Living Educational Theory Research
[PM version 26th June 2024]
1. Why do Living Educational Theory Research?
Living Educational Theory Research is a highly satisfying approach to researching your own educational practice. It is centred within your practice as a professional educator and is carried out from your own personal perspective as you develop your own living-educational-theory. It responds to the central question: "How can I improve what I'm doing?"
Living Educational Theory Research is 'research with' and not 'research on'.
2. What is Living Educational Theory Research?
Living Educational Theory Research (with upper case) is a form of values-led professional practitioner educational research. It can be conceptualised as the procedure that a professional practitioner engages in to create their own living-educational-theory (with lower case, hyphenated).
A living-educational-theory is an professional practitioner's descriptions and explanations of their educational influence in their own learning, the learning of others and the learning of social formations – as they explore questions of the sort "How do I improve what I'm doing?"
- It is living because it is based on the lived experience of professional practitioners as they try to improve the quality of their professional practice.
- It is educational because it offers guidance for the improvement of educational practice.
- It offers educational theory to other educational researchers that can be used to inform their own educational enquiries.
Living Educational Theory Research is routinely carried out world-wide in countries as diverse as Nepal, South Africa, the UK, the USA the Philippines and Canada. As a distinct research paradigm, it is academically rigorous and regularly features in national and international conferences. Living Educational Theory Researchers form a world-wide collaborative community. By means of this international reach, its principal intent is to make a contribution to the flourishing of Humanity in all its manifestations.
3. What is your interest?
If your interest is being drawn towards this distinctive form of educational research, then it is likely that you have already developed a particular perspective on your professional practice. For example, while you may or may not be a member of a professional body, it is likely that:
- you accept your responsibilities as a professional practitioner, which include holding yourself to account by researching your practice to better understand it and to improve it
- you wish the outcome of your research to itself be educational for all those involved in it, including those who read your scholarly accounts of your research enquiries
- you wish yourself and those you work with and those in the wider world to flourish as human beings – to grow and develop in a healthy and vigorous way and to help others do so too
- you hold distinctive values – principles, standards, or qualities you identify as significant, worthwhile and desirable – that guide your actions as a professional practitioner.
A significant aspect of Living Educational Theory Research is that it gives prominence to the values that inform and are expressed in professional practice. This emphasis makes this research paradigm unique.
The professional practitioner's values are identified and clarified as they emerge in the course of the research. They are used as:
- the explanatory principles that form the basis and structure of the account
- the practical standards of judgement to support claims, also publicly validated, to have improved educational practice
- epistemological standards of judgment, also publicly validated, to evaluate the validity of knowledge-claims.
4. Publishing in EJOLTs
EJOLTs – the E-Journal Of Living Theories – is the public-facing aspect of Living Educational Theory Research; it holds an archive of 18 years of peer-reviewed research papers written by educators from all around the world working in an extraordinary range of educational setting .
If you submit a draft account of your research for publication in EJOLTs, then you will have access to an in-house review team that will take an active part in helping you to strengthen and clarify your account. Thus, if you decide to use Living Educational Theory Research to explore your own professional practice, and to make public an account of that work, then you become a member of a collaborative community of practice with a global reach.
**Now have a look at the dedicated Lexicon that contains full details of vocabulary and processes associated with Living Educational Theory Research**
