In this article, I explore the challenges of undertaking insider research as a Widening Participation university practitioner and positioning myself as lead researcher with three academic co-researchers. The action research process provided the fertile environment for our complex academic: non-academic relationships to shift into more equitable…

In this study, we explore the following: a) How do secondary student teachers, engaged in collaborative action research, function as critical friends? b) What challenges do they encounter? How do they mitigate these challenges? and c) In what ways did meeting as critical friends influence the student teachers' learning to conduct collaborative…

The latest trends in Professional Development (PD) support grounding teacher development activities in the school context. This shift carries remarkable implications for school leadership through the realization that school leaders have a major role to play in PD of teachers. On this basis, action research was undertaken in a higher secondary…

We wanted to assess the quality of research conducted by Dutch secondary education teachers. We therefore needed to investigate the criteria for evaluating teacher research. The research timeline of this study covered four school years. We analyzed research reports and evaluation forms. We found that five quality criteria are useful for assessing…

Teacher education institutes generally assume that practitioner research in teacher education contributes to student teachers' professional development as well as to school development and generalizable knowledge. As a consequence, the position of student teacher research in teacher education and its goals have become unclear. In this interview…

This article nuances an ongoing discussion among researchers about external researchers in emancipatory action research in the educational field. It examines opportunities and challenges for emancipatory action research for participants in top-down and bottom-up initiated action research projects with external researchers. An analysis based on…

As language teachers and teacher educators transition into doctoral research and on into full-time academic positions in universities, they begin to encounter research practices and policies associated with neoliberal systems of higher education. These might be quite different from previous research experiences, such as self-initiated…

We analyse and self-reflect on an action research project conducted in a financial organisation twelve years ago. The research question was: What are the challenges of initiating an action research project in a financial organisation with top-down control that uses the Balanced Scorecard? The data came from action learning seminars with line…

In this article, we focus on students and teachers as practitioners of learning, a powerful notion seminal to Exploratory Practice, which is a form of practitioner research developed by working to understand local puzzles, by integrating research and regular pedagogic activities, and by emphasizing practitioners' understandings of the quality of…

Although English language teachers are increasingly being encouraged to engage in forms of collaborative practitioner research (PR), such as action research and exploratory practice, to date there are still comparatively few studies recounting the benefits of collaboration in research from teachers' perspectives. Drawing on cultural-historical…

In this study, we adopted a Teacher Research Group model, a collaborative approach to teacher education that draws on the principles of numerous action research models of enquiry. More specifically, a teacher educator worked alongside an experienced physical education teacher over a three-month period to plan, teach and evaluate a series of…

Action research approaches have evolved out of a criticism of previous research traditions, where teachers have been seen as research objects, at risk of being marginalized. Such approaches have also arisen out of the view that teaching, learning, and educational research are interrelated. In action research, teachers are seen as professionals,…

Action research is a methodology that has been increasing in educational studies in recent years. Previous studies have revealed that action research affects practitioners more than traditional methods, since the practitioners are not only participants but also researchers themselves. One branch of action research is collaborative action research…

This article describes how research-based knowledge was used in practice in an action research project which examined student dropout. The research was conducted as 'research circles' and involved systematic and organised cooperation between researchers and practitioners, in this case college teachers. Based on interviews with the teachers, we…

A team of teacher-researchers in a large urban school board is working in partnership with researchers from a leading Canadian university to use action research to broaden and deepen environmental education in their teaching practice. This research-informed approach involves teachers, students and their communities in collaboratively deepening…