This paper is an account of a three-year action research professional education project conducted in a European university with a group of nine senior nurse educators, supported by myself, as part of a broader institutional commitment to developing research capacity. The project arose in response to local policy recommendations, within a broader international policy framework that nursing and health care services and delivery should be more community-based and patient-oriented (e.g. RCN, 2013; WHO, 1994), with the intent of transforming professionalism for personal and social improvement (McDonnell and McNiff, in preparation). A preferred methodology for achieving this would be action research. My role, as a native English speaker, established academic and experienced and published action researcher, was to help colleagues (all non-native English speakers and novice action researchers though experienced health care professionals) to develop expertise in doing and writing action research for publication. This paper focuses on this critical issue of writing action research for publication, itself part of developments that are increasingly relevant to the international community, including the following:

• Greater interest in practice-based research in universities, given the recognition of Mode 2 forms of knowledge (Gibbons et al., 1994) for generating theory of direct relevance to contemporary social needs;

• Increasing demands for academics to publish their work, within an audit culture where reputation depends on publication (Hyland, 2007)

• Ensuring publication of action research texts within a literary orthodoxy that demands specific forms of academic writing, and controlled by university managers and journal editors who thereby also retain control of the means of professional legitimation (Gibson, 1993; Herr and Anderson, 2005);

• Danger that the content and form of action research texts become domesticated to fit into the established literary canon, thus denying the critical, emancipatory and democratic values and knowledge-constituted interests of action research.

Consequently, the production of texts that show the processes of realising socially-oriented values through their content and form within a literary culture that prioritises outcomes and analytical forms of expression could be seen as constituting a new legitimation crisis (Habermas, 1975), where established literary structures are no longer able to support new methodological perspectives. A favoured response from managers is to obstruct publication by academic action-researchers through a range of strategies, including rejection of proposals, dissertations and articles on the pretext of ‘poor quality’. It therefore becomes the responsibility of practitioner-researchers to ensure their texts achieve the internal standards agreed by the practitioner-researcher community, and the external criteria of the established canon. My research question focused on how I could help colleagues learn how to do so.

The task was made more difficult because

• learning to do and write action research involved shifts in individuals’ self-identity, including: a self-re-identification from teacher (as a facilitator of nurses’ learning in clinical settings) to professional educator (as a member of a university college now amalgamated with a research university) to academic researcher (as fulfilling the expectations of the research university for academics to conduct research) to writer (as part of communicating results and demonstrating academic validity). The issue became how to integrate these identities within the person (Sen, 2006).

• ‘Research’ for colleagues from a healthcare background meant ‘scientific research’; intellectual and emotional discipline were required to internalise action research philosophies and methodologies;

• an increasing requirement that texts for publication should be written in English, given that writing in English is now regarded internationally as a form of academic skill (Hyland, 2007); colleagues therefore had to develop academic literacy in a foreign language.

• It also involved my learning about the practices, traditions and policies of nursing and healthcare to support the group adequately in all aspects of the project.

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