In this article, we report on how we collaborated, as a research team whose members were drawn from Foundation Studies and the hairdressing vocation, to describe how we had used a multi-method approach to plan, implement and make sense of a module improvement project for pre-apprenticeship students in a tertiary institute in New Zealand. The project was initiated by three of the authors who are hairdressing tutors in the tertiary sector. They invited the literacy-embedding team (i.e. the two remaining authors) at the institute to participate in the project as critical friends and co-researchers. We report on the three stages the Action Research inquiry, which included a constructs-elicitation phase to raise the vocational educators’ awareness of their personally held pedagogical constructs informing their pedagogical actions.