Exploration 6 - Mini Action Research Project

Exploration 6 - Mini Action Research Project


For my mini action research project, I finished a collaboration with the music teacher in order to explore identity through art and music. 


On day two, after analyzing the visual data from student self-portraits, we decided to take a deeper look into “Why” artists make are (to tell a story and show emotion).  After talking to think a little more deeply about the answers to these complex questions, we introduced the idea of “What” - What do I care about?.  On this day, students made cause posters, highlighting a cause they care about.  Students were prompted with the following questions to encourage higher level questioning and thinking (Turn and Talk).




Students made a poster and a sound collage to go with their posters that represented a cause they care about. 














The final project was the identify mapping project. Students did a lot of self exploration through this, both guided and independent.  This whole experience and collaboration was multifaceted and allowed for many social justice components to exist and be explored.  As Karen Keifer-Boyd mentions in “Critique, Advocacy, and Dissemination: I’ve Got the Data and the Findings, Not What?” on page 198:

Pathways for action research as advocacy for social justice involves

attention to inequitable power relations, building spaces for transcultural

dialogue designed to question values and structures experienced in our

daily life, critical reflection from intertextual and intersubjective

investigations, and is often collaborative in the pursuit of collective

knowledge production for systemic change.  

Through this project, students underwent the cycle of advocacy and reciprocity in that us, the teacher researchers, used students and their lives as data.  Students, in turn, got the change and realizations out of identity mapping that makes it reciprocal.  There were many times throughout this process where students had the opportunity to reflect on themselves and the parts of the project they participated in up to that point.  Students had the power in this circumstance - they had options and choices.



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