Abstract:

Action research is a form of inquiry through which lecturers investigate and evaluate their practice. It is the process lecturers engage in to present evidence for making any claim of good practice. It is constructivist and situated learning process that implies the lecturer making meaning out of his/her professional practice as authentic context. It captures the essence of scholarly reflection, which is guided against an accountable theoretical framework and everyone involved in the curriculum development process. In this paper I present the results of the scholarly reflection I encouraged within a group of lecturers at the Eduardo Mondlane University in Mozambique. Within this endeavor I challenged them to implement an innovative idea encapsulated in Learning Style Flexibility (LSF). This is an approach to facilitate learning drawn from the whole brain model that calls lecturers to use different capacities of the entire brain, including the cognitive, affective, and behavioral dimensions. In this way, LSF seeks both to accommodate students’ preference and take them out of their comfort zone. This facilitates learning tailored to students’ preferences, promotes better constructing of meaning, and satisfaction. Such efforts were monitored by means of video recording and photograph, as tools to collect qualitative evidence. Results show that LSF is a powerful and comprehensive teaching methodology. Besides, action research, per se, revealed to be the scholarly reflection that improves the understanding of our practice. It showed to be truly empowering and emancipatory professional development process that also contributes to advance the body of knowledge.

Keywords:

Action research, Learning Style Flexibility, whole-brain model, constructivism, professional development.