Principles for school student participation in pre-service teacher action research: a practice architecture’s perspective

ABSTRACT

This study focuses on pre-service teachers’ views of the conditions that foster their participatory action research practices in secondary schools and on how these conditions can inform the development of a teacher education program for a participatory approach. By using the Theory of Practice Architectures as an analytical lens, eight cases of participatory action research projects were studied at two interrelated sites of pre-service teachers’ learning: the teacher education institute and the internship school. Findings shed light on the conditions for fostering participatory action research practices in a teacher education context in terms of three kinds of arrangements, i.e. cultural-discursive, material-economic, and social-political. Based on the findings, a set of 17 principles for supporting participatory research practices is presented that can be used to assess the viability of preservice teachers’ participatory action research within a teacher education program, and that also supports a well-aligned institute-school collaboration.

KEYWORDS:

• Pre-service teacher research
• student participation
• participatory action research
• teacher education
• practice theory
• principles

Abbreviations

Table

Acknowledgments

The authors wish to thank the student teachers, school students, and teacher educators for voluntarily participating in this study.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Research ethics

The study attained ethical approval from ICLON, Leiden University Graduate School of Teaching. Registration number: IREC_ICLON 2015-05.

Notes

1. The term ‘arrangements’ is part of the Theory of Practice Architectures (Edwards-Groves and Grootenboer 2015; Kemmis et al. 2014b).