Chapter 16: Reviewing the Collection's Contribution and Value of Practice-Based Doctoral Studies

The act of education practitioners researching their own practice is not a new phenomenon. It has always been valued for its capacity to illuminate the groundedness of practice through attending to the voices of those doing the work, those enacting the policies and those dealing with any consequences on a daily basis. In the 1970s in England, there was a powerful turn towards the ‘teacher as researcher’ movement led by Lawrence Stenhouse who argued for:

Quite simply, the idea was that if teachers were more centrally involved in researching in schools, it would be their ‘problems’ that would be explored; it would be their ‘questions’ that would be investigated; it would be their ‘reflections’ that would lie at the heart of the work. In this way, teachers would be a driving force for reform and ‘betterment’. Rudduck (1987, p. 5) also claimed that practitioner research could play a key part in making research more democratic through incorporating the expertise and knowledge of professionals, thus enriching research work more generally.