Professional practice in health and social care is embodied by the practitioners concerned, embedded in practice contexts and creative in nature. It is therefore complex to investigate, understand and develop. Current health and social care contexts can present practitioners with increasingly constraining circumstances and spaces that can feel…

This paper, delivered as a provocative keynote address to the Collaborative Action Research Network (CARN) conference in Manchester on 28th October 2023, explores the question if action research might have a sweet spot. A sweet spot is defined as an ideal location, area or combination of factors for a particular activity or purpose. It draws on…

This article describes how faculty in a teacher preparation program developed a signature pedagogy, a teacher candidate action-research project rooted in the Universal Design for Learning Framework. A dual perspective involved teacher candidates investigating the efficacy of their practice and articulating their learning, while their teacher…

Teacher action research is an important element for democratizing educational research, yet teachers often view it as unmanageable atop their other priorities. Grounded in sociocultural theories of identity and situated practice, this paper employs qualitative methods to explore how 16 novice teacher-researchers navigated their distinct identities…

The purpose of this paper is to explore the influence of Lesson Study on reconstructing students' practical knowledge during initial training as prospecting teachers. This case study sets out the voice and opinions of a student taking part in a lesson study process. The aim was to further understand how the student's opinions around teaching…

This paper reflects on the dynamic of co-developing knowledge within a Community-Based Participatory Research (CBPR) project in the UK that set out to direct teenage and young adult Ambulatory Care. This is a service that offers cancer treatment that would have once required inpatient hospital stays. Working within a Community-of-Inquiry (CoI),…

The climate crisis is not (merely) a problem of science but also, pre-eminently, a moral and ethical one. Humans alive today are the first with overwhelming data that our modern, industrialised, high-carbon-consumption ways of living threaten the biosphere we depend on, and perhaps the last with meaningful opportunity to avert climate disaster.…

The first-year student experience is attracting attention within Australian higher education, where heightened concerns exist in relation to the successful transition of students to university life. This paper presents a critical reflection of the process involved in an action research project in a collaboration between academics and first-year…

As practitioner inquiry is now established as a widely-recognized research tradition and flourishing movement for educational change, we might consider ways that practitioner inquiry could be conceptualized and executed to broaden implementation, deepen understanding, and sustain inquiry within teacher education. Arts-based research may be an…

This paper is an account of a developmental action inquiry research project in which teachers from 13 secondary schools were trained to philosophize the Dialogos way with their 8th-grade students, as part of ongoing curriculum reforms in Norway. In the reforms, and in this paper, the themes of life skills and democratic citizenship are in the…

This study chronicles a semester long inquiry focused on the impacts of pedagogical strategies informed by the tenets of third space theory on my own practices and understanding of students' learning outcomes in an action research course. As I applied new instructional strategies to promote discourse and critical inquiry, I reflexively explored…

There are many examples of collaborative action research being used to promote school change. Reflecting on evidence gathered as a result of collaborative inquiry led by a teacher in a primary school in Cyprus over a 3-year period, this paper examines what is involved in using such an approach within a centralised education system. In so doing, it…

This paper highlights action research into the practices of environmental learning through two interconnected stories focusing respectively on educational policy and the details of classroom instruction. Together these illustrate how a framework guides teachers in educational planning and supports the implementation of a curriculum for…

This article is a collaboration involving a professor and three graduate students. Together, they explore lifescaping action research pedagogy guided by the participatory inquiry process. Since the lesson taught is not the lesson learned, the first author presents a perspective about teaching PIP followed by the graduate students' collective…

The purpose of this case study was to propose collaborative inquiry (CI) as counterdiscourse in professional development literature by acknowledging the multiple forms of personal and professional knowledge of five preschool practitioners. Data were collected from transcripts of CI group meetings, semi-structured participant interviews, researcher…