Title:

Have We Created A New Epistemology For The New Scholarship Of Educational Enquiry Through Practitioner Research? Developing Sustainable Global Educational Networks Of Communication.

Authors, affiliations, and individual proposals leading to the papers

Jack Whitehead, University of Bath; Jean McNiff; University of Limerick

Ontological, Epistemological And Methodological Commitments In Practitioner-Research

Caitriona McDonagh, Bernie Sullivan, University of Limerick.

Learning From And With Our Pupils As Practitioner-Researchers

Joan Whitehead, Bernie Fitzgerald University of the West of England

New Ways Of Working With Mentors And Trainees In A Training School Partnership As Practitioner-Researchers.

Marian Naidoo, National Institute for Mental Health England

How Can I Use Creative Process To Improve My Practice As A Facilitator Of Healthcare

Mairin Glenn, University of Limerick

How Am I Enhancing Inter-connections with ICT?

Abstract:
(Your abstract must use Normal style and must fit in this space)

We are a group of practitioner-researchers working across the levels of education systems. Each of us asks, 'How do I improve what I am doing for personal and social good?' Each of us aims to generate our personal educational theories to show how we are doing so through our contributions to the education of social formations in our own settings. We believe that the validity of our efforts lies in the generation of educational theories of professional practice. A criterion for the legitimation of such validity claims is the capacity of educators to show how they are holding themselves accountable for their work as they seek to exercise their educative influence at local and global levels. We explain how we are fulfilling our understanding that acceptance of individual responsibility for ourselves and to each other through collaborative self-study is at the heart of global influence.

We will produce evidence to support our claims that we are contributing to sustainable forms of global understanding through education. We will do this by offering descriptions and explanations of our educational practices in different settings, as we extend our educative influence for social good. We aim to show how our public accounts of theory-generation contribute to a systematic knowledge base. From the ground of clarifying the meanings of our embodied values and using them as educational standards of judgment we show how contributing to this knowledge base constitutes a form of theory-generation that has profound implications for educational practices world-wide.

Each of the presenters will explain their learning processes as they research the realisation of their educational values within their social situations.

The significance of our presentation for educational research lies in showing how, in response to Snow's call to systematize our professional knowledge-base, the collaborative production of evidence-based accounts can contribute to this knowledge base. We show how this knowledge base, in response to Coulter and Wiens, Feldman and Noffke, can influence the trajectories of social change. We show how what begins as the personal accountability of self-study has the potential to impact on processes of organisational and social change at local levels, and how this can transform into the education of social formations at global levels. We explain how the knowledge base, which contains multi-media presentations of personal enquiries undertaken collaboratively, can be disseminated through global networks, in live and electronic forms.