This list represents key lessons learned from a recent Action Research (AR) inquiry into curriculum development at a military college. Hopefully, you will find some reasons here to engage in AR yourself.1. The 4 ways of knowing: experiential, presentational, propositional, practical. I evaluate claims for knowledge on the basis of this framework. I have introduced the idea into our faculty development program, since there is synergy with our stated educational philosophy.
2. Unproductive communication exercise: a useful set of techniques to formally and systematically reflect on problem areas. 3. The Leadership Development Profile: Torbert's intriguing and useful model for engaging organizations in transformation on a grand scale through self-awareness and a calibrate sense of what's possible and anticipating friction points. 4. Simultaneous 1st, 2d, and 3d person inquiry: I appreciated from the paired assignments, supplemented by the readings that there can be simultaneous learning loops in practice. My exposure to traditional change management techniques has been much more sequential and single task focused. There is a lot of momentum for change that can be generated when approached on multiple paths simultaneously.
3. Transparency in research in action: It has been very liberating to approach the AR project from an explicitly transparent perspective, with my needs, values and goals up front, and encourage the stakeholders (who are at first invited to be stakeholders) to do the same to find the maximum area of common interest to exploit. Transparency in education has been a new topic introduced by our Commandant and it matches up well with the values of AR: democracy, empowerment, and building capacity among others.
4. Systems Thinking: The Ray Ison article in the Handbook of Action Research is a treasure of clarity and conciseness, and comes along right when I need it to be able to engage our developers with generating the requirements for leaders cognitive skills, many of which are sensed to be from the field of systems thinking.
5. Variety of experience and perspective, linked by common framework: On 2d and 3d readings and after reflection I have come to value the sharing of different perspectives and experiences contained in the Handbook. 8. Iterative Learning & Doing: This could also read Learning by Doing, and Doing the Learning, since they are happening simultaneously and incorporate both the action and research components of the discipline. 9. Potential for AR in Education: Covered at greater length in the preceding pages, but it is clear to me that since infrastructure is a necessary part of learning/change that lasts, that AR must be a part of the education system, or we will continually be producing the kinds of wicked messes that require AR to address in the future. Unless AR is somehow integrated into our "fire prevention" in the ways people learn to think and work and share together, then AR will be focusing on "fire fighting" after the initial damage has been done.
6. Practicality: for all the concern I initially had about the field of AR being soft and fuzzy, filled with the kind of breathless fervor I negatively associate with true believers, I m seeing more and more the practicality of the philosophy, the integrity of the commitment to values I support, and the practicality of its methods and purposes inside my own work and life environment. It resonates with other experiences I have had, positive and negative, in the change management, quality and systems movements and I now see it as a practical discipline for achieving important change that lasts.
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