This collection provides a worldwide perspective on action research, a process which covers educational, professional, managerial and organizational development.

'Practical Action Research' is a compilation of critical commentaries that offer practical steps for understanding and implementing action research. The contributors demonstrate how educators can reflect, collect data, and create alternative ways to improve their practice in the classroom and schoolwide.

While the action research community across Canada is a vibrant one, it remains scattered, dismissed as rootless and still unproven. This book illuminates action research as a vital and long-established Canadian perspective, taking stock of its use in education by a wide array of scholars and practitioners. Reflecting an inclusive range of viewpoints from twenty-two scholars across the nation, chapters show without question that action research - encompassing collaborative, iterative, and practice-based research - is a growing field in Canada. Authors bring a range of experiences that speak to the many facets of this movement. They discuss historical foundations, individual and large-scale projects dealing with a multitude of subject areas and educational practices, and participatory methods that speak to the discipline's capacity to engage with the pressing social issues of our time. A timely intervention that threads the field together and serves as both a reference and a guide to further work, The Future of Action Research in Education draws clear links between the past and future and maps bold new directions for this approach.

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Provides the most up-to-date and comprehensive review of contemporary research in education policy implementation. A companion to Allan R. Odden’s Education Policy Implementation, also published by SUNY Press, this book presents original work by a new generation of scholars contributing to education policy implementation research. The contributors define education policy implementation as the product of the interaction among particular policies, people, and places. Their analyses of previous generations of implementation research reveal that contemporary findings not only build directly on lessons learned from the past, but also seek to deepen past findings. These contemporary researchers also break from the past by seeking a more nuanced, contingent, and rigorous theory-based explication of how implementation unfolds. They argue that researchers and practitioners can help improve education policy implementation by not asking simply what works, but rather focusing their attention on what works, for whom, where, when, and why. Meredith I. Honig is Assistant Professor of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies at the University of Washington at Seattle.

This year (2012) marks ten years of No Child Left Behind and the U.S. federal government's official designation of what qualifies as "scientifically based research" (SBR) in education. Combined, these two policies have resulted in a narrowing of education via standardization and high stakes testing (Au, 2007) as well as the curtailment of forms of inquiry that are deemed legitimate for examining education (Wright, 2006). While there has been much debate about the benefits and limitations of the NCLB legislation (e.g., Au, 2010) and SBR (e.g., Eisenhart & Towne, 2003), critical researchers have held strong to their position: The reductionistic narrowing of education curricula and educational research cannot solve the present and historical inequities in society and education (Shields, 2012). Contrarily, reductionism (via standardization and/or methodological prescription) exacerbates the challenges we face because it effectively erases the epistemological, ontological, and axiological diversity necessary for disrupting hegemonic social structures that lie at the root of human suffering (Kincheloe, 2004). Not only has NCLB proven incapable of overcoming inequalities, but there seems to be sufficient evidence to suggest it was never really intended to eliminate poverty and human suffering. That is, it seems NCLB, despite its lofty title and public discourse, is actually designed to advance the agenda of handing public education over to for-profit corporations to manage and privatize thereby intensifying the capitalist class' war on those who rely on a wage to survive (Malott, 2010). In the present ethos, reductionism upholds and retrenches the status quo (i.e. the basic structures of power), and it puts at risk education and educational research as means of working toward social justice (Biesta, 2007). Because social justice can be interpreted in multiple ways, we might note that we understand critical social justice as oriented toward action and social change. Thus, critical education and research may have potential to contribute to a number of social justice imperatives, such as: redistributing land from the neo-colonizing settler-state to Indigenous peoples, halting exploitative labor relations and hazardous working conditions for wage-earners, and engaging in reparations with formerly enslaved communities.

While health literacy is a relatively new multidisciplinary field, it is vital to the successful engagement with and communication of health with patients, caregivers, and the public. This book ‘New Directions in Health Literacy Research, Theory, and Practice’ provides an introduction to health literacy research and practice and highlights similar scholarship in related disciplines. The book is organized as follows: the first chapter explains the still-evolving definition of health literacy; the next three chapters discuss developments and new directions in health literacy research, then a further two chapters are devoted to developments and new directions in health literacy theory. Two chapters explore health literacy interventions for vulnerable populations; four chapters cover health literacy leadership efforts; six chapters describe developments and new directions in disciplines that are similar to health literacy; and six chapters portray diverse health literacy practices. A preface from Richard Carmona M.D., the former U.S. Surgeon General, is included in the book. Although the book is intended primarily for health literacy researchers, practitioners and students, the diverse topics and approaches covered will be of interest to all healthcare and public health researchers, practitioners, and students, as well as scholars in related fields, such as health communication, science communication, consumer health informatics, library science, health disparities, and mass communication. As Dr. Carmona concludes in his preface: ‘This is essential reading for all health practitioners.’