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This chapter explores the use of Lesson Study (LS) as a strategy for co-constructing pedagogical knowledge and draws on data from a series of interviews with student teachers. Sixteen student teachers, undertaking a postgraduate teacher training program in higher education in England, engaged in LS as an official assessment of their ability to jointly plan, deliver, and evaluate a lesson. LS is thus seen to promote an intense collaborative working relationship between participating student teachers that engenders fresh opportunities for learning. It is argued, then, that this approach can challenge the prevalent model of individually led professional development by facilitating a space for the co-construction of pedagogical knowledge. LS is also explored for its potential to bridge the theory-practice divide by enabling participant student teachers to generate theory from practice.

Purpose – This chapter demonstrates the social organization practices evident in early childhood disputes in order to promote a greater understanding of the role of non-verbal, embodied actions within the dispute process. In doing so, this chapter offers insight into children's co-construction of disputes and has practical implications for early childhood teachers.

Methodology – Ethnomethodology (EM), conversation analysis (CA) and membership categorization analysis (MCA) are applied to the current study of children's disputes in order to offer insight into the sequences of social organization processes evident in children's disagreements.

Findings – This chapter presents a detailed analysis of the everyday disputes which four-year-old children engage in during their morning playtime at a primary school in Wales, UK. It reveals the children's use of physical gestures to support their verbal actions in order to maximize intersubjectivity between the participants. This joint understanding was necessary during the social organization process.

Practical implications – Managing children's physical disputes within an educational context is recognized as a very difficult aspect of a teacher's routine as the timing and level of intervention are so subjective (Bateman, 2011a). This chapter offers insight into the organization of physical disputes between young children, and so enables teachers to make an informed decision in their practice.

This chapter introduces the notion of the ‘Innovation Story’ as a methodological approach to public policy evaluation, which builds in greater opportunity for learning and reflexivity.

The Innovation Story is an adaptation of the case study approach and draws on participatory action research traditions. It is a structured narrative that describes a particular public policy innovation in the personalised contexts in which it is experienced by innovators. Its construction involves a discursive process through which involved actors tell their story, explain it to others, listen to their questions and co-construct knowledge of change together.

The approach was employed to elaborate five case studies of place-based leadership and public service innovation in the United Kingdom, The Netherlands and Mexico. The key findings are that spaces in which civic leaders come together from different ‘realms’ of leadership in a locality (community, business, professional managers and political leaders) can become innovation zones that foster inventive behaviour. Much depends on the quality of civic leadership, and its capacity to foster genuine dialogue and co-responsibility. This involves the evaluation seeking out influential ideas from below the level of strategic management, and documenting leadership activities of those who are skilled at ‘boundary crossing’ – for example, communicating between sectors.

The evaluator can be a key player in this process, as a convenor of safe spaces for actors to come together to discuss and deliberate before returning to practice. Our approach therefore argues for a particular awareness of the political nature of policy evaluation in terms of negotiating these spaces, and the need for politically engaged evaluators who are skilled in facilitating collective learning processes.

We examine how digital technologies enable distributed actors to collaborate asynchronously on virtual projects. We use Wikipedia and associated wiki digital technology as the research site for our exploration. Our probe of the emergence of Wikipedia articles highlights a distinctive property of such digital technologies: in their very use, they generate a digital trace. This digital trace serves as a generative memory that facilitates ongoing cocreation, justification, and materialization of contributions from distributed actors. We examine the implications of such processes for virtual projects that embrace digital technologies with properties similar to the wiki technology used in Wikipedia.

As a result of the rapid technological innovation and its disruptive power also on the educational sector, teaching and learning practices changed fundamentally and new forms of education, as well as totally new degree programmes emerged. Today, higher education institutions (HEIs) make use of different online resources and new collaborative tools by integrating digital technologies and the internet fully within the curricula. However, although online education offers numerous advantages and has the power to overcome traditional barriers in education as time and space, many higher education institutions are still struggling with issues such as fostering student collaboration on one hand and reducing feelings of social isolation on the other. In the present case study, we analyse a blended Bachelor degree programme in Management at a European business school with the aim to provide practical suggestions and inspiration for implementing e-learning and online education in higher education. The introduced case demonstrates how collaborative learning aspects, organisational and pedagogical structures, philosophical assumptions and educational settings can be combined to decrease one of the main challenges in online education, namely distance.

This chapter compares programmes for urban housing regeneration in France and England, showing how ideological similarities reflected in policy ideas and programmes played out differently in significantly different contexts.

The chapter draws on results of several major research programmes, including in-depth extensive fieldwork in a number of cities and regions in France and England. Field research included participant observation in participatory planning events, interviews, home visits, guided walks in the districts, etc. These enabled a multi-site and multi-perspective understanding of urban housing renewal at different sites.

In both contexts, early promises for participation in housing renewal gave way to an imperative for demolition, justified on purely technical grounds that were not shared with participants. The linking of social mix and demolition for local ‘improvement’ also then appeared to be a contradiction between different policies that few residents could endorse, other than selected beneficiaries. Participation, social mix and demolition thus formed an unholy trinity in urban renewal policies.

Housing renewal requires much greater commitment to the experience of residents, to avoid exacerbating social problems rather than relieving them.

The chapter reflects on a wealth of in-depth research over more than a decade to consider the broader implications and outcomes of housing renewal programmes in two countries. It highlights the different balances of power in the two cases and the trajectories of respective urban social politics, including the overlaps between policy objectives and similarities in the government of housing renewal. It also highlights the determination and commitment among residents to the value of housing that is judged from the outside to be ‘poor’.

Purpose – The aim of this chapter is to explore the current trend for new ‘mutual’ models of public service delivery as part of a process of personalisation and commodification of health and social care design and service delivery.

Design/methodology/approach – The authors use the thesis of commodification and the concept of value to explore, with the aid of three examples from previous research, the complexity of transfer of large-scale services from local government and health bodies and the potential contribution of co-operatives and mutuals to this agenda.

Findings – Mutuals may provide an alternative to the supposedly inevitable progression to wholly commodified health and social care provision. However, a top-down push to encourage employee-owned enterprises may fail to take account of significant issues: high capital and labour costs; transfer of risk to consumers purchasing services; quality of care assurance; scope and scale of services; and enabling policies and structures to support democratic ownership and control of enterprises.

Research implications/limitations – Although the chapter focuses on Welsh experience, there are implications for the future provision of public services more generally.

Originality/value – This chapter contributes to a growing discourse and critical awareness of co-operatives and mutuals as potential public service providers. In particular, the nature of democratic engagement and involvement; models of co-ownership and co-construction of public services and the role of the State in promoting alternative non-marketised systems of design and delivery for the public good as well as maintaining accountability through local and national democratic processes.

This chapter aims to offer a focussed critical discussion of the combination of two qualitative data-collection methods used in a longitudinal multiple case study investigating the impact of intra-European mobility on the students' linguistic and intercultural development. The participant being the main (and often the only) source of data in higher education research, this chapter will centre on the use of shadowing as a data-collection strategy and on how this offered an other-report that favoured the co-construction and negotiation of meaning between the researcher and the research participant(s) in the narrative interview. Based on our experience shadowing and interviewing undergraduate students, we will stress: (1) the advantages of combining the direct and first-hand nature of the experience of the researcher with the participants' accounts of their experiences and (2) the need to not only rely on the participants' self-report(s) but also obtain an other-report about the phenomena being studied.

During the past decade, fast-paced changes created a new environment organisations need to adapt to in an agile way. To support their transformation, organisations are rethinking their approach to learning. They are moving away from traditional instructor-centred, standardised classroom-based learning settings. Instead, learning needs to be tailored to the individuals’ needs, available anywhere at any time and needs to enable learners to build their network. The development of digital tools, specifically network technology and social collaboration platforms, has enabled these new learning concepts.

The use of these new learning concepts in organisations also has implications for higher education. The present case study, therefore, investigates how universities can best prepare future employees and leaders for these new working environments, both on a content level and a methodological level. It also investigates if these new learning concepts can support universities in dealing with a changing environment.

The investigated case is a traditional face-to-face leadership lecture for a heterogeneous group of students. It was reconceptualised as a personalised and social collaborative learning setting, delivered through a social collaboration platform as the primary learning environment. Initial evaluation results indicate positive motivational effects, experience sharing and changes in perception of the student − lecturer relationship. The findings also supported previous challenges of computer-supported collaborative learning settings, such as the perception of a higher cognitive load. The implications of these results for the future teaching and business models of higher education are discussed. In addition, the potential of these computer-supported social collaborative learning settings is outlined.