The best way to find out about action research:
Put it into the brint portal:http://portal.brint.com/
There is a lot of stuff from googling "action research" "organizational development" "grounded theory"
http://www.exalead.com/search/web/results/?q=action+research&last_link_type=submit_search
OD and AR in a single article: http://people.bath.ac.uk/mnspwr/Papers/ActionResearch&OrganizationDevelopment.pdf
:
This definition brings together five dimensions of action research: it is pragmatic,concerned with addressing practical issues and making links between theory and practice; it is democratic both in the sense of involving people and in being liberationist - seeking to enable all people to create their own knowledge in learning organisations and communities of inquiry; it draws on an “extended epistemology” (Heron 1996) of many ways of knowing, valuing the experiential, narrative and aesthetic, alongside the propositional and conceptual; it is value oriented, asking how we can contribute to the flourishing—economic, political, psychological, spiritual—of human persons and communities, and of the wider ecology of the planet; and it is developmental, evolving over time from tentative beginnings toward more significant influence (Reason & Bradbury, 2001a).
Brint...exalead.... Southern Cross University http://www.scu.edu.au/schools/gcm/ar/arhome.html
[Action research can be described as a family of research methodologies which pursue action (or change) and research (or understanding) at the same time. In most of its forms it does this by using a cyclic or spiral process which alternates between action and critical reflection and in the later cycles, continuously refining methods, data and interpretation in the liht of the understanding developed in the earlier cycles. It is thus an emergent process which takes shape as understanding increases; it is an iterative process which converges towards a better understanding of what happens.
In most of its forms it is also participative (among other reasons, change is usually easier to achieve when those affected by the change are involved) and qualitative.]
open courseware free course:
http://ocw.umb.edu/eduCommons/graduate-college-of-education/evaluation-of-educational-change
http://ocw.umb.edu/join_form
registered
username: stanlecn
password: s...z
Senge and Whaetly in the Shambhala Sun:
http://www.shambhalasun.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=2382&Itemid=0
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Action_research
Contents [hide]
1 Overview
2 Major Theories
2.1 Chris Argyris' Action Science
2.2 John Heron and Peter Reason's Cooperative Inquiry
2.3 Paulo Freire's Participatory Action Research (PAR)
2.4 William Torbert’s Developmental Action Inquiry
2.5 Jack Whitehead's and Jean McNiff's Living Theory approach
3 Action research in organization development
Action Research and OD:
http://www.plusdelta.net/articles/Action_Research_OD_Practice.pdf
