Deciding where and how to begin your journey towards being a transformative professional is at times overwhelming. One way forward is to use established processes that help you to work with others for change in your community. Action research is one process that invites you as an early childhood professional on a journey with others to define and redefine theory, practice and professionalism in your early childhood classroom. For many early childhood professionals, action research is a way of looking again at the moments that are familiar or taken-for-granted and thinking about these moments differently. It is a systematic process of:
•locating an issue that troubles you as a teacher in your classroom,
•attempting to understand it theoretically, practically, and institutionally,
•taking action with others to transform inequities and injustices in how theory, practice and institutions play out for you, your children and your families,
Action research can help you and your community to unpack and reshape what is happening in your classroom, and then to share your work with other professionals and communities.
There are four cycles in action research that can be used to look at a specific moment, event or issue in your classroom. These are:
•reconnaissance;
•planning
•actings;and
•reflecting critically.
Reconnaissance involves framing a question about what is happening in your com- munity. It means you begin to ask questions and gather details about the broad issue it has been understood by you and others. Your that you have identified and how reconnaissance enables you to use the information that you gather to look a little more closely at what is problematic, troubling or exciting about this issue for your community.
When you have gathered sufficient information to refine your understanding of what is happening, you begin strategically to plan for change. These plans involve careful and considered discussion within your community about what changes are desirable, how these changes might be accomplished and what risks might be involved for people in the community in making a change.
Translating your plans into actions is often more challenging than you expect. You may find there are many unexpected outcomes of your change, and many issues that arise for individual people in your community that mean you will need to reconsider what you are doing. This is one reason why it is important to document what happens when you implement your change. Another reason for documenting your actions and their effects is to enable you to theorize and share your journey with others who might want to make changes in their community.
As you look at the data you collect about how the change has impacted on your community, you will find that you are inevitably involved in criticallv reflecting on what has happened and asking new questions about what has happened. This is an important step for rethinking what you and your community will do next. Ultimately, action research enables you to begin to unpack how theory, practice, people and institutions construct and are constructed by a regime of truth' that makes some changes possible for some people and not for others. If you are a professional who is committed to transforming early childhood education, this will continually bring you back to thinking about what the "regime of truth' means to your work for social justice.
Issues you might use to begin a journey into action research with others
An early childhood professional shared one of the issues that troubled her