The Action Research Community

The Supporting the Teaching of Action Research (STAR) is an Action Research Community (ARC) that is part of the Action Network of the Americas (ARNA). We have come together to provide an evolving community among those who teach action research. More information about the community leaders of this group can be found in our TEACHING ACTION RESEARCH BLOG. We are starting STAR conversations to better understand how we can support the community of people who teach action research. We are an open community and would love to have you join us. Please go to our BLOG, subscribe and we will send you notices when we schedule STAR conversations on different topics in action research. We will also post upcoming conversations on ARNA facebook site. We have committed to making the STAR site available to Spanish speaking members. Laura Dina and Clotilde Lomeli Agruel have been making the site available in Spanish. This process is not finished but we are working on it. If we can build our spanish-speaking community, along with those who work in English, we can explore what resources are best needed by our communities. Please join us!

Our History:

This ARC began with a Learning Circle Approach. A learning circle is a highly interactive, participatory structure for organizing group work. The goal is to build, share, and express knowledge through a process of open dialogue and deep reflection around issues or problems with a focus on a shared outcome. Online learning circles take advantage of social networking tools to manage collaborative work over distances following a timeline from the open to the close of the circle. Circles have a final project which collects the shared knowledge generated during the interactions. Learning circles are a great way to organize learning in global projects.

Learning Circle interaction is a process of distributed leadership. Each of us led the circle around a project idea and developed the site resources around that topic. We met monthly and worked on the different projects.

You can read our monthly meeting notes which we collectively keep on our etherpad.

We meet on the first Wednesday of the Month at 1:30pmPT in Google Hangout.

After we have developed the first draft of the website, we are now in phase 2 where with a goal of moderating a larger level of participation around the topics as well as to continue our evolution. We invite you to join us.