This beautifully compiled book will prove enormously helpful to teachers undertaking small-scale research into their inclusive practice.

Much thought has gone into its editing and organisation, so that it reads smoothly and coherently - less like a compilation and more like a single-authored book. It begins with a validation of small-scale research in education and proceeds with a series of introductions to, and examples of, different kinds of research.

The introductions clearly outline approaches, techniques and methods and the chapters which follow - several from practising teachers - exemplify those approaches well. There are chapters on action research, observation, using documents, case study, interviews, questionnaires and life stories - all of them the kinds of methods that will be employed in teacher research.

Particularly unusual for a compilation, but especially helpful, is the way in which the editors have tailored their introductions not just to the topic in question but to the particular exemplar which follows. Clear sensecan thus be made of what can be, in so many edited texts, isolated offerings stripped of context.

If I had to be critical it would be about the prominence given to the many attacks on educational research at the beginning and end of the book. These attacks are mostly well countered and responded to. But I have two quarrels with it. First, it gives a defensive (as distinct from encouraging or empowering) flavour to the whole. And second, respect and analytical finesse are given in equal shares both to well-founded critiques and to barmy rants. Instead of such forensic responses to these attacks on research, I would have preferred to see more of a discussion here of the contested notions of what counts as evidence and what, for example, a word such as “empirical” means in educational enquiry.

These issues are at the heart of the debate about the validity of small-scale research in education.

Gary Thomas

Gary Thomas is professor of education at Oxford Brookes University