High school instructional leaders describe how they reframed professional learning around autonomy with structured support. The new system, guided by trust and teacher inquiry, sparked innovation that proved critical during the pandemic.

'Enquiry Based Learning' (EBL), as an engagement strategy to encourage lifelong learning, is the focus of this paper. Participants in this study are adult learners in full time employment who are returning to education, in many cases, after a substantial break. The empirical data was gathered from these students who are studying a master's in…

To better understand the impacts of participatory design in English language arts teacher education, this critical case study focuses on the National Writing Project's Connected Learning Massive, Open, Online Collaboration (CLMOOC) that engaged educators in playing with the connected learning framework. The authors draw from 5 years of interaction…

This paper engages in a critical analysis of the educational theory of Paulo Freire. It is based on qualitative research which explores Irish adult literacy practice. The research harnesses the ontological aspects of Freire's theory; his interpretation of how human reality is constructed. Using this as the theoretical foundation for inquiry,…

During the last two decades, a number of successive policy initiatives have attempted to professionalise the further education sector in England: professional qualifications have been rewritten, made compulsory and then returned to voluntary status; professional bodies have been established, briefly promoted, and then neglected; professional…

By analyzing Zen guided meditations, I argue that literacy researchers can improve the field's conceptual tools by investigating experiential knowledge. Using work on procedural knowledge and the emotional bases of perception, cognition, and decision making, I show that experiential knowledge drives perceptions and action, thus shaping…

An athletic coach's focus is to develop individual skills as well as the collective capacity of the team to perform at the highest level. A coaching culture applies the same concept to schools. While coaching in schools is not new, what is fundamentally different in a culture of coaching is that all members of the school community see themselves…

Mass incarceration in America is a moral, economic, and societal crisis with serious implications for many men of color and high school non-completers who are incarcerated at proportionally higher rates than Whites or college graduates. For the formerly incarcerated, engagement in adult learning, whether high school equivalency (HSE) or college,…

In an early dialogue, "On Order", Augustine sets out a program for thinking about thinking. Through such reflections, students attain self-knowledge and prepare for philosophical inquiry. The liberal arts are useful for this project, insofar as they provide opportunities for thinking, yet they are not ultimately necessary. I suggest that "On…

This article is a narrative résumé of a year-long collaborative critical inquiry into teaching methods with teachers of modern languages in Irish secondary schools. Putting myself, a cultural stranger and first-time qualitative researcher, at the core of this self-study, I discuss first the context and methodological framework of the study to…

The classical principles of action learning, based on the work of Revans, usually include working with problems as the core. This article aims, by contrast, to show how a recent project of change has incorporated principles of appreciative inquiry (AI) based on social constructionism and positive psychology into an action learning process…

In this article, we critique two recent theoretical developments about collaborative inquiry in evaluation--using logic models as a means to understand theory, and efforts to compartmentalize versions of collaborative inquiry into discrete genres--as a basis for considering future direction for the field. We argue that collaborative inquiry in…

The problem to be investigated by this study is whether museum visitors' history content knowledge is enhanced by their museum experience and whether their lived experiences played a role in their learning. The study is based on the theories of experiential, informal and free-choice learning. A qualitative design examined the lived experiences of…

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…

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…