Practitioner research is a fourishing area with a signifcant body of theoretical and empirical research, but often researchers remain isolated, unaware of impactful work by colleagues in related felds. Exploratory Practice (EP) is one innovative form, uniting creative pedagogy and research methods. The potential contributions have hitherto been neglected. EP's emphasis on puzzling and understanding is a means of demystifying occluded practices which place learners, teachers and researchers as co-investigators at the heart of the research-practice nexus. EP's radical positioning of learners as co-researchers, alongside teachers, teacher educators and others, means crossing boundaries -- (re-)negotiating identities, in language learning/teaching/researching -- thus raising epistemological challenges for the feld. The contribution of this state-of-the-art article is to provide a meta-analysis of these themes and challenges, critically analysing the complexities involved as the paradigms of research, practice and practitioner research shift from research-as-practice towards practice-as-research.