Teacher-student negotiation in an action research project

Students in Greece are required to study classical texts, a task often challenging both for them and for their teachers. In this article, a teacher action researcher describes how he explored ways to enhance student engagement in the required reading. By negotiating the task of indexing, a process where students go through the text collecting information against a set of categories, teacher and students discovered they can cooperate in order to find a way of making teaching and learning more useful and pleasant for both. The article begins by setting research context in Greece, and goes on to describe the action research project. The action steps are presented in detail: the teaching problem faced by the action researcher, the resulting research, the action steps, and the data analysis during the action research project itself. In describing the above, the author focuses on the students' active involvement in the process. The article concludes that, in an action research framework, the teacher-students negotiation organises student intervention quite effectively and allows us to consult the student's voice.