This paper is an account of our ongoing collaborative action enquiry, as higher education professional developers, as we ask how we can encourage nurse and teacher educators in global cross-cultural settings to find ways of realizing the recommendations of new scholarship forms of educational enquiry, recommended by Carnegie Foundation theorists Boyer (1990) (for teaching) and Benner (2010) (for nursing). These recommendations explain that theoretical knowledge alone is an insufficient basis for professional competence, and should be embedded within a deep experiential understanding of practice situations and a strong personal commitment to the wellbeing of the service user (patient or student). However, while there is considerable agreement about the need for innovative thinking for improving practices, especially through adopting service-user perspectives (see McNiff 2013), there appears to be less agreement about the need for research approaches involving values-based assessment criteria and standards of judgement, or the willingness to implement them. This failure to link means that traditional theory-practice divides remain, with a normative prioritising of abstract theory. Indeed, our practical experience and interview data with higher education professional educators in a range of countries, including Iceland, Ireland, Norway, Sweden, the UK, South Africa and the USA, reveals that client-centred practices tend only partially to be implemented in practice settings, and suggestions regarding the introduction of values-based client-centred forms of assessment are frequently resisted.

Possible reasons for this theory-practice divide would include:

• the traditional divide between the perceived responsibilities of ‘workplaces’ and ‘the academy’: healthcare/teaching is understood as focusing on practice (patient care and student learning) while higher education as on disciplines-based knowledge development (Rolfe 1996); 

• the increasingly dominant market culture, which prioritises technical rational forms of assessment, and propositional and procedural above personal practical knowledge (Ball 2012); this includes a high-pressure culture with little time for practitioners’ structural self-refection;

• a tendency towards self-perceptions and identifications as ‘practitioners’ and ‘researchers’; reluctance to challenge such reification (see theoretical contributions from Habermas and Adorno, in Cook 2004).

This situation denies our professional and social values about encouraging social evolution through practitioners’ agency and communicative action. Therefore as professional developers we encourage higher education-based educators to develop values-based other-oriented criteria and standards for judging quality in their own practices, while encouraging the nurses and teachers they support to do the same. Thus their accounts of practice provide a strong evidence base that shows how other-centred communities of educational enquiry may develop for improving practices and research.

We draw on Habermas’s (1987) frameworks regarding ‘system’ and ‘lifeworld’, where the practical rationality of practices and practice-based knowledge stands frequently in contrast with the technical rationality of ‘systems’ and abstract knowledge. We argue for an integrated view of social change through an integration of theory and practice by encouraging ‘practitioners’ to see themselves as researchers, and ‘theorists’ to see themselves as knowledge workers. This generates a critical re-appraisal of self-identity within a broader commitment to the development of dialogically-oriented egalitarian practices, where the needs of the service user/patient/student are prioritized as a core feature of an evolving society. 

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