Harnessing the Affordances of Action Researchers to Address the Challenges of the COVID-19 Pandemic: Educational Leaders take Action Research Online

Abstract

The unique affordances of Action Research, including flexibility, playfulness, accessibility, and a focus on practical problem solving provided crucial strategies for generating knowledge and developing solutions to the challenges created by the Covid-19 pandemic. The move to online research settings, in particular, required action researchers to find ways to adapt existing research methods and to devise new approaches. This article describes the work of a group of doctoral students in an Educational Leadership program and their instructor in carrying out action research methods in both synchronous and asynchronous online settings. If the months of the pandemic have taught us nothing else, it is that flexibility and willingness to innovate, which are central to action research, are valuable assets in times of uncertainty. The unique affordances of Action Research include creativity, playfulness, accessibility to multiple participants and audiences, transferability of findings, and a focus on the generation of knowledge designed to be pragmatic and problem-focused. These qualities can be harnessed to address the multiple challenges we have encountered during the pandemic including health equity and access, poverty and unemployment, and the interruption of education for vulnerable student populations. They also offer us hope that action research can continue to contribute to addressing the challenges we are sure to face in the future. As students in an educational leadership doctoral program, we focus on examining problems of practice in our schools and districts through action research. As we adapted to online learning in our own schools, we were able to bring these skills to bear in our doctoral studies by developing strategies for conducting these action research methods in both synchronous and asynchronous online settings. This paper describes some of the approaches we developed in the hope that this will enable other action researchers to implement these methods in their own schools, organizations, and communities. The specific action research methods described in this paper are Future Creating Workshops, Citizens’ Juries, World Café, Nominal Group Technique, and Digital Storytelling.