AR And Curriculum Change

AR and Curriculum Change

The so-called teacher as researcher movement and practical AR are conceptualized in both macro curriculum-based level and micro classroom-based level. While the former focuses on curriculum change or improvement usually with cooperation and collaboration among all participants such as teachers, students, researchers, or other facilitators the latter just focuses on teachers' local practices, reflections, and learning improvements mainly by the individual teachers and practitioners not necessarily aided from the outside. The collaboration in this case, therefore, is shared between the classroom teacher and students.

The fundamental importance of collaboration is strongly accentuated in AR. According to Burns (1999),

One noticed example, however, is Mathew’s (1997, as cited in Mathew, 2006) study which described a large-scale curriculum implementation project in India aimed to evaluate the different aspects of a new English curriculum with a communicative framework in secondary schools. The Project involved teachers as researchers in understanding the curriculum-as-reality from within. To this end, teachers were trained to do AR to assess the feasibility of a communicative curriculum in their own local schools. The impacts of this longitudinal AR (1993-1997) have been summarized by Mathew (2006) as follows: a) effective instruction including better student-student interaction, more opportunities for skills practice, and more efficient evaluation procedures, b) an awareness of CLT principles, c) a feeling of satisfaction and confidence, d) better self-concept, e) becoming self-observant, more critical, and f) seeing oneself as a change

277), not all theorists of AR place this emphasis on collaboration. Rather, theses theorists argue that AR is frequently a solitary process of systematic self-reflection. Nunan (1992), also, does not believe that collaboration should be seen as a defining characteristic of AR. He asserts that many teachers who are interested in exploring the process of teaching and learning in their own classrooms are unable or reluctant to do collaborative research. The work that such people carry out should not be disregarded as AR. Nunan also argues that AR should not necessarily be concerned with change. A descriptive case study of a particular classroom, group of learners, or even a single learner is an AR if it is initiated by a question, is supported by data and interpretation and is carried out by a teacher investigating aspects of his or her own context. Nunan (1994), elsewhere, truly discusses that AR may not work all the time. He refers to the results of his three case studies of action research in different ESL and EFL contexts. Each of these projects suffered from serious problems. According to Nunan, the effectiveness of AR largely depends on the context in which it