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

This issue is a nuts-and-bolts guide to action research, a powerful technique for identifying and meeting instructional challenges and for improving programs for adult learners. The authors outline the action research process step-by-step, provide a convenient project planner, and present examples to show how action research yielded genuine improvements in six different settings, including a hospital, a university and a literacy education program. This sourcebook is intAnded for educators and trainers of adults in formal settings, such as higher education; continuing progessional education; corporate training; adult basic and literacy education; and religious or health education. It is also intAnded for those working in many of the informal adult education activities, including volunteer training, some types of distance education, and community development work. In any of these settings, action research provides a systematic discovery process that has helped hundreds of adult education practitioners understand, analyze, interpret, and resolve day-to-day problems in the educational workplace. This is the 73rd issue of the quarterly journal New Directions for Adult and Continuing Education. For more information on the series, please see the Journals and Periodicals page.

'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.

Since the first edition of this established text was published in 1988, action research has gained ground as a popular method amongst educational researchers, and in particular for practising teachers doing higher-level courses. In this new edition Jean McNiff provides updates on methodological discussions and includes new sections of case study material and information on supporting action research. The book raises issues about how action research is theorised, whether it is seen as a spectator discipline or as a real life practice, and how practitioners position themselves within the debate. It discusses the importance for educators of understanding their own work and showing how their educative influence can lead to the development of good orders in formal and informal learning settings and in the wider community. This second edition comes at a time when, after years of debate over what counts as action research, it is now considered an acceptable and useful part of mainstream research practice.

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.

Originally published in 1979. Celebrating the tenth anniversary of the Journal of Curriculum Studies. This edited collection of ten significant papers, five of them specially commissioned to critically survey a decade of intellectual effort in selected areas of curriculum studies, not only identifies the emerging frontiers in an important field within the study of education but also provides an excellent set of teaching and learning resources in an area where the usual text book can be counter-productive.