Jacqueline Delong
I 
am currently an educational consultant, having retired in 2007 as Superintendent of Education for the Grand Erie District School Board, Brantford. My experience as a professional educator for 40 years includes a variety of positions including secondary school teacher and department head, union president and governor, curriculum coordinator, principal, superintendent and university teacher. After 6 years of part-time study at the University of Bath, U.K., I completed my doctorate in educational action research in 2002 with Jack Whitehead. My thesis: “How can I improve my practice as a superintendent of schools and create my own living educational theory?” is available on my website: http://www.actionresearch.ca and on Jack Whitehead’s: http://www.actionresearch.net.
am currently an educational consultant, having retired in 2007 as Superintendent of Education for the Grand Erie District School Board, Brantford. My experience as a professional educator for 40 years includes a variety of positions including secondary school teacher and department head, union president and governor, curriculum coordinator, principal, superintendent and university teacher. After 6 years of part-time study at the University of Bath, U.K., I completed my doctorate in educational action research in 2002 with Jack Whitehead. My thesis: “How can I improve my practice as a superintendent of schools and create my own living educational theory?” is available on my website: http://www.actionresearch.ca and on Jack Whitehead’s: http://www.actionresearch.net.As superintendent of education, I created a culture of inquiry and reflection where teachers and administrators researched their practice by asking questions like ‘How can I be a better educator for these children?’ The evidence is available in the eight volumes of Passion in Professional Practice containing the practitioner research produced over 13 years and available on the above websites and in a guidebook, Action Research For Teaching Excellence (Delong, Black & Wideman, 2005).
This culture of inquiry was built using the living theory methodology to recognize the embodied knowledge of practitioner-researchers as informal professional development and for accreditation as academic knowledge. Through these eight volumes and three Brock University Masters’ cohort groups, the meanings of the embodied values that educational researchers use to explain their educational influences in their own learning, in the learning of others and in the learning of social formations is evident.
My current research and writing investigates the use of multi-media in data collection and knowledge creation in my classrooms and in the classrooms of my students and co-researchers. My latest writing is in the December issue of EJOLTS at www.ejolts.netand is on my website. Some of these ideas I have shared at a conference at Japan Women’s University in Tokyo on November 9, 2013.
In my personal life, I am married to Bill Weir, mother to two children, two step-children and grandmother to three grandsons and one granddaughter. I am an active sailor - last sail in October, 2013 in the Ionian Islands, Greece-, curler, golfer, painter and gardener.