Keynote address: The action learning, action research experiences of professionals

Abstract

This keynote relates the experiences of professional educational-practitioners, which contribute to the legacy of action learners, action researchers, and others concerned with transforming social change for the flourishing of humanity. It provides an evidence-based justification for claiming that this legacy includes the creation of an educational epistemology that is transforming globally what counts as educational knowledge in the Academy. This transformation takes into account the power relations that are supporting and hindering its legacy, including the power of epistemicide. The epistemology is being created in the explanations of practitioner-researchers of their educational influences in their own learning, in the learning of others and in the learning of the social formations in which the explanations are located. The energy-flowing values that constitute explanatory principles and living standards of judgement are clarified and evolved through the use of digital multi-media narratives. The freely available resources http://www.actionresearch.net  include 10 years of the Educational Journal of Living Theories (EJOLTS -  http://ejolts.net ). These are international resources for all Action Researchers, Action Learners and educational-practitioner researchers who want to research their practice to understand, improve and explain it in terms of their ontological and social values and their practice and to generate their own. These theories are generated from inquiries of the kind, “How do I improve what I am doing?” in which ‘I’ exists as a living contradiction and the researcher’s ontological and relational values form their explanatory principles and standards of judgement.