A Living Educational Theory Research approach to professional development focuses attention on the experiences and implications of living values that
carry hope for the flourishing of humanity. These values are the life-affirming and life-enhancing values that give meaning and purpose to the researcher’s professional life.
They are clarified as they emerge in the course of researching questions such as, ‘How am I improving what I am doing?’
They form the explanatory principles and standards by which improvements in both practice and knowledge-creation are judged.
The approach stresses the importance of extending the influence of these ontological and relational, embodied values and understandings in explanations of educational influence.
The relationally dynamic values are influenced by ecological perspectives.
In a Living Educational Theory Research approach to professional practice, individuals hold themselves to account by producing valid, evidence-based and values-laden explanations as their living-educational-theories.
of their living-educational theories: that is ‘explanations of their educational influences in their own learning, the learning of others and the
learning of social formations, in enquiries of the kind, 'How am I improving what I am doing?'with values of human flourishing’(Whitehead, 1989).
A Living Educational Theory Researcher can use insights from a range of methodologies, methods and theories, such as Action Research, Narrative Enquiry, Self-Study,
Participatory Research, Autoethnography, Ethnography, Grounded Theory, Critical Theory and Case Study, as well as various quantitative methods. Researchers new to
Living Educational Theory Research might create and submit a living-poster and browse
through the
Archive of the Educational Journal of Living Theories (EJOLTs).
Do please remember that action-reflection cycles are transformed into living-educational-theories by the necessary condition of generating and sharing a valid, evidence-based and values-laden explanation of educational influences in one's own learning
in the learning of others and in the learning of the social formations within which the practice is located, with values of human flourishing.
Living Theory Group
