From Action Research to the Classroom Case‐study: the history of ANTEC

Our aim in this article is to analyse the research process developed in the ANTEC project (The Application of New Technology in Science Teaching) both by the university research team that promoted the project and the groups of teachers that participated in it. We attempt to provide answers to the following questions. Can we characterise the research carried out as being action research? Or should the process rather be considered as being ‘classroom case‐studies'? And lastly, supposing that teachers really did manage to write something resembling classroom case‐studies, what relation was observed between the action research process and the process in which the classroom case‐studies were produced? In order to answer these and other questions we delve into the history of the events that probably occurred during the 3 years that the project lasted – at least, that is, from our own point of view (the authors were themselves involved in the research team in their respective capacities of project director and research collaborator).