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Nova Scotia Action Research Movement |
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| Return | Posing Problems/Solving Problems Conference"Posing Problems/Solving Problems: Using Action Research to Address Issues of Retention, Recruitment and Effective Teaching in Literacy" Workshop held on March 23 & 24, 2006 UpdateOn March 23rd, over fifty literacy practitioners and administrators met in Debert to attend the "Posing Problems/Solving Problems: Using Action Research to Address Issues of Retention, Recruitment and Effective Teaching in Literacy" workshop led by Allan Quigley, Professor of Adult Education at St. FX University. These adult educators represented community-based learning networks, adult high schools, and the School of Access at the community college. Participants were grouped by geographic regions to determine an "itch" that they wanted to work on. Nine groups identified a problem and worked out a plan of action. Some of the research focused on tutors, in particular recruitment, and many others focused on the students, including motivation, retention, and attention, to name a few. Participants have been sending their action research plans to be published in Literacy Nova Scotia's e-news and newsletter. Literacy Nova Scotia is pleased to announce an exciting new initiative which has sprung from the workshop in Debert: the Nova Scotia – Action Research Movement (NS-ARM). Allan's workshop ignited an interest in action research in Nova Scotia. This is timely because it corresponds with a national project, Developing a Framework for Research in Practice in Adult Literacy, led by Jenny Horsman and Helen Woodrow. (For more information on this project see our January 2006 E-news at http://www.ns.literacy.ca/enews/jan06/jan06.pdf). Janet Shively, the Nova Scotia researcher for the project, attended the workshop at Debert to learn about the action research activities practitioners in NS are undertaking. LNS is pleased to have the opportunity to support practitioner research in Nova Scotia; there is important work happening in the literacy field here at home. It is vital that this relatively new activity for Nova Scotia receive the attention it needs to help it thrive. LNS has received funding from the Adult Learning Knowledge Centre for a project entitled, Maintaining the Momentum. This project will support the inclusion of action research content in LNS's newsletter (paper version) and e-news, a new section in our website that will include the research started in Debert, a fact sheet about the initiative as well as other information about the topic and a web discussion forum. We hope that this will help all the participants at the Debert workshop to continue to work on their projects. As well as encourage other practitioners to explore action research in their work. LNS plans to include additional research in action training opportunities in its next series of professional development offerings over the next two years. Already good work has been done by those who participated in the Debert workshop. To date, five groups have submitted their action plans. You may find you have similar problems and have posed similar questions to those of the action research teams. Listed below are some of the questions asked by the teams. Click on the link to find out how they are going to investigate their problems following the action research criteria.
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