Action research: A situated perspective

In this article, the situated experiences of teacher educators with a collaborative action research course are shared. Our experiences expose the problematic nature of institutional, school-district based, and school-based collaborative relationships. By reflecting on events that occurred during a semester, the instructors of this course established an ongoing dialogue and decided to develop a set of subcases, each of which focuses on a different aspect of the problematics that can emerge in action research. Taken together, these subcases comprise a larger case that helps us address a common question: "What does it mean to do action research collaboratively?" Discussion of these subcases leads us to new questions about how preservice teachers engage in collaborative action research and how they establish conditions in their collaboration that both sustain and enhance the power of their learning and their teaching.