Narratives as a tool when working for equality in action research: a description and discussion of the researcher’s experiences from a school development project in Norway

Abstract

Collaboration between participants with different roles, but equal status, is the aim in action research. In this project we experienced problems establishing equality between the participants. The research question discussed in this paper is: ‘How did the researcher experience that the use of narratives affected the level of equality between the researcher and teachers in a collaborative action research project?’ The findings are presented under three headings: involved participants; efficient processes; and from descriptions to reflections, from incidents to processes. The use of the narratives appeared to increase the participants’ involvement. The processes also seemed to be more effective, even though the researcher as the author is discussed as a problem.