives) to believe that theory is meant to be absorbed and applied more than critiqued and that pers...