ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with two teachers’ accounts of their learning over a period of two years when members of a part-time Masters course in Applied Educational Research at CARE. The course is based on a number of applied research assignments which members carry out in their own institutional settings, either into aspects of their own practice or into institutional practices in which they are implicated. The idea of ‘reflective practice’, stimulated by the work of Schon, is now widely employed by educationalists as a new basis for teacher education which overcomes the problematics of the traditional rationalist paradigm by integrating theory and practice. Louden describes reflection with a personal interest as connecting experience with an understanding of one’s own life. The experience of a practical problem challenges people to question the framework of beliefs and assumptions we bring to the situation, and to personally reconstruct that framework.
