Generating research from and for action—3 central ideas in Action Research
by Alfredo Ortiz Aragon
The MethodSpace focus for October 2020 was on Action Research. Our Mentors-in-Residence this month were Ernie Stringer and Alfredo Ortiz Aragon, co-authors of a new edition of the text Action Research.
Action Research: Central Ideas
This 11-minute video offers the three most important ideas in action research :
Presentation given at the RWJF annual learning meeting in Jackson, Mississippi in early March 2020
Acting to learn: How action is a powerful way to generate knowledge. Also, taking action is the ultimate purpose of action research.
Learning, to act: How harvesting knowledge and using it to inform our actions can significantly improve the quality of our "doing".
Participation of those who know: How acting to learn, and learning to act are only meaningful if based on the knowledge and experiences the people who are closest to the issues.
Acting to learn and learning to act, when repeated, are what are known as action research cycles. There are of course many more important ideas in AR, but these three provide enough to get most of us going on approaching our work in interesting new ways!
Figure 1: Three central ideas in Action Research
We expand on this in more detail in chapter 1 of the 5th edition of our book, Action Research. You can download chapter 1 here.
More Methodspace posts from this series on Action Research
In this guest post Catherine Collins describes ways to put action research principles into practice.