Abstract
As educators, we want to guide our students so that they develop to the best of their ability and are emancipated. As researchers in education, we often use action research. We use proven theories to guide our intervention to emancipate our students. Or do we? Recently, prominent information systems journals have published few papers in the field of information systems education. We demonstrate that the guidelines for action research from a critical social research perspective in information systems are not evident in action research studies in information systems education. The emancipative goals of pure critical social research and reliance on critical social theory to guide our intervention are lacking in these educational studies. Our aim is to provide alignment between educational action research in information systems and information systems research conducted from a critical social theory perspective. Our methodology is to explicitly propose phases of action research from a critical social research perspective, grounded both in information systems and education literature. Then, we demonstrate the value of this approach in a study on the improvement of a data warehousing module. We conclude that by using proven theories and reflecting on the presuppositions in a problem environment, the researcher is able to guide the development of students and the community.
Highlights
IntroductionAs researchers in a specific discipline (information systems in our case), we want to make a scholarly contribution to the knowledge area and industry
Our goal as educators is to guide the development of our students
We demonstrate that the guidelines for action research from a critical social research perspective in information systems are not evident in action research studies in information systems education
Summary
As researchers in a specific discipline (information systems in our case), we want to make a scholarly contribution to the knowledge area and industry. In both our educational and industry-related work, our role is that of an “agent of change”, which motivates us to use action research as methodology. The principles for conducting critical social theory research in information systems (IS) developed by Myers and Klein [1] have provided scholars in the field of IS with explicit guidance for critical studies. Our area of concern (‘A’) was higher education in data warehousing and our own (BH2 and BH6)
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