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TAR Resources for Equity and Multicultural Education

Stages of TAR for Equity and Multicultural Education
TAR in Practice: An Illustration
Initiating TAR in Your School

Conceptualizing Teacher Action Research (TAR)

Teacher action research (TAR) is an evaluation method designed to engage educational practitioners in the assessment and improvement of their own practice. It can be an individual tool, helping classroom teachers to reconsider their teaching methods or to adapt in order to solve a problem. It can also be a community activity, helping teams of educators to assess problems in schools, enact changes, and reassess. Although TAR looks different in every context, it is, in general:

• a non-traditional and community-based form of educational evaluation;
• carried out by educators, not outside researchers or evaluators;
• focused on improving teaching and learning, but also social and environmental factors that affect the nature and success of teaching and learning;
• formative, not summative--an on-going process of evaluation, recommendation, practice, reflection, and reevaluation; and
• change-oriented, and undertaken with the assumption that change is needed in a given context.

TAR as a Tool for Equity and Multicultural Education

TAR can be a powerful tool for equity and multicultural education because:

• it engages the community in the evaluative effort, and as a result, gives the community ownership of and responsibility for change;
• it is public in nature, and provides a framework for public dialogue about existing concerns and possible solutions;
• it facilitates individual change and growth for the teacher-researchers;
• it is inherently critical and transformational--even if no school-wide change results, the educators are changed by conducting the research, and the school is changed by the change in the educators;
• research shows that teacher-researchers become more critical and reflective about their own practice; and
• it acknowledges that teachers are activists, whether we identify with that descriptor or not, and that our everyday actions and decisions play an important role in society and the lives of our students.

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