Educational research for social change with living educational theories

This position paper explains how African educational researchers could contribute to a new epistemology for educational knowledge. It is focused on those researchers who are willing to research and explain their educational influences in enquiries of the kind, "How do I improve what I am doing?" in the social contexts in which they live and work. Such explanations are called living educational theories to distinguish the explanations from those derived from the conceptual abstractions of traditional theories. The African concept of ubuntu is used with the digital technologies of multimedia narratives to explain how educational researchers for social change can create their own living educational theories that carry hope for the future of humanity. The global significance of the ideas in this editorial commentary is contextualised with research from China, India, Europe, Canada, Japan, USA, Tasmania and South Africa.