Empowering Teachers for Equitable and Sustainable Education: Action Research, Teacher Agency, and Online Community

This groundbreaking book uses a comprehensive study of a novel Master of Education program to showcase how teachers can be engaged in authoritative equity‑based research, using comparative education theory, inquiry‑based pedagogy, and the UNESCO SDGs as powerful frameworks. By developing agency to advance culturally sustaining and humanizing practices, it demonstrates how teachers can promote equity in their classrooms and communities. The central premise of the program is that teachers must become comparative, global, and local action researchers to have agency in their practice and to become effective advocates for the cultural and learning needs of their students, especially those in disadvantaged contexts or “learning at the bottom of the pyramid.” By learning comparative framing and social science methods, reviewing the literature to select verifiable educational research, and developing and implementing a plan for action research, this book offers new ideas for how teachers can effectively respond to recent UNESCO calls to reimagine and create promising futures locally. By providing formative and summative evidence of culturally and socially transformative learning, and showcasing how teacher educators can engage teachers in authoritative justice‑inquiry‑based research, this book will appeal to scholars, faculty, and researchers of comparative education and teacher education, and development.