FETC+Session

=FETC PANEL ON ACTION RESEARCH=

Ideas for the Friday Session
Concurrent Session 9 - Friday, January 26 - 12:30PM to 1:25PM Room S330H [|Link to FETC Program]

Goal
This session should help people think through action research for themselves. To do this we will need everyone's help. Here is the idea as far as we have developed it.

Introductory Action
Margaret, Paul, and Bill will begin by asking people to think about their workplace and their practices. Now think about your values, goals, and visions for your workplace. What would it look like if there was a perfect alignment with your values? How close are you to effectively accomplishing the goals you set for youself? What are your visions of what it could be like? Now what is the distance or gap between them?

The work of action research is to experiment by taking action to reduce that gap. Think of your actions as a band with just the right about of tension to pull you and others toward a workplace that you can envision. What would that action be? We will have some audience participation.

(This might take 5-10 minutes. The purpose is to get the audience thinking about action research for themselves.)

Panel of Pepperdine Alumni
Then we will turn to some of the Experts in Action research--past students who are with us at FETC. I am not sure of the set of people who will be there, but I know that Karen Elinich, Karen Connaghan, Karen Griffin, Pam Rivers, Paul Reynolds, and someone else that Paul mentioned will be there.

We will ask some questions of the panel based on the audience reactions but each of you might address a different question. (We can arrange some defualt questions and then we ask if anyone wants to respond to some of the emergent questions.)

What helped you find your issue or problem? How did doing action research change the way you viewed your workplace? What do you do differently now that you have gone through this experience? What advise to you have to people who are thinking about doing action research? What was most difficult about the process?

I suspect that each of the people on the panel will get to respond to 2 questions and each response should be about 2 minutes in length. So if there were 5 panelists, each answering 2 questions for 2 minutes that would be about 25 minutes.

Small Groups Faciliatated by Current Students
Then what we would do is put the audience in groups with current Pepperdine students who are engaged in action research as small group discussion leaders. If the students can disperse themselves throughout the audience sitting next to strangers, this will help. Then, each small group should have one or more Pepperdine student(s) in it.

The goal of the small groups will be to get the non-Pepperdine students to understand how they might engage in action research.

Resources for Action research (demo)
The session will end will a quick demo of the website and wiki site and distribution of flyers that they can take with both addresses.