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Continuing professional development (CPD) within a low resourced education environment necessitates context specific and needs-driven learning, particularly in Physical Education (PE) where personal and systemic barriers impede negatively on teachers and children's educational experiences. This paper provides evidence-based guidelines as to how an action learning approach to CPD for PE might empower teachers to direct their own learning within low resource environments. A participatory action learning and action research design, using qualitative data generation methods, guided the inquiry. Ten teachers from two low resourced schools in South Africa, through participation in an action learning process, ultimately deduced five guidelines from their reflective enquiry to guide teachers to collaborate to transform their teaching of PE. The action learning approach to CPD supports teachers to take ownership of and responsibility for their CPD within the subject of PE. Ultimately, learning how to learn, enables teachers to champion sustainable change through establishing ongoing communities of practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Health system governance is widely recognised as critical to well-performing health systems in low- and middle-income countries. However, in 2008, the Alliance for Health Policy and Systems Research identified governance as a neglected health systems research issue. Given the demands of such research, the Alliance recommended applying qualitative approaches and institutional analysis as well as implementing cross-country research programmes in engagement with policy-makers and managers. This Commentary reports on a 7-year programme of work that addressed these recommendations by establishing, in partnership with health managers, three district-level learning sites that supported real-time learning about the micro-practices of governance - that is, managers' and health workers' everyday practices of decision-making.Paper Focus: The paper's specific focus is methodological and it seeks to prompt wider discussion about the long-term and engaged nature of learning-site work for governance research. It was developed through processes of systematic reflection within and across the learning sites. In the paper, we describe the learning sites and our research approach, and highlight the set of wider activities that spun out of the research partnership, which both supported the research and enabled it to reach wider audiences. We also separately present the views of managers and researchers about the value of this work and reflect carefully on four critiques of the overall approach, drawing on wider co-production literature.Conclusions: Ultimately, the key lessons we draw from these experiences are that learning sites offer particular opportunities not only to understand the everyday realities of health system governance but also to support emergent system change led by health managers; the wider impacts of this type of research are enabled by working up the system as well as by infusing research findings into teaching and other activities, and this requires supportive organisational environments, some long-term research funding, recognising the professional and personal risks involved, and sustaining activities over time by paying attention to relationships; and working in multiple settings deepens learning for both researchers and managers. We hope the paper stimulates further reflection about research on health system governance and about co-production as a research approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

consideration of the challenges faced by practitioners in local government when it comes to the implementation of environmental management in practice, this paper supports a social learning approach to environmental management, which embraces reflective practice. Feedback is provided on the preliminary results of a current action research study in South African local government which aims to appraise the potential of a specific reflective practice framework to enhance environmental management in this transitional context. Consideration is given to some practical outcomes experienced in the roll-out of the reflective practice framework so far, as well as to preliminary data analysis outcomes, such as the nature of reflective practice and in the host organisation. Attention is also given to potential factors influencing the effectiveness of reflective practice in the host organisation and how they could be related to the challenges being experienced in the rollout of the reflective practice framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Community engagement (CE) is a core function of the university in South Africa. In the field of education, the imperative to pursue and promote CE provides an exciting opportunity for researchers to work with school communities to address the many challenges that threaten the quality of teaching and learning. Yet, relatively few researchers in education faculties have expertise in this emerging area of scholarship. There is therefore a need to develop among academics a capacity for community-based research and deep knowledge of how to approach it effectively. This conceptual article positions participatory action learning and action research (PALAR) as a creative, innovative, collaborative and self-developed way to achieve this purpose. Findings from various PALAR projects, in which the authors have participated, provide evidence of PALAR's utility for disrupting traditional notions of partnership, power relations and knowledge creation. However, they also highlight the challenges this form of enquiry poses within academic environments geared for research that follows a more predetermined, researcher-controlled trajectory. These findings are helpful for stimulating thinking about how such challenges can be addressed to ensure that the research, action, and knowledge we create through this process actually translate into practical community improvement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]