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In this article, two practitioner-researchers, Cathy, principal of a rural elementary school and Jackie, retired superintendent of education and adjunct professor now international mentor, collaborate to share the ways in which Living Educational Theory has helped them improve their practice and transform their lives. Their argument is that subsequent to first engaging in describing and explaining the nature of their influence on themselves, on others and on social formations using their values as explanatory principles, the process has become their ontology and epistemology, their 'way of living/life'. Their learning has been in an educational relationship over 13 years. Cathy builds educational relationships and studies her influence on their learning and practice. She allows them to find something of use in her practice, to see themselves in her story, her struggle, her journey. Living Educational Theory has become her way of being and leading, inspiring her to live with more love, joy, trust and authenticity. Living according to her value of 'loving into learning', Jackie, with the help of the practitioner-researchers with whom she has worked, has refined her understandings of building 'cultures of inquiry' to include democratic evaluation, vulnerability, 'dialogue and digital visual data as research methods' with life-affirming energy-flowing values. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The core of Living Educational Theory research methodology (Whitehead, 1989) and our Living Educational Theory research community is studying to understand, improve and explain our educational influences in our own learning, in the learning of others and in the learning of the institutions and organizations where we live and work. In this issue, the threads of trying to affect change in the direction of our values, recognizing our living contradictions and contributing to human flourishing are evident. I feel that the papers in this issue of EJOLTs has not only reviewed where we've come from and considered where we are but also is taking the field of Living Educational Theory research into the future into new spaces and perspectives. That's really stimulating! I will address each of the articles in the order of the issue, ending with the book review and share what I see as original contributions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As we approach the question, "How do I improve my practice?" we are simultaneously working towards, "How do I make the world a better place and invite others to do the same?" This article documents the nature of our influence on ourselves, and those around us, using the methodology of Living Theory research and creating cultures of inquiry in a myriad of contexts that can serve as intentional spaces for personal exploration of values as living standards of judgment and explanatory principles. A culture of inquiry is a safe, supportive space wherein practitioner-researchers are enabled to share their vulnerabilities, to make explicit their values, and to hold themselves accountable for living according to those values. We argue that creating cultures of inquiry through our personal and professional interactions, and embodying key values that are embedded within them, can contribute meaningfully to the growth of the field of Living Theory research. By inviting others into the world of Living Theory research, we are actively working towards creating and sustaining Living Theory research as a social movement with our current community and intentionally inviting others to join. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article describes and explains an educational journey shared by a university teacher, Michelle Vaughan, and myself, over a ten-month period. With the exception of being together in an ALARA workshop in June, 2018, our virtual meetings have been recorded, and shared through YouTube. The ontological importance of dialogue in relationships informs this approach to educational conversations as a research method. The nature of our influence can be seen through the videos and emails, embodied in a form of inquiry that focuses on dialogue. The research demonstrates my continuing commitment to building respectful, democratic and caring relationships within a living culture of inquiry and my ongoing, loving encouragement and support of practitioner-researchers as I love them into learning. The nature of my educational influence in learning, resides in the creation of living-theories in living cultures of inquiry. It is embodied in my dialogic way of being and highlights dialogic research combined with digital data as a form of representation. I intend this paper to contribute to the development of an educational knowledge-base. While the process of livingtheory research is a positive, productive and transformatory one, I include aspects such as epistemicide, burnout, and curriculum limitations on the dialogical journey. A Living Theory movement is growing in which individuals like Michelle share their embodied knowledge and commit themselves to influencing others to join us in improving ourselves and the world that we inhabit for the flourishing of humanity. My claims to know have been strengthened significantly through my validation group and the EJOLTs reviewers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I present some arguments to show what is needed for school and medical systems and educational research journals to respect and legitimate the embodied knowledge of practitioners through their own living-theories in terms of making original contributions to academic and professional educational knowledge. The students' stories that address obstacles, constraints and, thankfully, transcendence reveal the significance of leadership, sustainability, and accreditation in respecting their embodied knowledge and for improving the social order and the flourishing of humanity. To support my arguments, I show how a living-culture-of-inquiry and multi-media possibilities focus on clarifying and communicating values-based expressions of meaning. I draw insights from the work of De Sousa Santos (2014), including the idea of 'epistemicide'. Epistemicide draws attention to the ways in which the validity of indigenous and practitioner-knowledge is not recognised or is killed off in the dominant epistemology of western universities. This article shows how the embodied knowledges of practitioners are being made public in the context of the power struggles in which I am making this contribution as part of my living legacy (Forester, 2015). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a review of the Master of Education dissertation of nursing practitioners Jen Vickers-Manzin and Jan Johnston entitled "A Living Educational Theory of Knowledge Translation: Improving Practice, Influencing Learners, and Contributing to the Professional Knowledge Base."

An introduction is presented in which the author discusses various reports within the issue on topics including the professional knowledge base of nursing, public health education and postnatal anxiety and depression treatment.

In this article, I focus on making explicit the embodied knowledge of educators and seek to incite the social imagination to create educational research that creates attitudinal, behavioural, and social transformational learning opportunities in a way that challenges the status quo of education. Data is drawn from 1996 to 2013 in my years as a superintendent of schools in a school district of 30,000 students in Ontario, Canada, from which I retired in 2007, and as I completed my PhD at Bath, UK with Jack Whitehead from 1996-2002 and continued post-doctoral inquiry until the present. During much of that same time I was an adjunct professor at Brock University. With the informal teacher research in the school district and with the formal research programmes at the university, the methodology that I encouraged and supported was Jack's living-theory as I created a culture-of-Inquiry in which it could flourish. Working in collaboration with my three much-loved colleagues in this issue in a space where energy-flowing values have created a synergetic resonance, has inspired my life and work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this issue, we highlight personal journeys and collaborative pathways that explain educational influences in learning in terms of values, skills and understandings that we believe carry hope for the future of humanity and own future. We are focusing on values that are ontological in the sense that they are used to give meaning and purpose to our lives as individual researchers. Our values are used as explanatory principles in explanations of educational influence. These principles form our living standards of judgment for evaluating the validity of our contributions to knowledge. The explanatory principles connect flows of life-affirming energy with the living values that constitute our continuously evolving understandings of a culture-of-inquiry. In this first paper of the six contributions we share our present understanding of a culture-of-inquiry. We are writing from our range of professional contexts: elementary, high school and, postgraduate settings. In the course of our cooperation we have clarified and shared our meanings of being 'loved into learning'. We offer this energy-flowing value as a living standard of judgment for evaluating the validity of our contribution to educational knowledge. The constraints of poverty that we reference in our articles are traditional academic forms of print-based texts, which neglect the embodied expression of moral and aesthetic values. These constraints can limit the validity of the communication of the embodied meanings of the energy-flowing values of professional educators in explanations of their educational influences in learning. We are claiming that these constraints can be seen to be overcome through relationships based on trust and respect and through creative thinking with regard to the living curriculum. The articles in this issue follow our democratic way of creating together a shared meaning of a culture of inquiry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is a self-study in which a university teacher educator studies her practice. She creates a space for alternate ways of representing forms of knowledge from diverse cultural backgrounds, including Indigenous, and for their accreditation in the Academy. As she develops a way of thinking that is appropriate for getting closer to understanding indigenous ways of knowing, there is a transformation in her own understandings. Moving from reliance on print to the use of multi-media and artifacts to represent forms of knowledge in complex ecologies support the development of cultures of inquiry. In this work, the meanings of the embodied energyflowing values that educational researchers use to explain their educational influences in their own learning and in the learning of others are made explicit. These meanings are shown to have epistemological significance for educational knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the authors' views on Jane Spiro's doctoral thesis "How I have arrived at a notion of knowledge transformation, through understanding the story of myself as creative writer, creative educator, creative manager, and educational researcher."