ABSTRACT
An Inquiry Into Learning team meeting is characteristically a blend of many things. As well as responding to changes in room bookings or fixing problems with the preparation of teaching and learning resources, we talk about how things are going, and what we can think and do, to improve. As part of the conversations about ‘One student has said to me that …’ and ‘What did we agree we were going to do about …?’, we do our action research. A semi-formal structure which runs through our talk is to turn back from time to time to rethink what we initially thought we wanted and how it was supposed to be achievable, amid the ongoing inquiry into what we think is actually happening now, from various points of view, and what we are really doing. The activity may appear to an outsider to be more messy and disorganised than we hope our formal presentations of it seem to be. If we appear to be enthusiastic amateurs, there is some comfort in an obsolete meaning of the word as ‘a lover of something’. If love includes having understanding, close affinity with and high regard for something, then we do love doing action research into IIL. On the other hand, we would not wish to be called professional researchers if this means dispassionate seekers after an ultimate truth. We are trying to improve our professional practice. Then again we wouldn’t wish someone to call our inquiry ‘action research’ if all they mean is that we do conventional, objective research that just happens to be centred on action, merely finding out what works or what is effective. This is not a meaning of action research that we have regard for. We see ourselves being like Lawrence Stenhouse’s ‘teacher-researchers’, who do not suspend being teachers to take on a separate, researcherly mantle, but integrate an inquiring approach into their teaching, to improve it morally as well as technically and effectively. We also see ourselves being like Donald Schön’s ‘reflective practitioners’, whose artistic as well as scientific ways of knowing are as much in our doing as in our talking or writing: understanding more fully what we think and believe needs to be considered with understanding what we do and vice versa.
