A range of activities encouraged us all to bring our whole selves to the process of learning about these issues and to explore creative "knowing" through exercises with movement, sound, visual media, creative writing, observation and reflection, as well as the more usual analytical reading and discussion. Online, we were able to share our thoughts about our learning through this exploration. The next chapter provides more detail about the creative approaches we explored, along with other approaches we introduced to support learning.

Supporting Research in Practice⁷

Although valuing the opportunity to teach and learn through the online course, we were excited by the idea that Project participants could do more than learn approaches that had already been developed. During the course, we had read research about violence and learning and reflected on how it related to our practices (Horsman and Norton, 1999). The Changing Practices projects were an opportunity for participants to do research themselves. We saw these projects as a way for participants to explore an area of practice, to examine its effects systematically, and then to share what they had learned with others. Eight participants from the first cycle of the Project decided to take this opportunity.

In a January 2003 workshop, participants reviewed what they had learned from the course and began to plan their projects. They worked on their own and talked with each other and us about an area of practice that they wanted to explore. They mused about related ideas and questions on which they wanted to shine a light. We didn't worry about honing in on specific research questions, knowing that questions would emerge and shift along each project's way. Each participant received a copy of A Traveler's Guide to Literacy Research in Practice (Norton, 2003). Back home, participants prepared a brief proposal and began developing a budget.⁸