Prof. Dr. Jean McNiff

Jean McNiff is Professor of Educational Research at York St John University, UK. She is also a Visiting Professor at the University of TromsØ, Norway; Beijing Normal University and Ningxia Teachers' University, People's Republic of China; and the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University, South Africa. Formerly a Deputy Head Teacher in a mainstream secondary school in the UK, she moved into business for herself and later into Higher Education. She continues to run a successful consultancy and publishing business. Her institutional work now focuses on working with academic staff internationally, as they undertake their action enquiries for doctoral accreditation and write for publication. Jean's writings have exercised worldwide influence and her textbooks are used extensively on workplace and university courses. Her website at www.jeanmcniff.com is widely acknowledged as a valuable resource for educational researchers.

Latest publications
McNiff, J. (2013) Action Research: Principles and Practice (3rd edition). Abingdon: Routledge.

McNiff, J. (2013). Becoming cosmopolitan and other dilemmas of internationalisation: Reflections from the Gulf States, Cambridge Journal of Education, 43 (4), 501-515.

Title of presentation:
Travels with action research: What do we know, how do we know it, and what do we do with our knowledge?

In this presentation, I outline some of the lessons I have learned from the experience of travelling around the world for the last twenty years. My account takes the form of a travelogue of an action enquiry, where I explore what it means to learn to work with other people from cultures not my own, who hold different values and have different histories, and with whom I have learned to enrich my own life. I explore ideas about how we constitute our selves through our narratives of experience in company with others, and how we exercise critical discretion when placing our accounts of practice into the public sphere.