In this paper I explain how I aim to hold myself accountable for my work, specifically in relation to promoting the idea of teachers and other practitioners as theorists. Given that the aim of research is to generate knowledge, and developing Stenhouse's (1975) idea of 'teacher as researcher', the next logical step is to regard practitioners as knowledge-generators. Making this step could be a factor in widening participation in debates about the nature and uses of educational knowledge. I work as a professional educator with practitioners across the education levels and in a variety of professional education contexts. I encourage them to ask critical questions of the form, 'How do I evaluate and improve my work?' (Whitehead 1989). I do this because my lifework is to encourage sustainable societies, in which universal human wellbeing is taken as a regulative ideal, and communicative action (Habermas 1987) a primary means to its realisation. The idea of sustainable societies is to do with the realisation of the capacity of all citizens democratically to negotiate their desired forms of life, in relation with others (Sen 1999). Achieving this involves putting in place the basic means to ensure the inclusion of all as equal participants in the kind of communicative action that focuses on the making, testing and justification of knowledge claims in relation to negotiated personal and social goals. These personal and social goals take the form of improving learning for improving practice, grounded in the ideas of Chomsky (1986), that knowledge creation is an innate property of the individual, and Habermas (1975), that humans cannot not learn. The work of educators, I believe, is to enable people to develop their creative and critical capacities such that they will learn how to exercise their educational influence in the learning of others, so that they too will come to think for themselves and consistently test and critique their knowledge in the interests of contributing to the education of social formations (Whitehead 2004). I encourage educators to do this by adopting an action enquiry approach through which they investigate their learning and test their claims that they have improved their learning to improve practice. Through researching their learning they are able to generate their personal educational theories of practice (Whitehead 1989) by which they publicly account for their work. Their accounts of practice can contribute to the public knowledge base (Snow 2001) from which others may learn, and, which may, ultimately, contribute to the systemic support of practitioner enquiry. I believe I am succeeding in encouraging practitioners to regard themselves as serious theorists, and to take their rightful place as participants in public debates about whose theories can make worthwhile contributions to questions concerning the nature and uses of knowledge in the interests of sustainable societies. To support this claim, I will produce evidence in my presentation, drawn from a range of sources, including the Masters and Doctoral accounts to be found on http://www.actionresearch.net and http://www.jeanmcniff.com. References Chomsky. N. (1986) Knowledge of Language: Its Nature, Origin and Use. New York, Praeger. Habermas (1975) Legitimation Crisis, trans. T. McCarthy. Boston, Beacon Press. Habermas (1987) The Theory of Communicative Action Volume Two: The Critique of Functionalist Reason. Oxford, Polity. Sen, A. (1999) Development as Freedom. Oxford, Oxford University Press. Snow, C. (2001) 'Knowing What We Know: Children, Teachers, Researchers', Educational Researcher, 30(7): 3-9. Presidential Address to the American Educational Research Association Annual Meeting, Seattle. Stenhouse, L. (1975) An Introduction to Curriculum Research and Development. London, Heinemann. Whitehead, J. (1989) 'Creating a living educational theory from questions of the kind, "How do I improve my practice?"', Cambridge Journal of Education 19(1): 137-153. Retrieved 26th November 2004 from http://www.bath.ac.uk/~edsajw/writings/livtheory.html. Whitehead, J. (2004) 'What counts as evidence in the self- studies of teacher education practices?' in J.J. Loughran, M.L. Hamilton, V.K. LaBoskey and T. Russell (eds) International Handbook of Self-Study of Teaching and Teacher Education Practices. Dordrecht; Kluwer Academic Publishers.