As Educators and Educational Researchers, What Contribution Has a Living Educational Theory Approach Made to Helping Us to Improve the Quality of Our Practice and Our Lives?

In this article, two practitioner-researchers, Cathy, principal of a rural elementary school and Jackie, retired superintendent of education and adjunct professor now international mentor, collaborate to share the ways in which Living Educational Theory has helped them improve their practice and transform their lives. Their argument is that subsequent to first engaging in describing and explaining the nature of their influence on themselves, on others and on social formations using their values as explanatory principles, the process has become their ontology and epistemology, their ‘way of living/life’. Their learning has been in an educational relationship over 13 years. Cathy builds educational relationships and studies her influence on their learning and practice. She allows them to find something of use in her practice, to see themselves in her story, her struggle, her journey. Living Educational Theory has become her way of being and leading, inspiring her to live with more love, joy, trust and authenticity. Living according to her value of ‘loving into learning’, Jackie, with the help of the practitioner-researchers with whom she has worked, has refined her understandings of building ‘cultures of inquiry’ to include democratic evaluation, vulnerability, ‘dialogue and digital visual data as research methods’ with life-affirming energy-flowing values.