Transformational Change: Personal, Organizational, and Scholarly

• In Event: The Why, How, and Lessons Learned From Meta-Analysis of Action Research

Abstract

This presenter and her colleague have conducted a study exploring transformational change. Taking an action research perspective, her research question was: If I better understand what students say about the changes they experiences, what changes will this suggest in the way I teach action research?”
They described action research taking places on three planes or levels simultaneously -- the personal, organizational and scholarly.
-- The personal level addresses changes to the person (knowledge, practice and identity in the professional context)
-- The organizational is acquiring a deeper understanding of the process of change in the workplace -- attention to community roles, knowledge and practice and how they change
-- The scholarly level -- this is the development of knowledge, practices and identity of the researcher. Attention to methods, metacognitive and findings.
They analyzed the final reflection of 25 action researchers who work was select for publication on the Center for Collaborative Action Research site. The unit of analysis was the sentence. Sentences were coded for discussion of either personal, professional or scholarly change. Some sentences included more than one area but it was only coded for one and effort was made to identify the most salient topic. Where there were more than one and there was equal treatment, the first was selected for consistency.
They found that half of the messages were focused on personal and then an equal numbers of remaining half were divided on organizational learning insights and transformations as a scholar. Each of these areas was further analyzed to see which among knowledge, practices and identity were the most often cited.
This meta-analysis was helpful in seeing that students were more likely to center on how knowledge has changed more than practices and identity. As a consequence of this research, we know present to the students the three levels of possible change and ask them to directly reflect on them in their weekly blogs. Faculty are more aware of the focus of students and direct their support to help the students be more way of the different levels of change. This report will be cycle two – a comparison of the students in Cadre 13 with previous students. The question will be did they focus more on different levels of changes when they were more aware of the possibility and used these categories as tools for reflection.

Author

• Margaret M. Riel, Pepperdine University