Jean McNiff
Jean McNiff is an independent researcher, who also holds institutional positions on a part-time basis. Her work, individually and together with her colleague Jack Whitehead and others, has been influential in establishing action research as the basis for a credible and legitimate form of educational theory, and her books and papers have provided seminal and highly influential resources for moving the field forward.
She is currently Professor of Educational Research in the Faculty of Education and Theology at York St John University, having previously been Professor of Educational Research at St Mary's University College, Twickenham. She also holds the positions of Honorary Professor at the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University in South Africa; Visiting Professor at Ningxia Teachers College in China; and Adjunct Professor at the University of Limerick, Ireland. She is a regular visiting scholar, lecturer and consultant at universities around the world, and especially in South Africa, Ireland and the UK. Her work in higher education is mainly to do with enabling academic practitioners to raise their research capacity, primarily through studying their practices for their higher degrees, as well as writing for publication.
Jean has also worked with the National Centre for Technology in Education, Marino Institute of Education; and for some years with the National Centre for Guidance in Education and Kilkenny Education Centre as visiting scholar and guest lecturer. In South Africa she works in Khayelitsha, a large township outside Cape Town, and takes the form of developing educational and community programmes in the township, in collaboration with the False Bay College. She also works in Iceland and she has worked in Malaysia, both with the National University and the Ministry of Education, in a consultancy role. She is currently acting as consultant to the Tribal Group in the planning and delivery, with others, of a professional education programme for teachers in Qatar.
Jean is active in a number of research organisations around the world where, individually and in collaboration with others, she has presented keynote lectures and workshops: notably at the British Educational Research Association, American Educational Research Association, and at the Education Association of South Africa. She organises conferences and seminars for the practitioner research networks she supports (examples on the authors website and Critical Debates in Action Research), and also serves on editorial bodies for a range of educational research journals. She has written a variety of books for different publishers including All You Need to Know about Action Research (Sage) and Action Research: Living Theory (Sage) amongst others. Jean also has her own publishing firm, September Books, which she uses specifically to promote the work of action researchers around the world. Some of her work can be found on her website.
She has written, and contributed to, the following titles by Routledge:
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You and Your Action Research Project
3rd Edition
What are the most effective ways of planning and doing action research projects?
You and Your Action Research Project gives practical guidance on doing an action…
read moreJuly 2009 | Paperback: 978-0-415-48709-2 (Routledge)
Action Research for Teachers
A Practical Guide
Assuming no prior knowledge of research methods and techniques, this book is the perfect companion for teachers at all levels undergoing professional development who need…
read more2005 | Paperback: 978-1-84312-321-7 (David Fulton Publis)
Action Research
Principles and Practice, 2nd Edition
Since the first edition of this established text was published in 1988, action research has gained ground as a popular method amongst educational researchers, and… read more2001 | Paperback: 978-0-415-21994-5 (Routledge)
Action Research in Organisations
The current orthodoxy is that 'knowledge' is the most powerful resource for organisational success. So how can managers develop the appropriate knowledge base to make… read more2000 | Paperback: 978-0-415-22013-2 (Routledge)
Rethinking Pastoral Care
The issue of pastoral care and how a teacher effectively provides it is currently a topic of great debate in the media. With teachers increasingly… read more1999 | Paperback: 978-0-415-19442-6 (Routledge)
Teaching as Learning
An Action Research Approach
In this fascinating and very personal book, Jean McNiff, author of the successful Action Research: Principles and Practice, argues that educational knowledge is created by… read more1993 | Paperback: 978-0-415-08390-4 (Routledge)
I find it difficult to define myself in terms of what I do, because what I do is create my life with every new moment. If pressed, I would say I am a teacher, in the sense that I encourage other people to learn in ways that enable them to realise their capacity for creativity. I believe profoundly, like Chomsky (1986), in the idea that people are born with the capacity for an unlimited number of creative acts, from washing their faces to performing great works of art. I also believe that we are born with the capacity to make our own choices (Berlin 2002); so, as a teacher, I believe it is my responsibility to help others and myself to make the kind of choices that are right for ourselves and right for other people. I see teaching as a form of enabling people to explain how we hold ourselves accountable for what we do, as we create our lives in company with one another. This is what I do, and my classrooms are anywhere where people are prepared to learn, whether in mainstream schools, where I began my working life, to university learning rooms, where I am mainly situated these days.
I was born and grew up in Dorset, where I still live, though I am away from home more often than not. My father was Scottish, and my mother was Scottish-Irish. Consequently, I feel at home anywhere on these islands. Indeed, I tend to feel at home anywhere I go - and I go to a lot of places - because, although customs and traditions are different in different countries, people are still people, and probably feel the same the world over. Everyone needs love and affection; everyone is vulnerable in some way; and everyone feels the same joy and pain when things go right and wrong (see also Sacks 2002). So I tend not to feel a stranger, but go through life with a strong faith that if I respond to people as I hope they will respond to me, we will probably get along.
This sense of the ever-present now, of the real-life everyday nature of human interchange, informs the way I practise and write, as well as the ideas I bring to my writing. Although I enjoy the idea of grand theory, and draw on people's writings extensively to inform my own thinking, I tend to remain grounded in the idea that each one of us can, and should, offer our own explanations for what we are doing. My friend and colleague, Jack Whitehead, communicates this idea as the capacity of each person to offer their living educational theories of practice (Whitehead 1989). I agree, and, from working with Jack, have done whatever I can to legitimise this idea, as can be seen from our writings cited above. The efforts at legitimisation have included supervising masters and doctoral studies, so that the living theories of practitioners from any context may be validated by the Academy and so be seen as high quality knowledge. You can see extensive examples of the realisation of this idea in our websites. (Jack's website, Jean's website)
I think this is probably the greatest significance of what I do: to bring the knowledge of the townships and the streets into the Academy, and have the knowledge of teachers and children in poverty-stricken areas legitimated alongside the knowledge of academics working in universities, and, in the process, reconceptualise educational theory, from its present dominant propositional form to a transformational living form. This also has implications for the creation of a new form of public sphere. We are all people who can think for ourselves and offer our own explanations for our practices, regardless of our workplaces. I did my PhD studies mainly while working in my seaside gift shop, when I went into the retail business after taking early retirement from secondary mainstream education. I have since retired three more times, yet probably work harder these days than ever before. I do not believe practitioners need to be told what to do - we know our practices and we can imagine ways of improving them, and testing the validity of our knowledge claims; and I agree with the recent (2009) House of Lords report that ‘able, brilliant and skilled professionals do not thrive in an environment where much of their energies are absorbed by the need to comply with a raft of detailed requirements’ (House of Lords, 2009: 15). People thrive in contexts where they feel their knowledge and capacity for creative work is valued, and where they are free to enjoy caring relationships, on an equal footing with everyone else. These are the commitments I bring to my life and my work.
I have never thought of what I do as a career. I simply try to do what I do well, which is teach, and think for myself; and I am passionate about this and protect the creative spaces that enable me to do this. Those creative spaces seem to be getting fewer these days, so I am developing a new practice, of finding ways to write on aeroplanes and in hotel rooms. In the final analysis, when we travel, in normative terms, we move to new physical and geographical spaces; but perhaps the most important form of travel is what goes on in our own minds. I have already travelled far, and I know I still have a lot of travelling to do; and I am looking forward to the journey ahead, and the new ideas that are yet to come.
