The initial resurgence of contemporary interest in educational action
research arose from the work of the 1973–76 Ford Teaching Project in
Britian, under the direction of John Elliott and Clem Adelman.24 This
project involved teachers in collaborative action research into their
own practices, and its central notion of the ‘self-monitoring teacher’
was based on Lawrence Stenhouse’s25 views of the teacher as a
researcher and as an ‘extended professional’. There are a number of
reasons why this project led to a resurgence of interest. First, there
was the demand from within an increasingly professionalized teacher
force for a research role, based on the notion of the extended
professional investigating his or her own practice. Second, there was
the perceived irrelevance to the concerns of these practitioners of much