Jean McNiff’s research while affiliated with York St John University and other places

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Publications (12)


Certainty abandoned and some implications for curriculum research
  • Article
  • Full-text available

November 2020

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80 Reads

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3 Citations

London Review of Education

Jean McNiff

This article presents ideas about curriculum as a process in which people come together on an equal footing to explore ideas about how they might live and draw up plans about how they might do so. This is a negotiated process that recognizes the need of all to speak and be listened to, recognizing the historically constituted nature of social situations in different traditions, each with its own sets of culturally specific norms. Curriculum may then be seen as a process of everyday enquiry that may be conducted anywhere and by anyone, grounded in and informed by everyday practices.

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‘Impact’, educational influence and the practice of shared expertise

February 2018

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31 Reads

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3 Citations

Educational Action Research

This paper argues that participants and locals should be seen as at the centre of all development, including international and health development work. Consequently, in contexts of health and wellbeing, patients should be seen as active participants, which also implies the need for the independence and freedom of all and the development of dialogical spaces in which all may negotiate what counts as a life worth living. ‘Impact’, on this view, should be seen from a lifeworld perspective of evaluating the effects of dynamic evolving practices where all are seen potentially as donors and beneficiaries within contexts of mutually negotiated reciprocal relationships. Data drawn from extensive fieldwork with local trauma surgeons, midwives and healthcare personnel in rural Cambodia provide the basis of new perceptions about processes of ‘passing on’ knowledge and expertise. The ideas presented have potential implications for normative understandings of the social organisation of healthcare in domestic and international settings.


Learning About Action Research in and From the Middle East

October 2017

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18 Reads

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2 Citations

Who we are and become is influenced by our relationships in different times and spaces. In this paper, I tell stories about my professional education work with others in the Middle East and elsewhere that shows this process in action. However, this view of the evolutionary nature of identity requires a different epistemology from the dominant either-or epistemology of conventional higher education. Through stories about interactions with others in higher education, I explain how such a divisive epistemological form encourages divisive social practices. Further, given current misappropriations of action research by a traditionalist academy, this form now infiltrates action research discourses. Finding ways to create pluralist identities therefore becomes the responsibility of academics who thereby legitimize a dynamic epistemological form through their own action enquiries.


Writing Up Your Action Research Project

December 2015

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935 Reads

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45 Citations

Many practice-based researchers have expert knowledge of doing research but often experience difficulties when writing it up and communicating the significance of what they have done. This book aims to help bridge the gap. Packed with practical advice and strong theoretical resources it takes you through the basics of designing and producing your text so that it will meet established standards and high quality assurance expectations. Divided into 3 distinctive parts, key points include: Understanding writing practices Engaging with the literatures How to write up a project report or dissertation How writing is judged in terms of professional and academic writing practices Developing ideas for further study and publication Writing up Your Action Research Project is an essential text for practitioners on professional education and undergraduate courses across disciplines who want their writing to reflect the excellence of their research. It is the ideal companion to the author's You and Your Action Research Project,now in its fourth edition.


Becoming cosmopolitan and other dilemmas of internationalisation: Reflections from the Gulf States

December 2013

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33 Reads

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15 Citations

Cambridge Journal of Education

Drawing on the concept of cosmopolitans and locals within competing discourses regarding the aims of higher education and international marketization, this paper suggests that cultural cosmopolitanism may be developed through intercultural dialogue. It reflects on the findings of an action research-based teacher professional education programme in Qatar, with further delivery in other Gulf States, and suggests that potential negative outcomes of uncritical ‘othering’ forms of marketization, potentially resulting in epistemological mnemocide through the exercise of cultural imperialism, may be avoided through developing dialogical communities of inquiry, where issues of values pluralism may be negotiated according to participants’ needs and capacities for knowledge creation. These ideas may be significant for negotiating appropriate criteria for judging the quality of delivery and methodological ethics of the increasing numbers of international programmes using practice-based forms of enquiry. They are essential if international development work is to encourage sustainability through independent knowledge creation.


Action research: Principles and practice, 3rd edition

March 2013

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3,821 Reads

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1,410 Citations

Since its first publication, Action Research: Principles and Practice has become a key text in its field. This new updated edition clearly describes and explains the practices of action research and its underlying values, and introduces important new ideas, including: • all professionals should be reflective practitioners; • they should produce their personal theories of practice to show how they are holding themselves accountable for their educational influences in learning; •the stories they produce become a new people's history of action research, with potential for influencing new futures. This new edition has expanded in scope, to contribute to diverse fields including professional development across the sectors and the disciplines. It considers the current field, including its problems as well as its considerable hopes and prospects for new thinking and practices. Now fully updated, this book contains: • A wealth of case-study material • New chapters on the educational significance of action research • An overview of methodological and ethical discussion The book is a valuable addition to the literature on research methods in education and nursing and healthcare, and professional education, and contributes to contemporary debates about the generation and dissemination of knowledge and its potential influence for wider social and environmental contexts. Practitioners across the professions who are planning action research in their own work settings will find this book a helpful introduction to the subject while those studying on higher degree courses will find it an indispensable resource.



Travels around identity: Transforming cultures of learned colonisation

March 2012

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47 Reads

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13 Citations

Educational Action Research

This paper is about: developing critical understandings about the nature and origins of one’s personal and professional identity; learning how to transform uncritically internalised and potentially damaging conceptualisations of identity and identity formation; saying why it is important to do so; and considering what kinds of texts can show the processes involved. Becoming critical means not simply accepting that ‘I’ am the person I see in the mirror or the ‘me’ my mother/partner/boss wishes me to be, but actively engaging with the experience of my own living ‘I’. This is especially important for action researchers involved in processes of social transformation, and trying to find ways of living their understandings in practice, which begins with developing capacity in critical self-reflection. Here I tell a story of how this capacity might be achieved, and some of the problematics involved. The story is about how two groups of teachers – one in Ireland and one in South Africa, studying for their higher degrees – and I as their supervisor, managed to find ways of reconceptualising what we thought were our stable identities, how we came to appreciate that those identities were culturally and historically constituted, and how we made our collaborative enquiries public. Thus we found ways of writing new stories about identity and identity formation, which, we hope, will influence new thinking about critical self-reflection in educational practices and research.


New cultures of critical reflection in Qatar

September 2011

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54 Reads

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15 Citations

Educational Action Research

We speak about the need for critical reflection on practice, but what do we do when we do it; and how do we explain how and why we should do it? This paper explores these issues, and itself acts as the site for an exploration and explanation of what it means to be critically reflective. Drawing on recent research in Qatar, I give an account of how practitioners’ capacity for critical reflection is contributing to a new knowledge base for the country (and possibly beyond), grounded in inter-relational epistemologies, that has potentially far-reaching consequences for improving the quality of learning and teaching in schools and colleges; and how my involvement in the research has improved the quality of my own practice. A main theme throughout is the need to engage with questions – ‘How do I understand my practice? How do I make judgements about its justifiability? How do I demonstrate moral accountability through interrogating the values that inspire what I do?’ – and with the need to make public the emergent understandings that engagement with these questions demands.


You and Your Action Research Project

January 2011

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2,415 Reads

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902 Citations

This book gives practical guidance on doing an action research project. Written for practitioners across professions who are studying on work-based learning programmes and award-bearing courses, this book is packed full of useful advice and takes the reader through the various stages of a project, including: Starting your action research project. Monitoring and documenting the action. Techniques for dealing with the data. Making claims to knowledge and validating them. Legitimating your research. Making your research public. Creating your living educational theory. The book's practical approach will appeal to practitioners and will encourage them to try out new strategies for improving their work. It will also be essential reading for those resource managers in schools, colleges and higher education institutions who are responsible for providing courses and support. This third edition of the best-selling book has been thoroughly updated and improved by a number of features, with new case studies from a wide range of disciplines, extracts from validated dissertations and theses (with information on how to access more examples via the Internet), points for reflection, checklists of reflective questions, and up-to the-minute information on current debates and ideas.


Citations (11)


... Participatory action research is a form of participatory research that challenges dominant positivist paradigms and involves three types of change: (1) critical consciousness; (2) development of researchers and participants; (3) improvement of lives of those participating in research, and transformation of relationships and societal structures (MacDonald 2012;McNiff and Whitehead 2012). PAR is considered emancipatory and supports participants and active co-researchers to release themselves from the constraints in which they are situated. ...

Reference:

Deepening our understanding: Collaboration through online peer-to-peer participatory action research with children
Action Research for Teachers
  • Citing Book
  • November 2012

... Greenwood and Levin (2007) define action research simply as research that is conducted by at least one expert with individuals in an organisation or common field, to bring about a transformation of the context in which the individuals exist or work whilst Altrichter, Kemmis, McTaggart and Zuber-Skerritt (2021) define action research as an activity that mainly aims to develop process skills and achieve emancipation. The transformation leads to a better and more functional environment in which the individuals live or work (Greenwood & Levin, 2007;Hendricks, 2019;Kemmis, McTaggart & Nixon, 2019;McNiff, Edvardsen, Steinholt & Margit, 2018). ...

‘Impact’, educational influence and the practice of shared expertise
  • Citing Article
  • February 2018

Educational Action Research

... Although some education departments of some universities in the U.S. have one or more faculty members devoted to the recognition that 'another knowledge is possible' (Santos 2008, xx), including knowledge produced through action research and other participatory research approaches, sustaining or further developing action-research courses are not guaranteed at this time of predominance of EBP talk in universities. The situation becomes more exacerbated in academic units where some faculty see action research as not meeting the standard for producing evidence of causality or as lacking a sufficiently academic tone (McNiff 2017). In addition to recognizing the signs of what McNiff identified as 'academic protectionism' (256), we wonder whether these academics know the definition of evidence in EBP introduced in the U.S., whether they have given much thought to the difficulties associated with using EBP in relation to diverse contexts of practice, the endemic disempowerment of practitioners in the field associated with EBP, and whether they recognize that acceptance of diverse knowledges (Santos 2008) is not an anti-science stance. ...

Learning About Action Research in and From the Middle East
  • Citing Chapter
  • October 2017

... This research was conducted in 8-12 meetings, with 4 meetings for each cycle. Classroom action research is an ongoing process because there will always be a new problem arising in classroom practices (McNiff, 2016). Thus, the cyclical process in this study conducted until the researcher meets the satisfactory result of students' writing proficiency. ...

Writing Up Your Action Research Project
  • Citing Book
  • December 2015

... As artistic researchers we have sought to preserve the uniqueness and messiness of teaching through the research process. The freedom afforded to us by this emancipatory approach facilitated a more fluid exploration of thought and emotion, resisting the expectations of convention which presented to us both a challenge, and opportunity in the context of how we present this to you our reader (McNiff, 2013). We are aware that through our positionality in this account we actively resist the prescriptive norms of theory, data and methods, exposing ourselves and our work to potential criticism as lacking methodological rigour (Ganesh, 2014). ...

Action research: Principles and practice, 3rd edition
  • Citing Article
  • March 2013

... A few other observations must be made. First, many of the Gulf States are highly cosmopolitan (McNiff, 2013), with the expatriate community today constituting the majority of the population in three of the six GCC states and significant portions in the other three (Shayah & Sun, 2019). Also, according to Tryzna et al. (2019), there has been a rapid influx of Western education in the GCC states through international universities and their branch campuses to produce 'global-ready graduates' in the model of mainly U.S. higher education (p. ...

Becoming cosmopolitan and other dilemmas of internationalisation: Reflections from the Gulf States
  • Citing Article
  • December 2013

Cambridge Journal of Education

... On the other hand, professional wisdom, also commonly referred to as practice wisdom, refers to knowledge and expertise gained through practical experience (Klein & Bloom, 1995;McNiff, 2008). This professional acumen is based on accumulating knowledge over time through practice and reflection, and it can help scholar-practitioners make informed decisions about research design, data collection, analysis, and interpretation. ...

The significance of 'I' in educational research and the responsibility of intellectuals

South African Journal of Education

... All members of host societies, as well as those of origin, have a cultural identity that is the result of the acquisition of a series of qualities or characteristics (values, customs, symbols, beliefs, types of behaviour …) based on their belonging to a specific collective. This article agrees with the widely held opinion that there is a strong relationship between cultural identity, culture and belonging to a specific social group (McNiff, 2012;O'Connor y Faas, 2012;Steinbach, 2014;Silver, 2015;Velázquez, 2012), and especially the relationship between individuals and their community of origin for the configuration of their cultural identity. Deep roots in the society of origin (see Table 3) and time of residence in the society of arrival therefore become essential factors in the construction of individual cultural identity (Fuentes, 2014). ...

Travels around identity: Transforming cultures of learned colonisation
  • Citing Article
  • March 2012

Educational Action Research