Social and Organizational Development Through Action Research

Introduction

Institutions and teachers the world over continue to paddle and operate from an eclectic, idiosyncratic knowledge base grounded almost exclusively on personal experience. It is as if the two closely related territories of research and practice are separate planets, unknown and seemingly inaccessible to one another (Baporikar, 2015b). It is of concern, that if continued to feed the interest in learning with nothing more than rhetoric, it will not flourish and neither grow into better instructional practice. Similarly, if students do not acquire research skills and move on path of self-directed learning or discovery then they will not develop lifelong learning attitude (Baporikar, 2016). Hence, there is great move towards placing the student in the driver’s seat for learning and various forms of teaching methods, which are student centred, are under discussion. Brookfield (1985) argues that teachers' role is to “facilitate” the acquisition of knowledge, not “transmit” it. All these forms are a hope that it will transform learning into practice easily. Further if research remains the prerogative of the professorial and that too done in ivory towers then research will not make the impact on organizations and society worse it will not benefit the humankind at large. Then, who should build the bridges necessary to connect research and practice? Yet, most of time, those who do the research tend to be faculty who daily face passive students who are taking required courses. Worse still, they adopt research methods the base of which is collection of data and analysis, rather than real time and situation analysis.

After that experience, it made a difference in about the propriety of researchers’ drawing implications from their findings. Hence, there are those few of us, who do build the bridges with no blueprints to follow and few rewards to honour our work. However, this building continues because it seems so clear to us that these territories are beneficial and will connect theory to practice. Moreover, knowledge in all of its forms is one of the most important factors for individual fulfilment and success in society. Thus, adopting a grounded theory approach and in-depth literature review, the aim of this paper is to investigate and cultivate understanding of action learning and research, establish connection between knowledge and practice and show this makes social and organisational development possible. The paper also proposes a framework for easy adoption of action research with suitable cases.