Examining how and why to Engage Practitioners from across the Learning Landscape in the Research Enterprise: Proposal for Phronêtic Research on Education

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Abstract

Educational practitioners are often reluctant, if not actively resistant, to their participation in production and consumption of educational research. Based on my research experience with educational practitioners, I try to deconstruct this phenomenon using dialogic Bakhtinian and Aristotelian sociocultural frameworks. I consider two major related breakdowns in the educational practice: 1) a lack of self-correcting process in the educational practice, while reliance on accountability policy to achieve the practice quality, and 2) a breakdown between educational research and educational practice. I argue that the first breakdown is caused by viewing teaching as poiesis, aiming at preset curricular endpoints, and not as praxis, critically defining its own values, goals, and virtues. As to the second breakdown, I argue that current mainstream and even innovative research is defined through the technê and epistêmê ways of knowing, which correspond to a poiesic vision of educational practice. I suggest that educational practice primarily involves the phronêtic and sophic ways of knowing, which correspond to a praxis vision of educational practice. I describe phronêtic research of teaching through a case of my students, preservice teachers, working on revisions of their lessons that they conducted at an urban afterschool program. Finally, I consider recommendations for institutional support for phronêtic research on teaching.

Keywords

Agency Standards Poïesis Praxis Technê Epistêmê Phronêsis Sophia Dialogue Self-correcting practice Bakhtin Aristotle 
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Notes

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Ethical Approval

This article does not contain any studies with human participants performed by any of the authors.

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Copyright information

© Springer Science+Business Media New York 2016

Authors and Affiliations

  1. 1.University of DelawareNewarkUSA

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