Living theory approach

The Living-Theory approach is an approach to explaining educational influences in a person's learning.

Educational and other researchers are always faced with issues of validating their claims to knowledge. In the UK and elsewhere there is much interest in developing appropriate standards of judgement for assessing the quality of the knowledge generated by educational researchers. In 1995 Donald Schon advocated the development of a new epistemology for the new scholarship by Boyer and explained that this new epistemology would be generated from action research and would be a challenge to the epistemology of the modern research university (Boyer, 1990).

The idea that individuals can generate their own unique explanations for their educational influences in their own learning, in the learning of others and in the learning of social formations, as their living educational theory has been gaining credibility since the establishment of the Self-Study of Teacher Education Practices Special Interest Group of the American Educational Research Association in 1993 (S-STEP, 1993). A living-educational-theory emerges from the methodological inventiveness of individual practitioner researchers. We generate our explanations with the help of our living-theory methodologies. These methodologies draw on the self-study methods of a self-study methodology (Samaras, 2010).

Living-Educational-Theory was the inspiration of Jack Whitehead, when serving as a lecturer at the University of Bath, and was defined and transformed into a pragmatic concept (Atkins and Wallace, p. 130-131) by Professor and Director of Secondary Education, Dr. William Barry, of Notre Dame de Namur University where the university offers classes specific to using Living Educational Theory in earning an education credential in California, USA to be public school teacher (www.ndnu.edu).The most recent discussion of living theory is Jean McNiff's (2013) book, Action Research: Principles and Practice, where she philosophically separates herself from Jack Whitehead's initial idea of Living Theory as overly focused on radical individual constructivism (Riegler, 2014).

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