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Research in education draws upon a wide range of epistemological traditions due in part to the wide range of problems that are investigated. While this diversity might be considered a strength of the field, it also makes researchers who work within it vulnerable to being divided into those worth listening to and those who should be ignored by ‘end-users’. These people and groups who are interested in the outcomes of educational research, such as policy makers and system providers, increasingly expect research findings to be accessible, and to inform questions of the ‘what works’ variety. Under this imperative, research processes that elaborate the complexity of educational problems, and the provisional, partial and contingent nature of solutions, tend to be dismissed as unnecessarily complex and inaccessible. Epistemological diversity in educational research also presents challenges for inducting teacher education students into the profession. We outline some of these challenges in a discussion of epistemological diversity in research in education. We also describe differences in how research traditions construct educational problems. We argue that crossing epistemic boundaries is a necessary condition of the educational practices of teachers and of those preparing to join their ranks. We compare and contrast knowledge-producing processes in education and identify the repertoires of capabilities and habits of mind associated with different epistemologies or ‘angles’. We suggest that the impact of educational research, including its contribution to teacher education programs, policy and public debate about issues in education, might be enhanced through a heuristic suite of four angles that are each understood to be necessary but not sufficient on their own. We provide a brief worked example of how such a heuristic might be applied to make sense of the diverse bodies of research regarding student engagement in school.

The Changing Schools, Changing Times research, on which this article is based, is a three-year project to examine how four high schools serving culturally diverse and disadvantaged communities responded to opportunities and constraints when they set out to improve the quality of student learning. The article draws upon an aspect of the research that focuses upon learning and teaching within the classroom. It describes the process that resulted in the Day Diaries, brief but accurate recounts of a day in the life of a Year 8 class in each of the four participating schools. The paper reports on the nature of the teaching and learning scripts adopted in the lessons and how school leaders and teachers responded to the patterns when the Day Diaries were fed back as tools for reflection and discussion. It explores the idea that two interlocking logics, one of practice and the other of justification, work as a kind of grid or frame to create a “safety zone” for teachers in these very difficult classroom contexts while at the same time restricting the possibility that learners will engage with high-challenge curricula.

We know what good schools look like but experience tells us that it is very difficult to create and maintain them, especially when they are operating under adverse conditions -constant change, limited resources, high staff and student turnover, and a concentration of first time leaders and beginning teachers. The Changing Schools in Changing Times Project 2005-7was designed to investigate ways in which schools working under adverse conditions can engage in sustained school improvement. From the outset, the project team acknowledged that the quid pro quo of being given access to these types of heavily researched schools was the expectation that they would get something in return, and this was most often expressed in terms of some feedback on how they were progressing. Consequently, we had to find ways of working in and with the schools we were researching and, like them, we found it difficult to get people together in the same place without interruption for long enough to maintain a focus on what works and why it matters. Unremarkably, we started to write field notes, make classroom observations, take minutes of meetings and transcribe interviews, but we needed a way of supporting and documenting our observations and conversations that could be regularly and readily shared and negotiated with research participants. We started to scratch together short stories that drew on all our data sources, and shared them with each other and the research participants. The stories have come to function as both a product of the research and one of its data sources. They raise a number of questions related to their use and distribution, such as: Whose stories are they? In whose interest are they told? Do those depicted within them recognize themselves? These stories are described and discussed in this article, and the roles they are playing in the research and reform processes are critically analysed.

Stomatitis has been found to be a major dose‐limiting toxicity from bolus 5‐fluorouracil‐based (5‐FU) chemotherapy regimens, despite the use of oral cryotherapy. Pursuant to preliminary data which suggested that a chamomile mouthwash might ameliorate this toxicity, a prospective trial was developed to test chamomile in this situation. A Phase III, double‐blind, placebo‐controlled clinical trial was designed. Patients were entered into the study at the time of their first cycle of 5‐FU‐based chemotherapy. All patients received oral cryotherapy for 30 minutes with each dose of 5‐FU. In addition, each patient was randomized to receive a chamomile or placebo mouthwash thrice daily for 14 days. Stomatitis scores were determined by health care providers and by patients themselves. There were 164 evaluable and well‐stratified patients equally randomized to both treatment groups. There was no suggestion of any stomatitis difference between patients randomized to either protocol arm. There was also no suggestion of toxicity. Subset analysis did reveal unsuspected differential effects between males and females that could not be explained by reasons other than chance. The resultant data from this clinical trial did not support the prestudy hypothesis that chamomile could decrease 5‐FU‐induced stomatitis. Cancer 1996;77:522‐5.

Several letters to the editor are presented on topics related to an image of North Star, one appreciating the "Patrick's Corner" section of the periodical, and other in response to an article about French Jesuit missionary Jean de Brébeuf in the October 2014 issue.