Introduction to living theory action research in a culture of inquiry transforms learning in elementary, high school and post-graduate settings

In this issue, we highlight personal journeys and collaborative pathways that explain educational influences in learning in terms of values, skills and understandings that we believe carry hope for the future of humanity and own future. We are focusing on values that are ontological in the sense that they are used to give meaning and purpose to our lives as individual researchers. Our values are used as explanatory principles in explanations of educational influence. These principles form our living standards of judgment for evaluating the validity of our contributions to knowledge. The explanatory principles connect flows of life-affirming energy with the living values that constitute our continuously evolving understandings of a culture-of-inquiry. In this first paper of the six contributions we share our present understanding of a culture-of-inquiry.

We are writing from our range of professional contexts: elementary, high school and, postgraduate settings.  In the course of our cooperation we have clarified and shared our meanings of being ‘loved into learning’. We offer this energy-flowing value as a living standard of judgment for evaluating the validity of our contribution to educational knowledge.

The constraints of poverty that we reference in our articles are traditional academic forms of print-based texts, which neglect the embodied expression of moral and aesthetic values. These constraints can limit the validity of the communication of the embodied meanings of the energy-flowing values of profession-nal educators in explanations of their educational influences in learning. We are claiming that these constraints can be seen to be overcome through relationships based on trust and respect and through creative thinking with regard to the living curriculum. The articles in this issue follow our democratic way of creating together a shared meaning of a culture of inquiry.