From research-as-practice to exploratory practice-as-research in language teaching and beyond

Practitioner research is a flourishing area with a significant body of theoretical and empirical research, but often researchers remain isolated, unaware of impactful work by colleagues in related fields. Exploratory Practice (EP) is one innovative form, uniting creative pedagogy and research methods, the potential contribution of which has hitherto been neglected. EP’s emphasis on puzzling and understanding is a means of demystifying occluded practices which places learners, teachers and researchers as co-investigators at the heart of the research-practice nexus. Its radical positioning of learners as co-researchers, alongside teachers, teacher educators and others, means crossing boundaries, (re-)negotiating identities, in language learning/teaching/researching, thus raising epistemological challenges for the field. The contribution of this state-of-the-art article is to provide a meta-analysis of these themes and challenges, critically analyzing the complexities involved as the paradigms of research, practice and practitioner research shift from notions of research-as-practice towards practice-as-research.