Teacher study groups as a collaborative platform for action research: an ecological perspective

The interplay between teachers engaged in action research (AR) and the educational ecosystem involving the other teachers who did not conduct AR and administrators has been an issue unexplored in the English Language Teaching (ELT) field. In the current study, we explore how teachers’ engagement in AR within a Teacher Study Group (TSG) at a state university in Türkiye interacted with each layer of the ecosystem from an Ecological Systems Theory (EST) perspective. Inductive analysis of data from semi-structured interviews with the teachers who actively participated in the project (n = 6), the other teachers who peripherally observed the action researchers (n = 10), and the administrators (n = 3), revealed that AR processes including collaborative professional learning and disseminating research findings significantly impacted the four layers of the educational ecological system (micro-, meso-, exo- and macrosystems). We discuss how AR as a collaborative professional development practice impacted each layer of the ecosystem, together with implications for its sustainability.