Curriculum aims often remain unrealised aspirations. This is because the values and principles implicit in them fail to get articulated in forms that can effectively inform and guide the practice of teaching. Ideas such as "learner-centred education", "independent/autonomous learning", "self-directed learning",…

The English education system has recently seen something of a revival of enthusiasm for the use of research both to develop educational practices and to gather evidence about their effectiveness. These initiatives often present action research as a model of individual problem-solving, which, we argue, communicates a limited conception of action…

The act of engaging in sound and ethical practitioner research, regardless of context, encourages and indeed demands an alignment between the ethical framework employed in the research enterprise and the "everyday ethics" of practice. This paper explores the ethical dimensions of what Cochran-Smith and Lytle have termed the dialectic of…

This study provides insight into the quality of practitioner research and the impact of this on the professional development of the individual teacher and the school as a whole. We examined the quality of practitioner research in relation to the goals of the research. We operationalized the quality of the research in terms of the validities…

Collaboration between academics and teachers has become increasingly prevalent over recent years. Whether its aim is joint research or continuing professional development for teachers, collaboration seems to offer a realistic opportunity for reducing the perceived gap between theory and practice. However, collaboration is not merely academics and…

In this action research work, I analyze the theory-practice integration in teacher preparation within the context of a science and technology (S&T) education teaching methodology course aimed at future elementary teachers. The course was designed, developed and evaluated taking into account this relationship as one of its axes. The results…

In this action research study, we describe how doctoral candidates conceptualize innovations for their dissertations and outline how we are using the results to improve the doctoral dissertation experience for our new cohort. Over the course of one academic year (2010/11) we documented our students' process of conceptualizing their…

As school-based action research has taken a higher profile in UK schools, the place of ethics warrants particular attention. This paper draws on evidence from a taught online Master of Education course collated via chat room discussion where 53 researching teachers were asked to explore policy within their own institution regarding school-based…

This paper argues that action research finds a rationale in the pragmatic position that knowledge is provisional and generated through a transaction between agent and environment. Action research finds a further methodological rationale in the pragmatic view that knowledge is generated within indeterminate situations, requires habits of reflection…

The focus of the Education Works Personalization Project was to facilitate teams of teacher action researchers whose goal was to personalize their teaching with the support of university partners including doctoral students in education. The subsequent apprentice-like research experience within this university-school partnership provided an…

An alternative formulation of the actor in educational action research is shown to refresh notions of theory within initial teacher education. Methodologically, the actor is depicted as identifying with ongoing cultural adjustments through reflective data. Specifically, the paper considers the experience of mature trainee teachers in the United…

Either action research by teachers uses the approach as a methodology to examine pedagogical change in a single intervention or it is used as means of understanding a journey of change. In contrast, this paper examines the significant impact of using action research in a second cycle of learning in the same context and with the same participants.…

This paper reports on a fragment from an educational action research in a teacher education setting, ascertaining the possibilities of using the online environment of google.doc for initiating pre-service teachers' discourse about the nature of inclusive relationships between individuals and the environment, and the ways of their enhancement. The…

This article begins by raising issues around the way in which ethical approval for research is managed in university settings, where committees often base their assumptions on a principlist approach making a number of assumptions that we consider to be contestable, such as a neat separation between researcher and researched. However, collaborative…

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…