Background/Context: High quality early education, preschool through third grade, has received significant attention as a vehicle for addressing academic disparities. Research-practice partnerships (RPPs) offer a promising strategy for improving early education and closing the gap between research and practice; however, RPPs in the early learning…

In both Australia and Malaysia where there is strong central oversight of education, reflective thinking is promoted as integral to an effective pedagogy that leads to good quality learner outcomes. Besides providing tools and resources for teachers and pre-service teachers to use, increasing the systemic procedures for teacher advancement and…

Self-study is a self-focused, improvement-oriented approach to understanding one's own professional practices while also forging recommendations for the larger community of learners within a discipline. Faculty in teacher education have been engaging in self-study research since the early 1990s, and the approach has recently been adopted by…

This article draws on a larger research project that questions the impacts of '21st century learning' on teachers and leaders. Implicit is an evaluation of the promise of futures pedagogies to deepen teacher reflective practice. Critical theoretic and critical hermeneutic approaches underpin this research. It therefore analyses policy and…

In this paper, we argue from principle that teacher education must enable a positive relationship between educational research and teaching knowledge and practice. We discuss two popular conceptions of good teaching, which conceive of the teacher as craft worker and as executive technician, and suggest that, while each of these aspects of knowing…

This article reports on a study of teachers who have engaged in systematic research about their practice. It describes the inquiries of two urban teachers into challenges and dilemmas common to many who work with diverse groups of students. The accounts presented reveal how teachers are able to construct new knowledge about teaching when they…

It is just over 12 years since "Psychology Teaching Review"'s first Special Issue on action research psychology. In the guest editorial for that issue Lin Norton suggested that pedagogical action research can be controversial, and that for some academic psychologists it appears to be more than curriculum development rather than…

Vagle's "post-intentional phenomenological research approach" applies post-structural thinking to intentionality. I apply his five-component research process, reflect on some initial findings of semi-structured interview discussions with 25 participants, and consider a meta-reflection by some participants on those findings. My larger…

"Impressing Heaven" is the title of my collection of short stories about career decisions and experience interacting in English on the part of actual young adult learners of English as a foreign language in South Korea. (See "Impressing Heaven" by Barbara Waldern, July 2012 Smashwords ISBN: 9781476467023). While I was first…

In this article we consider the importance of reflective practice and research attitude for the professional development of in-service teachers. Nine teachers engaged in an international master's course (in a Belgium and French university) were interviewed to obtain self-narratives. The two year full-time master's course aims to develop skills in…

The paper reviews recent psycho-educational literature to identify features of teacher thinking which enable learners to acquire meaningful knowledge. The review establishes that one powerful mechanism to improve teaching in higher education turns on exploiting adults' epistemic beliefs: beliefs about the nature and the acquisition of…

In this article, the author compares the practices, philosophy, and history of action research, also known as participatory action research, to the purposes and practices of dance education. The comparison yields connections in four categories, enhancing self-reflective teaching and curriculum design, taking responsibility for teaching outcomes,…

Educators addressing humanness helps bring into focus a concept that developing a broad, liberal, critical, cynical, skeptical, and tolerant mind leads to truth seeking, personal freedom and autonomy, improved pedagogy, and ultimately, higher-quality living. It is not enough for teacher and student to come together in dialogue to gain knowledge of…

Considerable attention has been paid across international contexts to structural factors affecting the sustainability of the early childhood workforce. While attention to these elements is vital, it can nevertheless overshadow less tangible elements that may contribute to, or assist in addressing, problems of workforce sustainability. In…

In this action research work, I analyze the theory-practice integration in teacher preparation within the context of a science and technology (S&T) education teaching methodology course aimed at future elementary teachers. The course was designed, developed and evaluated taking into account this relationship as one of its axes. The results…