Critical friendship as a contribution to master’s‐level work in an international programme of study

This article reports on an action research project in which the value of criticalfriendship for students doing research and writing their dissertations within aninternational master’s course has been explored. This course is run jointly byRoehampton University (London, UK), Charles University (Prague, CzechRepublic) together with Fontys OSO (Tilburg, the Netherlands). It describes theprocess and the results of working with the concept of critical friendship in thismaster’s course since its start in 2005. Data were collected by means of variousqualitative instruments and data sources: evaluation forms after tutorial sessions,reflective logs and focus interviews. The results show that the process of engagingwith the research they did was enhanced and supported by the development ofcritical friendship groups. A number of recommendations have been formulated,such as the importance of discussing the concept of critical friend and itsphilosophy with the participants and of defining roles and tasks as clearly aspossible. Teaching and Teacher Learning (ICLON