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The purpose of this paper is to examine how Catholic district offices support school leaders’ instructional leadership practices at times of major reform.

The paper employs the theory of practice architectures as a lens through which to examine local site-based responses to system-wide reforms in two Australian Catholic secondary schools and their district offices. Data collection for these parallel case studies included semi-structured interviews, focus groups, teaching observations, classroom walkthroughs and coaching conversations.

Findings suggest that in the New South Wales case, arrangements of language and specialist discourses associated with a school improvement agenda were reinforced by district office imperatives. These imperatives made possible new kinds of know-how, ways of working and relating to district office, teachers and students when it came to instructional leading. In the Queensland case, the district office facilitated instructional leadership practices that actively sought and valued practitioners’ input and professional judgment.

The research focussed on two case studies of district offices supporting school leaders’ instructional leadership practices at times of major reform. The findings are not generalizable.

Practically, the studies suggest that for excellent pedagogical practice to be embedded and sustained over time, district offices need to work with principals to foster communicative spaces that promote explicit dialogue between teachers and leaders’ interpretive categories.

The paper contends that responding to the diversity of secondary school sites requires district office practices that reject a one size fits all formulas. Instead, district offices must foster site-based education development.

The paper adopts a practice theory approach to its study of district support for instructional leader’ practices. A practice approach rejects a one size fits all approach to educational change. Instead, it focusses on understanding how particular practices come to be in specific sites, and what kinds of conditions make their emergence possible. As such, it leads the authors to consider whether and how different practices such as district practices of educational reforming or principals’ instructional leading might be transformed, or conducted otherwise, under other conditions of possibility.

Action research has been recognised for its breadth as a field of research practice and its depth as a discourse of theoretical insight. It does not have one neat, widely accepted definition. Points to some reasons for the difficulty of formulating a generally accepted definition of action research, and argues why action research should not be confined but should be both clarified for communication and open for development. The discussion stems from a working definition developed with participants in an international symposium that serves as a classic definition of action research. Presents several alternative approaches to resolution and argues for a judicious mix of pragmatism and flexibility in approaching the definition issue.

In these uncertain and risky times, the work that educators and educational researchers carry out may feel inconsequential. In preparing young people to live well in a world worth living in, educators must consider, firstly, what roles they can play in a global environment riven by volatile economic, social, and environmental contexts, and secondly, the responsibilities they bear as researchers to produce forms of understanding, modes of action, and ways of relating to one another and this world.

In this chapter, we introduce the pedagogy, education, and praxis (PEP) network and how it is that we, as researchers from around the world, came together to discuss our researching practices in coming to know and explore educational research problems concerning equity, diversity and social justice within and across different cultural settings. We share short stories of ourselves to reveal how it is that we have come to know, be, and act as researchers in our projects and how working alongside each other – our mutual relatings – have generated further understanding about our own and each other’s researching practices.

This chapter establishes the purpose of the book, where we share empirical work through the lens of practice architectures. For instance, what is considered to be an educational equity problem across international or cross-cultural sites? What are considered acceptable forms of evidence of coming to understand educational inequity in its diverse forms in different sites? How are taken-for-granted research practices enabling and/or constraining different forms of understandings about educational inequity, including the issues to be researched and/or the direction of the research project? We then provide an overview of the remaining chapters.

In an effort to enhance the student experience and achieve complex learning outcomes the use of gamification in higher education is increasing. Using two case studies, this paper explores the efficacy of two discrete inclusions of gamification in entrepreneurial education.

In the first case study, students leveraged their taught knowledge about gamification to develop a gamified business concept. In the second case study, students played a humanitarian game and provided feedback about its design and efficacy.

The students' overall engagement with entrepreneurial education was significantly influenced by two factors: their perceived learning about gamification; and their perceived engagement with the gamification. It was observed that highly engaged students considered the gamification component of the course challenging.

This study demonstrates the potential of gamification to enhance engagement and to foster higher-order learning in the context of entrepreneurial education.

In this book chapter, I focus on the epistemological, ontological and axiological practice traditions that help to reveal the taken-for-granted assumptions about the management of trust funds in First Nation communities. Informing this chapter is a qualitative research study involving 11 First Nation community members in Canada who were interviewed. Indigenous ways of knowing, being and doing and the theory of practice architectures are used to identify the cultural discursive, material-economic and social-political arrangements that enable and/or constrain practice. The findings reveal that Indigenous ways of knowing, being and doing collide adversely with trust account decision making due to the duties and obligations guiding trust settlement agreements. The ways in which trust account practices can be transformed to ensure greater alignment with Indigenous ways of knowing, being and doing are outlined.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss participatory action research with staff, residents and relatives contributed to the residents’ quality of life through the development of an inclusive praxis in a public nursing home in Denmark. The project addressed the residents’ reports about a lack of influence in their everyday lives.

The project used future-creating workshops as an important methodological tool. Theoretical concepts about developing a social reflexive and colletive morally obliging praxis were central to frame democratic learning and acting. The theoretical concepts of empowerment and capability were also applied. This paper will outline the methods and the results obtained.

Learning processes were initiated, enabling staff to respectfully engage in dialogue with residents and their relatives about their needs and wishes. The development of a democratic knowledge-building process was established based on the perspectives of the residents, relatives and staff. In conclusion, the project contributed to the development of a more reflective and democratic praxis focused on empowering the residents as the primary “stakeholders” in the daily life of the nursing home.

The research paper is based on the authors’ own research.

This is the concluding chapter of Researching Practices Across and Within Diverse Educational Sites: Onto-epistemological Considerations. In this chapter, we recall the primary purpose of the book as to examine what it is that we believe we do as a diverse group of researchers from Australia, Finland, Norway, and Canada in educational research, reflexively considering our researching practices and how projects ‘turn out’ as a consequence of these practices. Having met and worked together as a part of the pedagogy, education, and praxis (PEP) international network, our collaborations offer us an important intercultural and cross-cultural opportunity to consider our positionality and responsibilities as researchers to our participants and co-inquirers, and their communities. Sharing our projects reveals the affordances and challenges offered by various methodologies unique from and common across our projects but also reinforces the imperatives of relationality, respect, and reciprocity between researchers and the communities they serve. We leave the readers with a concept that builds upon the title of this book, that of axio-onto-epistemology, already in use in postcolonial and decolonial/Indigenous scholarship, but raised here as an open invitation for all educational researchers to consider in their researching praxis.