“I notice that I'm getting more involved, interested, and excited about my future topic.” Exploring Action Research to move from research steps to scholarly thinking.

Graduate students often adopt a rigid approach to research, following a prescribed set of steps without considering the creative and original elements of their work. To address this problem, we introduced a set of tasks to shift their focus from a methodological checklist to a developmental approach that encourages creativity and negotiation. Through our scaffolded tasks we envisaged a deeper student engagement in academic and disciplinary communities, allowing them to gain membership in these communities and develop their voice and scholarship. Our purpose was to make explicit the community of practice through a scaffolded pedagogical framework for students’ apprenticeship in the academy. We argue that a Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) genre-based Action Research (AR) approach was a powerful tool for promoting how different scholarly genres, such as literature reviews, negotiate meaning, and it made the scholarly knowledge explicit. Our research findings suggest that the genre-based AR design encouraged our students to view their research projects as an ongoing conversation rather than continuing in formulaic research exercises.