This research collection includes practitioner-researchers accounts from a wide range of global, social, cultural and workplace contexts that discuss educational influences on the practitioners own learning, in the learning of others and in the learning of social formations. Contributors from China, Black Africa, Western and Central Europe, Canada, Japan and the United States discuss and clarify the meaning of their embedded values in the course of their emergence in practice and demonstrate their responsiveness to the diversity of learners' experience. Through a disciplined form of educational inquiry the educational knowledge of professional educators is distilled from a variety of workplace settings and challenges. Professor Farren and her colleagues argue that there is an emergent view within education regarding the need of educators to provide evidence-based accounts of how they are improving workplace practices within their organizations and generating new research knowledge. The research community realizes that there are different kinds of excellence in research and that there is a need to show diversity, hybridization and versatility in educational research. The research accounts in this book explain educational influences in learning in terms of values, skills and understandings that the researchers believe carry great hope. In terms of action research this work is unique as it contains practitioner researcher accounts from a range of cultural and workplace setting
