This article examines the potential of practitioner research to contribute to understandings of critical and transformative literacy theories. Drawing upon the work of intellectual historian Dominick LaCapra (2004), we investigate how practitioner research can reconcile theories proliferated from universities with those generated by practitioners, who conceptualise literacy from their work with students in classrooms and communities. Following a review of scholarship by literacy teachers, we examine examples of practitioner inquiry conducted in a graduate literacy course to discuss the following: What happens when school- and community-based practitioners are in dialogue with academic literature in the field of literacy? How can practitioner research encourage educators to develop their own working theories of literacy practice? And what can the broader field of literacy learn from activist practitioner researchers? In conclusion, we suggest several interconnected ways that practitioner research methodologies can inform more dialectical understandings of literacy practice and theory.