Search

The difficulty of connecting the knowledge generated by educational researchers and the practice of classroom teachers is familiar. Academics write about the importance of research for understanding and improving classroom practices; classroom teachers dismiss the academics’ research knowledge as a poor substitute for actual experience. We argue for moving from debates between spectators and actors about knowledge and practice to discussions about how all educators can foster good judgment. We outline two major accounts of judgment in Western thought, Aristotle’s and Kant’s, which ultimately privilege the spectator over the actor. We then introduce the work of Hannah Arendt, who linked thinking and acting without privileging either in her conception of judgment. Focusing on how teachers and researchers might become better educational judges is a crucial, yet neglected, agenda that promises to link these communities.

Teacher research has been concerned with the generation of knowledge and voice for more than 70 years; teachers are invited to join the academic dialogue by becoming researchers themselves. Yet the promised fusion of communities seems as distant as ever. I want to suggest that for these two solitudes to be brought together, the emphasis needs to change from the generation of knowledge to dialogue about what counts as knowledge. Using the work of the Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin (1895–1975), I argue for dialogic research. In making my case, I present a research problem that was investigated by a group of school administrators and teachers, sketch the previous response of the research community to that issue, take a brief detour through Bakhtin's literary theory, and then show how each of the conceptual resources that he supplies–polyphony, chronoscope and carnival–affected the research project and the ensuing dialogue about knowledge and its relationship to practice.