ABSTRACT
When practitioners undertake research into their own practice and seek to improve aspects of that practice or to improve their understanding of it as they seek to generate new theory (McNiff and Whitehead, 2009), one step they take is to identify an area of professional concern or interest. In the previous part of the book we outlined how this process might be undertaken. This area of professional concern may be causing anxiety for the practitioner or it may be an area that the teacher feels needs some investigation, or indeed it can be an area that the teacher feels should be celebrated. A closely related phase of the research process seeks to identify why this issue is of concern to the practitioner (see Whitehead and McNiff 2006) and this is the phase that will be discussed in this chapter.
