This review of the literature discusses contemporary theories and models of action research that are being used by university faculty who are working with administrators and teachers to plan and conduct school-and classroom-based action research projects. The books that are reviewed provide educators with a variety of models for planning and implementing an action research project. Many of the authors work in the critical emancipatory tradition. Emancipatory action researchers seek to identify inequities that are embedded in social institutions, interactions, and ideologies, and to develop a moral epistemology based on ethical caring and social justice. Other action researchers work in the teacher researcher tradition. They view teachers as active producers of knowledge that is aimed at improving practice through a better understanding of the multiple layers of meaning and the fullness of actions in classrooms and schools. Educators sometimes engage in institutional action research or participatory evaluation organized around school reform. Evaluators who do self-study inquire into their own lives and construct living theories as they meditate on their own experiences. Action research provides the conceptual basis and the methods needed to deliberate on social, cultural, and historical practices, to critique existing and emerging educational theories and practices, and to study actions in social institutions and schools. Action researchers do not always disseminate the results of their inquiries in reports, essays, or action plans. They may express themselves in varied forms to capture the human condition through poetry, myths, song, or dance. Action research is an international movement that involves citizens in participating in discussions about the conditions that facilitate or inhibit the development of deliberative forms of democracy within classrooms, schools, and society. (Contains 1 table and 27 references.) (Author/SLD)