When a student fails to participate in an ordinary class activity, most teachers consider it legitimate to insist on the student's participation either by persuading, demanding, or (perhaps) tricking the student to join. Doing so is ethical for teachers in their roles as teachers, because teachers are primarily responsible for insuring that students learn, and students' participation presumably facilitates learning. If a teacher designates an activity as part of an action research project, however, and later shares the results with them, the teacher then also becomes partly responsible for how other teachers use knowledge of the research study. (Remember: sharing results is intrinsically part of the research process.) The resulting dual commitment means that “forcing” a student to participate in an action research activity can no longer be justified solely as being for the student's own educational good.
Much of the time, a simultaneous commitment to both teachers and students presents no real dilemma: what is good for the action research project may also be good for the students. But not always. Suppose, for example, that a teacher wants to do research about students' beliefs about war and global conflict, and doing so requires that students participate in numerous extended group discussions on this topic. Even though the group discussions might resemble a social studies lesson and in this sense be generally acceptable as a class activity, some parents (or students) may object because they take too much class time away from the normal curriculum topics. Yet the research project necessitates giving it lots of discussion time in class. To respond ethically to this dilemma, therefore, the teacher may need to allow students to opt out of the discussions if they or their parents choose. She may therefore need to find ways for them to cover an alternate set of activities from the curriculum. (One way to do this, for example, is to hold the special group discussions outside regular class times though this obviously also increases the amount of work for both the teacher and students.)
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