You are here

Ethical cautions about action research

18 February, 2015 - 15:58
Available under Creative Commons-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Download for free at http://cnx.org/contents/ce6c5eb6-84d3-4265-9554-84059b75221e@2.1

One caution is the possibility of conflict of interest between the roles of teaching and conducting action research (Hammack, 1997). A teacher's first priorities should be the welfare of his or her students: first and foremost, you want students to learn, to be motivated, to feel accepted by their peers, and the like A researcher's first priorities, however, are to the field or topic being studied. The two kinds of priorities may often overlap and support each other. Vivian Paley's observations of children in her classes, described earlier, not only supported her children's learning, but also her studies of the children.

But situations can also occur in which action research and teaching are less compatible, and can create ethical dilemmas. The problems usually relate to one of three issues: privacy, informed consent, or freedom to participate. Each of these becomes an issue only if the results of a research project are made public, either in a journal or book, as with the examples we have given in this chapter, or simply by being described or shared outside the classroom. (Sharing, you may recall, is one of the defining features of action research.) Look briefly at each of the issues.