Educational theory, practice and research: pragmatic perspectives.

I conceded in the previous chapter that academic, discipline based research, whatever its importance and interest, had problems in engaging directly with practice, especially when this practice is understood in terms of the agency of an individual practitioner working with a socially derived, but uniquely personal, set of constructs in a highly particular working context. I pointed to a developing tradition of practitioner research, in particular action research, as a response to this analysis of the demands on the kind of research which was needed for engagement with practice. In such research teachers might test ideas, hypotheses and theory — including their own tacitly or self consciously held theory — against experience in their own classroom and modify practice in the light of such testing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]