Aliki Nicolaides

2024 SPE Outstanding Book Award Honorable Mention

The idea of the doctorate is undergoing a transformation as experts explore the nature of “doctorateness” and its relevance for current organizational and societal challenges. The professional practice doctorate has emerged as a highly useful framework to address these challenges and it necessarily requires a distinctive approach to the doctoral dissertation.

The Action Research Dissertation: Learning from Leading Change shares a framework for the action research dissertation, outlining the specific ways in which action research fosters the development of scholar-leaders. It offers both doctoral students who are practitioners in applied fields, and the faculty who guide them in their doctoral research, a comprehensive and applied approach to action research that focuses on facilitating and leading change in organizations, as well as ways to address how to translate the findings of this work into a rigorous, dissertation research study.

Throughout the book, the authors explicitly address the connection between the parallel and mutually-reinforcing processes of taking action and conducting research, offering rich insights, tools, and case examples that outline specifically how to use action research to both guide a change effort and generate useful insights to contribute to theory-building.

This is an essential book for a variety of readers, including professional practice doctoral students, faculty directing the studies of those students, program administrators, professional development coordinators, and many others.

Perfect for courses such as: Introduction to Action Research, Action Research, Applied Research, Qualitative Research, Mixed Methods Research, and Case Study Research

A 2023 SPE Outstanding Book Honorable Mention

Generative Knowing explores the mystery of learning from the unknown in ways that reveal that learning is a dynamic phenomenon, encompassing both personal and societal contexts.

Dewey defines learning in terms of experience, reflection, continuity, and interactivity. When learning happens, it eventually solidifies into reliable truths that become a shortcut for taking action or making decisions—thus a habit of learning is formed and becomes rigid.

Generative knowing is an emerging theory of adult learning that seeks the not-yet-foreknown potential that waits to be uncovered in the richness of experience. The book delivers vignettes of different lived experiences of being and becoming, signaling multiple ways in which a person shapes and transcends traditional conceptions of self-other binary activating the power to respond to the ongoing complex evolution of self and society.

Generative Knowing seeks to accomplish four goals:

• to offer a unique exploration of learning, positioned as response-ability that illuminates the relatedness of learning and complex, ambiguous, unsolvable challenges that are recognizable in society as social challenges (i.e. forced migration)
• to present and distinguish an emerging theory of adult learning, generative knowing. Generative knowing emerged as a distinct learning disposition at the intersections of personal meaning making capacity (developmental psychology) encountering the characteristics of rising ambiguity (complexity sciences) and the lived experience of undergoing experience
• to make visible and help others make the connections between generative knowing at a personal level and the complex, ambiguous unsolvable challenges in today’s society, and
• to provide illustrations of what generative knowing entails, how it shapes personal and societal transformation and how that may support educators, facilitator activists and change activists to make space for generative knowing when complex challenges call for both personal and societal transformations.