This paper looks at the role participatory action research played in beginning curriculum conversations in sexual health for young Australian Muslims. Sexual health education has been the cause of much dissension among the local, national and international Muslim community. There is also a general lack of consensus in many Australian Islamic…

With the goal of assisting predominantly low-socio-economic status and minority undergraduate education majors to achieve necessary competence in the use of oral and written Standard English, an innovative action research initiative was incorporated into an introductory education class at a comprehensive urban university in the northeastern part…

The purpose of this article is to describe innovatory online teaching carried out in the inter-university master's "Educational Innovation Policies and Practices for the Knowledge Society", with the participation of Malaga, Almeria and Internacional de Andalucia Universities. The master's focuses on the exploration of a problem-based learning…

Students in Greece are required to study classical texts, a task often challenging both for them and for their teachers. In this article, a teacher action researcher describes how he explored ways to enhance student engagement in the required reading. By negotiating the task of indexing, a process where students go through the text collecting…

This paper explores the sacred space of teaching and learning by examining a five-year personal inquiry into the study and practice of teaching leadership. The research described exposes the value of engaging in action inquiry as a heuristic in the ongoing process of teaching and learning about leadership. The writing reflects five years of work…

Mess and rigour might appear to be strange bedfellows. This paper argues that the purpose of mess is to facilitate a turn towards new constructions of knowing that lead to transformation in practice (an action turn). Engaging in action research--research that can disturb both individual and communally held notions of knowledge for practice--will…

This paper explores how ethnographic and action research methodologies can be justifiably combined to create a new methodological approach in educational research. It draws on existing examples in both educational research and development studies that have discussed the use of ethnography and action research in specific projects. Interpretations…

Building on work in the area of third space theory, this study documents one teacher's efforts to create third spaces in an elementary mathematics classroom. In an attempt to link the worlds of theory and practice, I examine how the work of other theorists and researchers--inside and outside the field of education--can create new lenses for…

Different communities of research practice (action research, teacher research, lesson study, self-study, participatory action research, and the scholarship of teaching) claim to hold an idiosyncratic status and identity in relation to questions of purpose, methods of inquiry, modes of representation, conceptualization of the process and outcomes,…

This article discusses practitioner inquiry in a South African context. It begins by outlining the changing policy context in the country, particularly since the advent of democracy in 1994. The implications of these changes for practitioner inquiry are then discussed. The article explores some issues and dilemmas arising from this context,…

The teacher research movement in Chile has, historically, been an expression of the profession's concerns with the ways in which schooling reproduces and produces the social order in the broader society. The work currently done by members of the union's Pedagogical Movement is described, showing the connections between the scope of problems…

Since the introduction of the action research into China in the 1980s, especially since the start of the twenty-first century, Chinese education researchers have been trying to localize it in relation to the backdrop of the national curriculum reform in basic education. This article presents three cases in which educators aimed for a conscious…

Action research can be understood as a complex interplay between local circumstances and local research traditions, embedded in their turn in local intellectual-philosophical traditions, national as well as international. Because of this interplay it is questionable whether it would be particularly fruitful to look for 'typical local forms of…

This article takes the history of teacher research in one large urban school district over a period of 20 years as a telling case of the intensely local character of this work. Beginning with an overview of the variations and different conceptions of teacher research in the USA, we argue that teacher research is continually being invented and…

This article maps out key features of self-study in teaching and teacher development, particularly in relation to social action. As teacher educator-researchers, we have become increasingly interested in how self-reflexivity in teaching and teacher development can illuminate social and educational challenges that have resonance beyond the self and…