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In my professional writing I seem always to have been struggling
to stretch the boundaries of what counts as academic research.
In what has come to be called "action research"
the rhetorical problems are particularly challenging –
traditional academic writing obliterates the personal from
the research account. In action research, however, it's the
personal which conveys the meanings of the situation being
studied. Often, the research accocunt is a narrative of the
journey taken by the researcher, the focus of the research
being on the reseracher him or herself.
In Action
Research: Exploring the Tensions of Teaching I attempted to merge
fiction with exposition by using excerpts from Tony Hillerman's novel
Sacred Clowns upon which to build a description of how action research
plays out for me.
In Validity
and Action Research: An Online Conversation I struggled
with the rhetorical problem discussed by Gregory Bateson in
the Metalogues from his book Steps
to an Ecology of Mind
A metalogue is a conversation about some problematic
subject. This conversation should be such that not only do the participants
discuss the problem but the structure of the conversation as a whole
is also relevant to the same subject."
In this piece I was stepping quite a distance outside
normal academic writing in an effort to capture this international electronic
conversation about action research.
I have chosen to include a third piece:
A Garden Path? Information Technology and Education to
illustrate how I've been thinking about the problems and hazards
of using the new information technologies in an educational
context and to put the two websites developed by the teachers
in the Literacy,
Curriculum & Technology and the
Creating Technology-Supported Literacy Classrooms Summer
Institutes into some kind of context.
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