The Demonstration Project began as a multi-method action research study adopting an enhancement approach (Holter & Schwartz-Barcott 1993). This encourages practitioners to use theory to enhance practice and raise awareness of underlying values and beliefs that relate to individual and collective responses to change. Realistic Evaluation, with its origins in critical realism (Pawson & Tilley 1997), has guided several of the evaluation cycles.
Theoretical influences embrace both practice development and learning models. Major influences on practice development include descriptions of emancipatory practice development, which highlight culture and context (Garbett and McCormack 2002, Harvey et al 2003) and frameworks which recognise the role and relationships between practice, practitioners, knowledge creation and application (Clarke and Wilcockson 2001).
Wenger’s work explicating communities of practice and social participatory learning (Wenger et al 2002, Wenger 2003) has been pivotal to developing ways of working within the virtual college.
A particularly useful perspective on scholarship which has enabled us to conceptualise and to some extent fuse research with practitioner learning and practice development is provided by Boyer (1990). Boyer proposes four forms of scholarship namely discovery, integration, application and teaching.