Educational Action Research in Australia: Organization and Practice

Abstract

Australian educational action research has developed a community of practitioners through initiatives in school-based curriculum development, school-level evaluation, in-service education and participatory decision-making in schools. It has also developed as a disciplinary area in its own right (Brown, 1981). It has also developed an epistemology, rooted in critical social science (Kemmis, 1983; Grundy and Kemmis, 1981), with a characteristic set of research problems of other approaches to educational research and educational theory. These research problems are actively being pursued by a widening community of action researchers and action research facilitators around Australia.