USING ACTIVITY SYSTEMS ANALYSIS FOR MONITORING TEACHER ACTION RESEARCH

This presentation will introduce how the use of activity systems analysis (Engestrom, 1998) can support and monitor teacher action research in geoscience classrooms. In our NSF-sponsored teacher professional development program, we are working with 10 middle and high school science teachers to introduce action research into their classroom. We are specifically using a modified activity system (Yamagata-Lynch & Smaldino, 2007) during monthly meetings with teachers on how their action research projects are progressing and changing over the course of the year.

Teachers use the modified system to log, share, and reflect on their projects. They share their reflections on a project blog site and review each other's work. This methodology is helping our teachers focus their curricular projects within the context of their classroom and student situations. It helps teachers to sort very complicated situational variables within an organized framework for conducting a qualitative analysis about their work. They are able to use the information from the analysis and understand how their projects are affected by those contextual variables. Additionally, among the 10 participants this method is helping them communicate the progress of their projects with each other.