Chapter Seven: Learning to Learn

A bold claim has been made that under appropriate conditions practice-embedded research approaches like DBR can have two functions. One is to solve the local problem or challenge. The second is that in so doing, they can also contribute to our understanding of education. The latter is a claim that we can generate knowledge that adds to the wealth of evidence-based knowledge, contributing to educational sciences.

Our claim is that an approach like the LSM can make this contribution to both methodological and conceptual understandings. Moreover, the conceptual understandings can be at all levels of educational systems: that of the micro-system of the teacher and students and processes of teaching and learning; at the level of the school and its organisational properties; school and community relationships; pathways within- and across-schools and post-school; as well as the understanding of larger aggregates of systems, such as districts. In principle it can be about resources conceived very broadly, from micro-properties of pedagogy through relationships among and between families and schools through to system infrastructure.