Action research

Emotion Labor as Professional Development Work: Insights from Teachers Doing Action Research

“…Such an exploration could thus offer benefits to teachers and teacher educators to better understand how emotions feature in AR and more importantly how emotions could be employed for contributing to teachers' professional growth in short and long terms. In this vein, our understanding of AR, thus, resonates with the recent scholarship (e.g., Banegas & Villacañas de Castro, 2019; Villacañas de Castro, 2014, 2020) in situating AR against the role of power and discourse in educational work (i.e., emotion labor), yet with a focal attention to how the process of AR is inflected with emotion work, as the under‐explored agendum in this line of thinking and research. The present study aimed to fill this gap by reporting on four Iranian English language teachers' engagement in AR, addressing the following question:…”

“…Longitudinal examination of the teachers' perceptions revealed that the AR project helped them engage in deep‐acting in response to various expectations to experience sustainable effects of AR (see Banegas & Villacañas de Castro, 2019; Edwards, 2020; Edwards & Burns, 2015). However, while institutional expectations featured prominently in the teachers' sixth interview responses, their seventh‐interview responses showed that the AR project has functioned as a critical incident for them in terms of being a memorable experience.…”

“…Such perspectives have also been reflected in the ideas of John Dewey who emphasized collective inquiry as an approach that transcends mere educational issues toward embracing the sociocultural particularities that define educational work and how individuals could move toward dealing with those particularities for purposes of responsive education. Such a quest for embracing sociocultural particularities in the context of AR has been effectively employed by recent scholarship on AR (e.g., Banegas & Villacañas de Castro, 2015, 2019; Villacañas de Castro, 2014, 2020; Villacañas de Castro & Banegas, 2020). This recent and emerging line of thinking and research has the principle that “social practices” (Villacañas de Castro & Banegas, 2020, p. 1) form the ontological underpinnings of AR, which was also empirically corroborated in the study by Villacañas de Castro (2014) in dealing with academic, conceptual, and socioeconomic obstacles of a professional development course, as ameliorated by AR, and resulted in better mutual understanding in the course.…”

“…Action research in language teaching began to appear around the mid‐1980s and has considered teachers as critical, reflective, and self‐motivated agents who can take an active role in their own professional development by conducting systematic inquiry (Burns, 2009). As a combination of two modes of activity (action and research), AR aims to bridge the gap between researchers and teachers, and to encourage teachers to adopt an inquiring stance toward their own classroom practices (De Costa, Gajasinghe, Ojha, & Rabie–Ahmed, 2022; Edwards & Burns, 2016; Trent, 2010) and more broadly the sociocultural particularities concerning their professional work (see Banegas & Villacañas de Castro, 2019; Villacañas de Castro, 2014). Burns (2019) emphasizes that the sense of professional growth that can emerge from conducting AR provides teachers with the means to reflect on and problematize their practices.…”

Non-Native Teachers Investigating New Englishes

“…Teacher research has been defined as "systematic self-study by teachers (individually or collaboratively) which seeks to achieve the real-world impact of some kind and is made public" (Borg & Sanchez, 2015, p. 1). It may include different approaches such as action research (Banegas & Villacañas de Castro, 2019;Borg, 2013;Burns, 2010;Freeman, 1998), exploratory practice (Hanks, 2017a(Hanks, , 2017b, exploratory action research (Smith, 2015;Smith & Rebolledo, 2018), self-study, lesson study, design-based research and scholarship of teaching and learning (Admiraal et al, 2014).…”