Researching Practices Across and Within Diverse Educational Sites explores the role of educational research in uncertain, risky times. Researching practices and their consequences transpire unpredictably, depending on how we set about to understand these practices. The authors consider the unknowns in research action, and what promises researchers can keep to their communities as they embark on research action together. The authors examine how researching practices come to be constituted within and across cultural sites through consideration of the onto-epistemological bases of research action, broadly understood as “doing, through knowing and being”. Theoretical arguments and empirical examples of the in-situ development of research practices in Australia, Canada, Finland and Norway are provided, arising from reflection upon and dialogue about researching practices with particular groups. Within each chapter, the authors reflect on how knowledge production is influenced by how they go about their researching practices and who or what they regard as knowledge holders. These examples enable readers to reflect on their researching practices in different educational settings.

The impact of St. Mark's Community Center and United Methodist Church on the city of New Orleans is immense. Their stories are dramatic reflections of the times. But these stories are more than mere reflections because St. Mark's changed the picture, leading the way into different understandings of what urban diversity could and should mean. This book looks at the contributions of St. Mark's, in particular the important role played by women (especially deaconesses) as the church confronted social issues through the rise of the social gospel movement and into the modern civil rights era.
Ellen Blue uses St. Mark's as a microcosm to tell a larger, overlooked story about women in the Methodist Church and the sources of reform. One of the few volumes on women's history within the church, this book challenges the dominant narrative of the social gospel movement and its past.
"St. Mark's and the Social Gospel" begins by examining the period between 1895 and World War I, chronicling the center's development from its early beginnings as a settlement house that served immigrants and documenting the early social gospel activities of Methodist women in New Orleans. Part II explores the efforts of subsequent generations of women to further gender and racial equality between the 1920s and 1960. Major topics addressed in this section include an examination of the deaconesses' training in Christian Socialist economic theory and the church's response to the Brown decision. The third part focuses on the church's direct involvement in the school desegregation crisis of 1960, including an account of the pastor who broke the white boycott of a desegregated elementary school by taking his daughter back to class there. Part IV offers a brief look at the history of St. Mark's since 1965.
Shedding new light on an often neglected subject, "St. Mark's and the Social Gospel" will be welcomed by scholars of religious history, local history, social history, and women's studies.

How the pastor reads a situation theologically will define the possibilities for ministry now and for the church's future.
The pastor's theological lens effects every ministry task. This book introduces students to the importance of theological reflection. It tells them why theological reflection is crucial to who they are and what they do, and it shows them how they can acquire and strengthen their capacity for theological attentiveness. Central to Wood and Blue's approach is the conviction that pastoral character and pastoral practice are mutually formative. Also through the practice of ministry the pastor's identity is both continually discovered and continually worked on and worked out. All pastors must integrate who they believe themselves to be and who they believe God is to be effective leaders.