This chapter describes the photo-based profile-building exercise that occurred as part of a research process which took place over the course of a school year in a secondary school in England. The chapter explain the challenges in broaching the topic of mental illness be put forward along with an explanation of why it was felt visual approaches could offer a fruitful alternative. Neil Pickering proposes that the concepts or ideas of mental illness, and the precise labels beneath that umbrella like schizophrenia or ADHD, are deeply ingrained in the language, institutions and constitutions of the UK as well as throughout the western world. Pickering describes popular factual accounts of the experiences of people who are mentally ill, including well-known films, novels and autobiographies. Pickering draws attention to the way in the stories in the media have brought terms like paranoid, schizophrenia and post traumatic stress disorder into the public eye and made these familiar expression.

Participatory research methods directly engage with the topics that they set out to address. It is therefore no surprise that participatory research practice on the topic of educational inclusion and exclusion raises ethical issues for the participatory researcher that are themselves about inclusion and exclusion. This paper describes and analyses a pilot postgraduate course on the use of participatory photography in this area, and uses this analysis to illustrate the value of sensitive and reflexive participative research as a powerful educational practice.A multi‐ethnic and multinational group of students attended the course and explored the use of images as a qualitative research tool as a means to further developing their own sociocultural perspectives on inclusion.As a method, participatory photography was able to support students to represent their own perspectives on issues such as inclusion and diversity. Just as importantly, it facilitated inclusive teaching and learning, making it easy for students to take an active role in ongoing evaluation of the course and in devising their own assessment criteria. More significantly still, a deep exploration of practices of inclusion and exclusion was facilitated by the ethical issues that were raised and addressed during the research process.

Bringing about school improvement in economically poor urban contexts remains a major challenge. In England the emphasis on competition between schools has further complicated this agenda. At the same time, there is evidence of the emergence of a new policy emphasis that involves support and challenge to school-led improvement efforts through collaboration with other schools. This paper provides an evaluative account of an attempt to use such processes of networking across all secondary schools in one city. The study suggests that schools working together can contribute to the raising of aspirations and attainment in schools that have previously had a record of low achievement, but that this is never a straightforward process – schools are complex organisations, and collaboration between them involves the orchestration of action and purpose at many levels. The paper concludes that the successful use of such approaches involves dealing with a number of challenging dilemmas, and draws out the implications for policy development.

This article considers the role of university researchers in a project aimed at developing inclusive practices in schools through collaborative action research. It tells the story of how these researchers became part of the action in one school—Beechbank Primary—through visits, the collection and reporting of data, and through the development of a relationship (particularly with the head teacher) that facilitated learning and change to take place. One of the issues highlighted is that it is in the process of setting up an action research project that many disturbances are evident and, perhaps, inevitable. We argue that it is in working with these disturbances that one might begin to establish the basis of a collaborative relationship, rather than implying that collaboration may result in such things. The approach taken in the section ‘Beechbank Story’ is a conscious departure from the investigations conducted as a consequence of audit mechanisms, where only particular measurable outcomes, designated in advance, constitute evidence of ‘progress’. We focus instead on process and hope to illustrate the small shifts and changes, documented ethnographically, which we argue are essential if change is to take place in the culture of a school.

This article considers the role of university researchers in a project aimed at developing inclusive practices in schools through collaborative action research. It tells the story of how these researchers became part of the action in one school—Beechbank Primary—through visits, the collection and reporting of data, and through the development of a relationship (particularly with the head teacher) that facilitated learning and change to take place. One of the issues highlighted is that it is in the process of setting up an action research project that many disturbances are evident and, perhaps, inevitable. We argue that it is in working with these disturbances that one might begin to establish the basis of a collaborative relationship, rather than implying that collaboration may result in such things. The approach taken in the section ‘Beechbank Story’ is a conscious departure from the investigations conducted as a consequence of audit mechanisms, where only particular measurable outcomes, designated in advance, constitute evidence of ‘progress’. We focus instead on process and hope to illustrate the small shifts and changes, documented ethnographically, which we argue are essential if change is to take place in the culture of a school.

This book is an easy to read collection of papers written by practitioners that have a passion for their work and the drive to try to bring about change. The research, conducted in different educational environments, illustrates how action research can be undertaken to promote inclusive practice in a variety of educational contexts. Overall, the papers give an informative and thought-provoking documentation of action research that explores and reflects on different aspects of inclusive practice, gives an insight into how the role of the researcher varies within each of the different research projects, describes the ways in which an action research project can progress, identifies the type of problems that can arise and, in some instances, how these difficulties can be overcome. It is refreshing to see an acknowledgement by the contributors of the difficulties encountered during the planning and implementation of their research, mistakes that were made, and how it was possible to rectify mistakes within the reflective process of their research. Furthermore, on completion of the project practitioners further reflected on issues that arose during the research, taking account of these difficulties when interpreting the findings and planning future work. The documentation of this process enables the reader to learn from the experiences of practitioners and see that, despite the challenges of a variety of educational settings, projects can and do go on to successful outcomes. This makes the book interesting reading for anyone working within the parameters of an educational setting who has aspirations to change practice and provoke thought within the context of their work. In Chapter 1 the editors, Felicity Armstrong and Michele Moore, use their research experience to offer guidance that will be useful to practitioners in the planning, implementation and evaluation of action research. They emphasize that it is those that are living and working within the constraints of the educational setting that are best placed to determine the focus of the research, how the research process should be managed, and the questions and issues that should be the focus of the change process. In Chapter 2 Val Thompson, a lecturer in higher education, focuses on access to financial support for disabled students, an important topic when considering the barriers to the inclusion of students in further education. This project began as a joint venture with a disabled learner; the imbalance of power within the research partnership, and the difficulties encountered with this relationship are also discussed as they highlight potential problems of joint participative research. The project achieved success in making changes to internal funding procedures with the publication of these procedures in internally produced guides and improvements in Book Review

This article is an exploration of the value of research involving images in a school, and aims to provoke more general discussion of the purpose, value and risks of educational research using images. It reports on a participative research project in a secondary school which led to the construction of a web site based on images of that school. The value of the process and of the web site in promoting learning within the school community is discussed and assessed, along with the risks of abuse, misuse, and manipulation of those images. The authors consider the value of grouping and clustering the images generated in this project as a means of engaging meaningfully with the images themselves, their context and what they represent. Data are presented from discussions with students and staff involved in taking images, with further reflection on the process that they and we engaged in.

This article examines the journey of a secondary school in its attempts to be more responsive to community values. The school had worked hard for many years to gain the trust of the Asian-heritage population, and, after much debate and consultation, it was agreed to teach boys and girls separately in the first three years. The article examines the way in which existing research on single-sex schooling was used in support of this change, and focuses on an evaluation of the change that involved teachers and parents. It highlights some unexpected and contradictory responses of parents, and the dangers of a stereotyped understanding of identity and religion among teachers and school leaders. The authors advocate a boldness of vision in imagining possible changes and responding proactively to a cultural context, but also that major changes should first be piloted on a smaller scale in order to evaluate the experience and the responses of different groups of parents, even within a seemingly cohesive community.

Schools in England are currently being asked to pay greater attention to the issue of educational inclusion. This paper reports some of the findings of a collaborative action research Network that was set up to address the implications of this trend. The Network involves teams of university researchers in working with practitioners in order to encourage the development of inclusive practices. As a result of this work, it is argued that the development of such practices is not about adopting ‘recipes’ of the sort described in much of the existing literature. Rather, it involves social learning processes that occur within a given workplace. The paper attempts to provide deeper understandings of what these processes involve. To assist in this analysis use is made of the idea of ‘communities of practice’, as developed by Etienne Wenger, focusing specifically on the way he sees learning as a characteristic of practice. It is argued that the development of inclusive practices involves collaborative working arrangements; that they can be encouraged by engagement with various forms of evidence that interrupt ways of thinking; and that the space that is created through such interruptions can enable those involved to recognize overlooked or, indeed, new possibilities for moving practice forward.

The article explores an increasingly popular form of University support for school development: collaborative action research. Research into the development of inclusive practices in schools is a social process: it is impossible to understand the process without thinking carefully about the relationship between the researcher and the staff of the school. My aim here is to make connections between the development of inclusive practices and features of the partnership between university and school staff, in order to clarify the meaning and value of collaborative action research in this context.