Susan Groundwater-Smith is one of the most influential voices in the world of educational practitioner inquiry. The convener in Australia of the Coalition of Knowledge Building Schools, she is a staunch advocate of innovative methods of practitioner inquiry with a particular emphasis upon student voice and the use of images in capturing young people’s perspectives on their learning experience. So it is more than fitting that this unique text on practitioner inquiry and teacher professional learning is dedicated to her. Rethinking Education Practice Through Reflexive Inquiry is a compilation of essays that explore contemporary issues in practitioner inquiry and action research from the perspective of both university-based and school-based authors. The essays discuss the practical, political and theoretical dimensions of practitioner inquiry, advancing the argument that the adoption of an inquiring approach to practice is both an integral dimension of teachers’ work in the modern school as well as critical to effective and authentic professional learning. And the essays draw on the work of Groundwater-Smith to demonstrate the benefits brought to bear on schools, teachers and learners when the complex nature of the relationship between inquiry and practice is understood and acted upon in pursuit of democratic knowledge interests.

This book sets out to explain how the reflexive inquiry model can be adapted to research so that consultants can continue to evaluate their work and learn from the process. It draws out some implications of the principles, arguments, models, and tools presented for undertaking research.

Philosophers have warned of the perils of a life spent without reflection, but what constitutes reflective inquiry - and why it’s necessary in our lives - can be an elusive concept. Synthesizing ideas from minds as diverse as John Dewey and Paulo Freire, theHandbook of Reflection and Reflective Inquiry presents reflective thought in its most vital aspects, not as a fanciful or nostalgic exercise, but as a powerful means of seeing familiar events anew, encouraging critical thinking and crucial insight, teaching and learning. In its opening pages, two seasoned educators, Maxine Greene and Lee Shulman, discuss reflective inquiry as a form of active attention (Thoreau’s "wide-awakeness"), an act of consciousness, and a process by which people can understand themselves, their work (particularly in the form of life projects), and others. Building on this foundation, the Handbook analyzes through the work of 40 internationally oriented authors: - Definitional issues concerning reflection, what it is and is not; - Worldwide social and moral conditions contributing to the growing interest in reflective inquiry in professional education; - Reflection as promoted across professional educational domains, including K-12 education, teacher education, occupational therapy, and the law; - Methods of facilitating and scaffolding reflective engagement; - Current pedagogical and research practices in reflection; - Approaches to assessing reflective inquiry. Educators across the professions as well as adult educators, counselors and psychologists, and curriculum developers concerned with adult learning will find the Handbook of Reflection and Reflective Inquiry an invaluable teaching tool for challenging times.

This collection includes critical, qualitative, creative, and arts-integrated chapters attentive to the ways in which reflexive inquiry supports explorations of teacher identity. The explicit aim of this manuscript is to advance teacher self-study and, through it, the teaching and learning experience.

Reflexive Narrative is latest addition to the Qualitative Research Methods series. Author Christopher Johns describes this unique qualitative method and its developmental approach to research to enable researchers’ self-realization, however that might be expressed.

Questions that concern gender and violence against women have been placed firmly on the agenda of interdisciplinary research within the humanities in recent years. Gender-based violence against women has increased exponentially in South Africa and in other countries on the African continent, particularly those with a history of political conflict. Researchers who explore such gender issues have paid limited attention to the intersection between the social contexts of the researched, the positionality of the researcher and the research product. This book brings together an interdisciplinary group of scholars and scholar-activists to explore new terrains of knowledge production, interrogating the connection between the intellectual project of this kind of research and the process of its production. Some chapters draw on theoretical insights and provide new ways of thinking about the kinds of questions that should be asked when conducting research in the field of gender. Other authors grapple with an acknowledgement of their multiple social positions in the world, the ways in which they experience these ever-shifting boundaries, and how this influences their theoretical and practical work. Some contributions go further, discussing the ways in which the researcher and the researched influence each other, and the link between feminist research and social change. These chapters contribute to an understanding of how social movement activism can be developed. Overall, this book represents an important combination of scholarly insights, and provides multiple reflections about practical aspects of conducting gender research in the African context. The work of the contributors to the volume is situated within a post-structural feminist agenda, and, collectively, the chapters link scholarship and activism in a way that pursues a social change agenda in research on gender and gender-based violence.

This book provides insight into the value and process of reflexive inquiry for facilitating and exploring teacher learning and development, broadly defined. The authors' reflexive inquiry framework is constructed around notions of personal empowerment, self-directed learning, the primacy of practice, and personal history. The book contains numerous stories of teacher-researchers exploring their own experiences within the context of professional development inquiry.