This stack of slides comes from the presentation entitled “Practice-based research methods: Challenges and potentials” given before the master class on practice-based research on the 11th of December 2018, at the University of Southern Denmark, Kolding.
Abstract
Education as an applied interdisciplinary research field faces acute challenges in defining the nature and scope of practice-based research. Constantly shifting notions of what it means to learn and, consequentially, what it means to teach make practice-based research a fluid and muddy concept. Increasing technologisation of learning environments and heightened expectations concerning the role of evidence in situated educational decisions have led some scholars to suggest a range of new approaches that are seen as more suitable for quickly changing research and practice contexts and capable to connect research with practice, design with teaching, and data with action. In this presentation, I discuss some different ways of thinking about these connections and emerging from them methodological implications. I argue that practice-based research has to ground itself in a much better understanding of diverse ways of knowing. It requires knowledge and skill to engage in methodological craftsmanship.
Educational research is, of course, one of the most epistemically diverse and challenging research fields. Actionable knowledge and epistemic fluency are big themes in it. Some people have been asking us if we wrote anything about this. Not recently, but below there are summaries and links to some our earlier papers that should give an insight into our ways of thinking about epistemological landscape of educational research. They are written during 2010–2011, but the main messages are still very relevant. The first paper discusses connections between epistemic fluency, educational research methods and educational design (or educational research as design). The next two papers talk about emerging technology-mediated research methods and implications for educational research. (NB: these two papers have been written in the era when “learning analytics” yet to be invented, but fundamental epistemological questions about big data vs. rich data, digital materiality, digital knowledge, educational research infrastructures, etc. are still pretty “hot”). Of course, others have been writing about these topics too, e.g. see Deb Hayes and Catherine Doherty’s 
epistemic fluency 