"You gave us a lens to look through": Teacher transformation and long-term impact of action research

The focus of this paper is to shed some light on three Indian English language teachers' transformational experiences, following their participation in an action research project, and investigate how these teachers' project experience continued to impact their classroom practices more than two years after the actual project came to an end. The main themes in the teachers' narratives are related to the core values of freedom, choice, no hierarchy, collaborative learning, individual attention to learners and the unexpected/ surprising joys of taking the children seriously as partners in teaching and learning. The unique iterative methodology, which invited the teachers to carefully craft their stories over multiple cycles of reflection, shed light on the nature of their transformations and also helped them to articulate and identify with their new professional identities. The findings of this study are directly relevant to teacher education contexts around the world where deep reflection on one's experiences is desirable and feasible.