The article continues the discussion of the five quality principles proposed by Heikkinen, Huttunen, and Syrjala, published in 2007 in "Educational Action Research". In the present article, the authors reconsider the five principles: historical continuity; reflexivity; dialectics; workability; and evocativeness. These five principles are…

For decades, outsiders have criticized The Ivory Tower for its seclusion. Today, insiders proclaim a crisis within the tower itself. Staff publicly criticize conditions for research and teaching. Here I reflect on my experiences as an action researcher within academia and address the question of espoused theories and theories-in-use in academic…

The use of narratives in the social sciences has drastically increased throughout recent decades. They are mainly used as a way of collecting data and as a way of promoting professional development. This article sheds light on how a practitioner-researcher engaged in narrative writing and how this helped in what is hereby termed a reflective…

Women Reaching Women was a three-year action research project aimed at raising awareness of world poverty, gender inequality and climate change. The project brought together the National Federation of Women's Institutes, Oxfam, the Everyone Foundation and a unique group of 28 women drawn from Women's Institutes across the country. The project…

The purpose of this article is to present a specific approach to the practice of action research "in complex organisations". Clearly, there are many approaches to the challenge of doing action research in organisations; approaches that are, and also must be, quite context dependent and specific. But my purpose is neither to give an overview nor a…

This paper reports and reflects on a collaborative and multi-layered action enquiry project in the New Zealand polytechnic sector. In the context of widespread national professional development centred on adult literacy and numeracy teaching and learning in vocational educational institutions, an action enquiry methodology was piloted with…

An ongoing oral history project at the University of Cumbria seeks to uncover the lived experiences of people with learning difficulties who lived at the Royal Albert Hospital. A recently made video exposed the apparent distress this caused one of the participants. Ethical discussions about the project reached a point of being "stuck". The ethical…

The focus is a self-study of my own practice and how I investigated my educative practice in facilitating the professional learning of a group of teacher researchers. Two key questions are answered: How did I support teacher researchers with their inquiries? How did this contribution shape my professional identity as an educator? This self-study…

This paper reflects on the challenges and benefits of multidimensional collaboration in an action research study to evaluate and improve preoperative education for patients awaiting colorectal surgery. Three cycles of planning, acting, observing and reflecting were designed to evaluate practice and implement change in this interactive setting,…

How can teachers be helped, at relatively little expense, to improve their professional practice? This problem was addressed in "Improving Formative Assessment in Vocational Education and Adult Literacy, Language and Numeracy Programmes"--the IFA project. Adopting a specific problem-based methodology as part of an action research approach, the IFA…

This paper argues that material from dreams offers a resource within the social sphere that has potential for the practice of action research. The modern approach to dream interpretation, following Freud, has almost exclusively been situated at the level of the therapeutic dyad where the significance of dream material is circumscribed within…

This paper explores ways in which student-teachers in the Lifelong Learning sector are able to draw on fictionalised accounts of their own teaching practice experiences in order to gain a clearer understanding of their models and expectations of professionalism, and of how they, as individuals, locate their current position within the profession…

An assumption that knowledge arises from research outcomes has been expanded in recent years to include the possibility that knowledge may also be created from the process of engaging in research. Action research (AR) is particularly well suited to such knowledge development. This article offers a brief overview of knowledge in AR as well as the…

The TRIO Project (Teacher Training & Research for Individuals & Organisations) began with the notion that cross-cultural reflection could be an effective tool by which teachers could examine their personal belief systems about learning, teaching and pupil guidance. University-based teacher educators from four countries, the Netherlands, Russia,…

Seeking to soften the gap between clinical and tenure-track teacher education faculty, a year-long action research seminar was conducted. Using data from observation notes, interviews and a taped seminar session, the authors explore the seminar from its very rocky beginning to its conclusion. Drawing on the concept of "communities of practice",…