There is a growing awareness in higher education of the need to move beyond the "tired old 'teaching versus research' debate" (Boyer 1990) and work out what are 'due standards of excellence' (Furlong & Oancea 2005) for practice-based research. As three self-study researchers in higher education, we will show how we are contributing to a knowledge base of professional practice by using a 'living educational theory' (Whitehead, 2004) approach to action research in our own learning. We will provide evidence to show how the meanings of our embodied ontological values, can become living standards of judgement in evaluating the validity of our knowledge-claims. These living critical standards of judgement include a ‘pedagogy of the unique’, ‘a web of betweenness’, ‘a generative approach to mentoring’ and ‘racialising whiteness’ in educational discourse.