1st Edition

An Ethical Approach to Practitioner Research Dealing with Issues and Dilemmas in Action Research

Edited By Anne Campbell, Susan Groundwater-Smith Copyright 2007
    208 Pages
    by Routledge

    208 Pages
    by Routledge

    Practice based research is burgeoning in a number of professional areas. An Ethical Approach to Practitioner Research covers a comprehensive range of issues and dilemmas encountered in practitioner and action research contexts. While principally focused upon practitioner inquiry in education it takes account of, and acknowledges that others engaged in professional practice such as in legal, nursing and social care contexts, face similar issues and dilemmas. It aims to stimulate ethical thinking and practice in enquiry and research contexts.

    Following moves to promote professional learning and development in the workplace, there is an increase in the number of practitioners engaging in action or inquiry based learning in the workplace supported by university staff or consultants, as evidenced in the emergence of professional learning communities and learning networks. There are many tensions inherent in relationships between practitioners and academics in terms of the setting of the research agenda, the policy implications that may flow from it and the right to publish outcomes. Negotiating that relationship requires ethical probity where each party recognises, understands and respects mutual responsibilities. The book explores this through a wide variety of roles from those of academic researchers, consultants and teachers to professional practitioners as researchers and, importantly, students and children. It therefore illustrates a number of differing perspectives about ethics and research which are allied to those roles

    Drawing on the expertise of international researchers and academics from America, Australia and Europe, the book provides invaluable support to the novice researcher and illuminates some of the more intricate issues for the more experienced research practitioner.Packed with detailed and thought-provoking examples this book contains both theoretical analyses of ethical matters and offers practical advice to practitioner and action researchers across the fields of schools hospitals and community and family settings.

     

    1. Introduction: an Overview of the Purpose of the Book and the Context in Which it has Been Written  2. Managing Research Ethics: A Head on Collision?  3. Everything’s Ethics: Practitioner Inquiry and University Culture  4. At The Boundaries: The Voice of Consequential Stakeholders  5. Children’s Participation in Legal Decision Making  6. Working with Networks: Ethical Tensions in Communities of Trust  7. Professional Values and Research Values: From Dilemmas to Diversity  8. The ‘Insider’ Research Facilitator: The Possibility of Transformational Practice  9. Trans-Disciplinary Inquiry: Researching with Rather than Researching on  10. Behind the Vision: Action Research, Pedagogy and Human Development  11. Ways of Telling: The use of Practitioners’ Stories  12. Investigating Academic Pedagogical Practice  13. Conclusion: New Challenges for an ICT Mediated Future

    Biography

    Anne Campbell, Susan Groundwater-Smith