ABSTRACT
The idea of ‘research-based teaching’ was originally shaped in the UK by ‘Lawrence Stenhouse’s compelling image of the “teacher as a researcher”’ (Carr 1994: 428). As such it came to form part of what Carr depicts as a reformulation of action research that had emerged in the US during the 1940s. This reformulation in the UK occurred specifically in the field of education. In this chapter I will not only attempt to clarify the conception of ‘researchbased teaching’, which emerged in the context of the British curriculum reform movement during the 1960s and 1970s, but also ask whether as a form of action research it is likely to suffer a similar fate to its predecessor in the US, and indeed to a parallel but quite separate development of action research in Germany, at the hand of a positivistic ideology. It will be argued that although such a fate is possible, the Stenhousian version of ‘research-based teaching’ has become sufficiently internationalized to render it improbable.
