Action Research by Early Childhood Teachers in Chile: A Tool for a Broader Change?

• In Event: School Leadership and Practitioner Research: Criticality or Domestication?

Abstract

In early childhood teacher education, teacher professional development is crucial due to its potential impact on children’s learning (UNESCO, 2015). In Chile, the quality of pedagogical practices at preschool level is deficient and focused mainly on non-instructional practices (Strasser, Lissi & Silva, 2009). The results of national teacher evaluation show that less than half of preschool teachers evaluated well in quality of pedagogical interaction and only 20% - 40% demonstrated high levels of reflection (Minister of Education, 2013). Literature about teacher education agrees the need to foster collaboration and reflection among teachers (Borko, 2004, Darling-Hammond, 2006); however this is hard to develop within a traditional setting (Cohen & Hill, 2000).

New alternatives have emerged to address the social - cultural dimension of teacher education. One of these is action-research. As we understand, action research provides the tools for teachers to investigate their own practice in a broad sense (Carr & Kemmis, 1986). In Chile, action research was used in Education during the dictatorship of the 1980’s. Nowadays, action research is linked with reflection and inquiry through professional standards for early childhood teachers, but is not a main tool of teacher professional development. This may reflect the predominance of individual improvement of teachers, instead of the collective agency that action research might foster.

This study investigates the experience of action research inserted into a teacher professional development program focused on the improvement of pedagogical interaction from a sociocultural perspective. From 2012 to 2015, three cohorts of around 80 early childhood teachers from Fundación Integra participate in this program and work in nursery schools located in vulnerable contexts.
During the experience, teachers set up professional learning communities to reflect on the pedagogical problems and developed intervention plans according to an action research framework. The intervention plans were analyzed through qualitative content analysis that included a descriptive level and an interpretative-critical level. This data will be complemented by interviews with participants and analysis of one of the professional learning community meetings in order to identify some of the critical aspects of action research described by Kemmis (2006).

The intervention plans were mostly focused on the professional development of teachers using video formation, replicating the main teaching strategy developed by the program. In the same way, the focus of the video formation was on the quality of the interaction with children, based on the theoretical framework of learning mediated experience that was also the main conceptual topic developed in the program. Other interventions were oriented towards family involvement to introduce parents into ways of promoting learning mediated experience at homes. These initial results show the positive implications of action research, but also should alert researchers to the cautions of using this tool in a context of high accountability. In this respect, action research may become an artifact that is useful just to achieve the standards, but is far from the original purpose of emancipation and social justice.

Authors

• Paula Guerra, Universidad Diego Portales

• Ignacio Figueroa, Universidad Diego Portales