Article 8: Fostering Inclusivity Through Teaching and Learning Action Research

November 1 – 7: For this article there are two lead blogger, Samantha and Casey. They will post their lead blogs by Sunday midnight. Follow-up blogs are due Wednesday midnight. Please make sure that there is a least one follow-up blog to each lead blog.

5 Responses to "Article 8: Fostering Inclusivity Through Teaching and Learning Action Research"

Casey Vanderpool says:

November 4, 2018 at 11:17 am

Walsh, Rutherford, and Sears (2010) created an elective social working/nursing course on community-based research (CBR). The article defined CBR as “research rooted in community, serving community interests, encouraging citizen participation and geared towards affecting social change” (Walsh et al., 2010, p. 192). It was open to undergraduates in both social work and nursing fields. Because the CBR focused on homelessness, spaces were made available to staff at a local homeless shelter and extended to homeless community members who made use of the services. The members of the homeless community who participated in the course were referred to as community members in an attempt to decrease inequity brought on by socioeconomic status.

The course was meant to instruct students on performing action research (AR). Because of this, all aspects of AR were in place. AR has a goal to promote social change; the goal of the CBR for this particular class was related to homelessness. Additionally, AR is meant to be conducted with members of the community who are going to benefit from the social change. Including members of the city’s homeless community provided a unique opportunity for students to work with the people who will often be directly receiving social work or nursing services. The class was held in the local homeless shelter. Students were organized into small groups to complete course assignments and tasks. Both small group work and whole group discussions were utilized in the class structure. Students were given opportunities to discuss the syllabus, required assignments and due dates. There was an additional online component, and computers were made available to the community members who would not have traditionally had access to them.

The authors discussed institutional rules and procedures, funding limitations, and academic schedules as three barriers to AR in academic settings. The students identified different levels of investment, different learning styles, and different levels of engagement as three challenges faced in this type of course. Much of that had to do with the types of students involved in the course. Some were students receiving college credit, and others were community members receiving a certificate of participation from the university. The students gained multiple benefits from this course. Working so closely with members of the community who could receive their services allowed the social work and nursing students to make valuable connections to coursework and their everyday lives. Additionally, the community members provided their perspective on many different issues that those students may never have been exposed to before. This course also provided hands-on opportunities for students to become familiar with developing an action plan that is doable and sustainable.

Reflexivity, values, and critical thought are three important areas to every AR curriculum (Walsh et al., 2010). Reflexivity was promoted in this particular course with online reflections and group work. Students were encouraged to think on their own motivations for participating in the course in an effort to understand their values. Critically thinking about homelessness created avenues for students to develop action plans that directly impact the causes of the social issues. This course built practical skills for the learners involved. It also brought up unique ethical issues. The homeless participants in the course were a truly vulnerable population as they worked alongside staff members of the homeless shelter as fellow learners. One of these issues arose when members of the city’s homeless population struggled with boundaries in relationships. The authors described them as being less prepared to separate themselves from the relationships developed with students and staff members. The authors mentioned that they should provide counseling services to support this transition. The authors reported that their course was not renewed at the university for a variety of reasons; however, the success of the course was documented.

One very interesting aspect of this article was how the authors included themselves in the course. Due to the collaborative nature of AR, the researchers often become learners in the process of creating action plans for social change. The instructors of the course placed themselves in the position of learners. They provided plenty of opportunities for students to work in groups and provide feedback to each other. One author/instructor stated at one point that she felt “left out” during one particular class period in which student learners were so involved providing feedback and helping each other that the instructors did not have much to add. As I was reading, I felt myself comparing this class structure to our current research class. Dr. Laursen provides opportunities for us to listen to each other, work together, and provide peer feedback. He works as a facilitator to discussion and creates an environment where we can be responsible for learning in authentic ways.

Before I became a contracted teacher, I was a board substitute for five years. Most of my time as a sub was spent in one particularly difficult Chesterfield Co school. Approximately 85% of their students qualified for free and reduced lunch, and there was a fairly substantial homeless population as well. Trying to reduce the socioeconomic gap is going to take a tremendous effort from all involved, but I believe that it is one of the biggest problems in public education today. Poverty has a detrimental impact on learning, and it is difficult for those children to break from that cycle. If universities could provide more of these types of courses to create advocates to begin to address socio-economic issues, there could be an avenue for changes to begin to take place.
Samantha Muse says:

November 4, 2018 at 8:46 pm

This was a great article that touched on multidisciplinary teachings in a collaborative classroom. This classroom included nursing students, social working students, workers at a homeless shelter and people who were homeless themselves. Not only did this group work together, but they worked together to plan the course before and during the implementation of the course. “During the creation of the course considerable support was received from Teaching and Learning Centre; for example, staff at the Centre reviewed the course outline and offered suggestions to increase opportunities for active learning. The course instructors worked closely with the Institutional Review Board when develop-ing the course, meeting with the Chair of the Ethics board during the various phases of course development to establish links and reach a common understand-ing of the ethical issues involved. (Walsh et al.)”

Working with such a diverse group was good for everyone involved. The students could get some experience working with populations that they could be working with one day, and workers at the homeless shelter had a chance to work with some of the homeless people who stayed there. “Blurring this distinction provided the opportunity for shelter staff members to learn from shelter residents in ways that were not typical within their relationship of service provider/service recipient. (Walsh et al.)”

Walsh’s group was able to hit all of the guiding principles for their university academic plan, “learning centered university, research university, multi-disciplinary inquiry, and return to community.” They are in the community, teaching people and students in the community how to read and do their own research, and they are working with a multi-disciplinary diverse group of people.

I thought this article was very interesting. I love the idea of working in the community and studying homelessness with a population that lives with and works with it every day. I think everyone in this class has a much greater understanding of homelessness and action research after taking this course. This reminded me of our reading 2 course at UR where we were working in a local elementary school to teach concepts learned in reading 1 to students. We would then have a lecture when the students left to discuss how our mini lessons went. Although we weren’t talking about research in that particular course, we were doing service based work in our local community.
Timothy Corallo says:

November 6, 2018 at 9:58 pm

Casey and Samii,
Great job summarizing the article! I think the college class designed by these authors was a great way to get students involved in the action research process and promote positive change in their community. Casey, as you noted, this was a great way to have undergraduate students to, “…make valuable connections between their coursework and their everyday lives.” I too felt this coursework allowed them to not only affect positive change, but engage in an action research process that was directly relevant to their education and possible future careers. I especially liked the part of the course that focused on creating an action plan that was sustainable. This is a very important idea in action research that I had not fully considered until reading this article. If the goal of action research is to affect positive change, the action plan must be sustainable.

On another note, Casey, I also kept thinking of the parallels between the class structure in the article and our current class. Much of our classroom time revolves around discussions among the students and teacher. Dr. Laursen seems to guide and scaffold our conversations while also acting as a conversational participant. A lot of our assignments seem to follow the model in the article also. Our more complex assignments are completed collaboratively in small groups and involve the complex process of conducting an action research project. Further, our independent assignments also vary in different aspects of action research (reflecting on literature, conducting data analyses, etc.).
Molly Hulihan says:

November 7, 2018 at 5:04 pm

Casey and Samii,

Thanks for your great summaries of this article. I really enjoyed reading this article and seeing a model of an action research project that was promoting positive change in the community. Casey, I agree with you that this was a great way to conduct an action research project that could be beneficial to community members. One thing I thought was really interesting about this action research project was the fact that it was held in the community at the homeless shelter. The fact that classes were held in the chapel at the shelter and that the activities took place at the shelter and in the community is a really cool concept. I am also really interested in this because I do community based instruction with my students every day. I have always thought about how I could incorporate some type of research into my community-based instruction so this gave me a little insight into that.

Samii, I had not thought about the connection to our reading 2 class but I think that was a really great observation to make. Although it is not quite the same as this it is taking what we learned in a course and applying it in order to help the community.

Another aspect of this study that I really liked was the reflexive piece. This really contributes to the action research process and is such an important part. Overall I thought this was an impressive research study that promoted social change. It was a well thought out action research plan and although they have not offered the class again I hope that they can refine it and make it a class that is accessible to specific groups of students.
Justin Bartlett says:

November 7, 2018 at 11:12 pm

Casey and Samii,

Great job articulating this article. I found the article to be very interesting in the sense that they created an entire class based on Action Research and was able to yield meaningful results from it. I think it was notable that the researchers themselves were active participants in the class even when it was their research that was being conducted. I feel that with Action Research you must become one with your topic in order to truly understand what it is you are looking for as well knowing what the end goal is.

Casey, you bought up a great point about the connection of our class to the article. Even though we are all doing different research projects, there are certain components that we are able to help each other with. Action Research truly encompasses the act of collaboration and provides opportunity for peer reflection.

Samii, I would agree with you that our reading 2 class was similar to this article. Because Action Research is about solving a problem within a localized school environment, we did just that by helping our students in areas they needed the most. We took the time to learn and study everything about how to teach reading and then was able to put that knowledge to work. By analyzing the progress of the students and using each other as support truly brings the ideas and foundation of Action research full circle.

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