MR. LABAREE: Thanks, it is a pleasure to be here today. Thanks for coming. What I am planning to do today is talk a little bit about the particular difficulties that are involved in preparing educational researchers, both for those who provide this training and those who receive it.

What I want to emphasize is the things that are different about education. I think when Felice picks up her strand of this conversation, she is going to give you a comparison and talk about similarities across fields. I think, between the two of us, you will get both perspectives in a way that will be useful to you.

I want to focus on programs, in particular, at U.S. education schools that aim at turning practitioners -- particular teachers -- into educational researchers.

In the process, I am going to draw on a structural analysis of the nature of teaching and research as forms of professional practice.

I am also going to draw on my own experience in the last 18 years in doctoral programs at MSU and now at Stanford.

The work here is part of a large work, a book that I just completed called The Trouble With Ed Schools, which is coming out next fall from Yale.

I want to frame the problem around four factors that make it difficult to produce education researchers. Two of them have to do with issues of place and knowledge space, and two of them have to do with the fundamental differences between teaching and research, which lead to conflict over both culture and over educational expectations. I am particularly going to focus on the last two of those.

Let me start with the issue of place. The place problem is that we are training educational researchers in a low status institution, the ed school.

This reputation issue of ed schools is an old problem. I am not going to spend much time talking about it, since it is familiar.

Part of it is that is deserved and part of it is undeserved. In part, it is a legacy of our history, the history of teacher ed, which we were under a lot of pressure to produce a high quantity of teachers at low cost, with very little attention to academic quality over the years.

It is also a legacy, in some ways, of the fact that ed school is a newcomer to higher ed. We started out in normal schools, at the high school level in the 19th century, and only became regional state universities by the middle of the 20th Century. We still carry a little bit of the odor of the parvenu about us.

There is also a legacy of our connection to teaching. Teaching is the largest of the professions and it is also possibly the one that is held in the lowest esteem.

Now, the kind of effects that this has. It has an effect on our ability to recruit people into doing educational research.

It also, in some ways, undermines our authority to try to socialize people into a powerful culture of educational research.

Let me say a little bit about the second issue, which is that we are training people to produce a very difficult form of knowledge. I want to say a little bit about that.

Consider two classic kinds of distinctions of knowledge, hard versus soft, pure versus applied, hard knowledge being the kind that findings are verifiable and definitive and accumulative, or at least you can make the rhetorical claim that they are such.

Soft knowledge is the kind where the findings tend to be hard to replicate, the validity is harder to establish or defend, and the focus tends to be more on interpretation than causation.

In this sense, then, education is the softest of the soft field. It is a place where we really have trouble making strong claims and holding on to them.

We are dealing with willful actors here. I mean, these billiard balls are likely to change direction between the cue ball and the corner pocket.

We find this is also a normative arena that we work in. It is a place where context is everything. We end up making a lot of statements that have phrases in them that say something like, well, it all depends.

Under those circumstances, it is really hard for us to build towers of knowledge because we are constantly re-building the foundations.

Then there is the pure applied distinction. Pure knowledge, in the kind of classic sense, is theory construction, making universal claims partially abstracted from context, whereas applied knowledge focuses on practical issues, in particular context with an aim toward problem solving.

Education is obviously an overwhelmingly applied field. We don't practice a discipline, really. We have a responsibility for an institutional area.

We don't have the luxury of following our theories where they take us. Instead, we end up having to respond from problems that are thrown at us from the field.

In that sense, it means that we end up having to do what is needed, not what we are good at. That is a serious problem.

Now, education is not alone in this. Social sciences are also as soft as all get out. The professional fields, like medicine and engineering, are also quite applied.

Social science, for example, can shore up the credibility of its relatively soft knowledge with a lot of theory, and fields like medicine and engineering can shore up the credibility of their applied knowledge with a lot of hard science.

What is unusual about education is that we are both very soft and very applied. In that sense, we are in the same category with a very small number of other people-changing professions, to use David Cohen's term, like counseling or social work.

The effects? Well, educational researchers, therefore, as a result of this, need a great deal of methodological sophistication and flexibility, in order to do well in this field.

It is a very complex terrain. It needs multiple perspectives to be done well, and a deep and rich array of skills.

It is very hard to design a program for producing researchers that can provide that kind of an expertise, especially when we are in a relatively week position to sell students on the need to actually adopt these skills.

Now I want to turn to the issue of the transition from teaching to research, and what makes that particularly hard.

Now, some things make it easy, actually. Those of us in doctoral programs in this field know it. Our students tend to be very mature.

They tend to have a lot of professional experience and a lot of dedication to the field, which are huge pluses to bring into doctoral study.

I want to focus on the problems here, the problem, particularly, of moving from one form of professional practice to another, from teaching to research, and how to accommodate the conflicting world views that arise from this transition. Also, how to accommodate the conflicting ideas about educational expectations.

So, a little about the conflicting world views. Teaching and educational research exists in practitioner cultures that are quite different in terms of the values, norms and practices that characterize them.

I am not talking here just about an attitude difference, but about differences that arise from the very nature of the work itself.

These cultural differences persist over time because there are enduring differences in the nature and conditions of practice in each of these fields.

To put it in a very simplistic way, which I will complicate a bit later, teaching is a practice that tends to emphasize the analytical, the intellectual, the universalistic and the experiential, whereas educational research is a form of practice that tends to emphasize the analytical, the intellectual, the universalistic and the theoretical.

One transition that students in these programs, the teachers coming into a doctoral program in education go through is a shift from the normative to the analytical.

The teaching, in many ways, is a moral practice, that is aimed to changing students toward particular valued ends, whereas educational research is more of an analytical practice that is aimed at understanding educational processes.

For the teachers being confronted with this world of educational research, it almost looks immoral at times, that we seem to be talking about and thinking about stuff instead of fixing it. Don't just fix, do something, seems to be the response that we often get.

As a result, it means that there is often a certain amount of resistance to adopting the analytical approach, and an urge, instead, to jump to fixing the problem or looking for the success stories.

Another kind of transition here is from the personal to the intellectual. There is a close connection i teaching between the teacher and the student that is at the very heart of the enterprise.

That person connection is a kind of lever that motivates learning. Like me, like my subject, is a key kind of component of teaching as a practice.

For teachers coming into educational research, you can sometimes feel it is like a coldly distant, impersonal and over-intellectualized enterprise. That kind of a reaction can lead to a stance that borders on anti-intellectualism.

A third kind of transition is from the particularistic to the universalistic. Context is everything in teaching. It always boils down to a particular person, a particular time and a particular place. The general rules, teachers find out early, don't help very much. It always comes down to cases.

Here we are, in educational research, focusing on elements that look across context, trying to generalize. That often makes educational research a hard sell to teachers who are approaching entry into that field.

A fourth transition that I want to talk about is from the transitional to the theoretical. I have been defining teaching up to this point as a particularistic moral practice involving management of personal relations for curricular ends.

Now, in light of that logic it follows that the primary bank of professional knowledge that a teacher would draw from would come directly from personal experience in practice.

That orientation, in a doctoral program, allows our teacher students in the classroom, often, to trump any educational research claim they come up with, with an anecdote from practice.

That kind of experiential orientation can lead to an active effort to resist taking theory seriously, because it seems to be incompatible with the classroom experience.

So, how do you respond to this? One way of trying to respond to this cultural gap, between the teacher and the researcher in doctoral programs, is to try to narrow the cultural divide a little bit.

One strategy is to demonstrate that the divide itself is not as sharp as it appears. Obviously, this binary distinction is an exaggeration.

Like teachers, educational researchers, in many ways, in their own practice as researchers, take an approach that is normative and personal and particularistic and experiential.

So, one approach is to try to point out that this gap between teaching and research isn't as big as it appears.

We, as professors in these programs, could do a better job, I think, of making clear the kind of connections between the kind of work we do and the kind that teaching does.

The other approach would be to demonstrate in these programs a greater respect for the kind of knowledge and expertise that our teachers bring in, and to incorporate that kind of teacher knowledge into our researcher education curriculum.

That means, in effect, combining teacher and research skills more clearly, creating a more hybrid program that is drawn closer to teaching. That also is a useful approach.

The gap, I think, is still a real one. It is not one that goes away, that deconstructs itself into oblivion. It may just be a matter of emphasis, but it is still grounded in serious differences in practice that don't go away easily.

Learning to be an educational researcher, like any kind of learning, involves change. So, we don't need to apologize for the fact that we are asking our students to change.

However, we do need to do this kind of pursuit of preparing people to be educational researchers in a way that honors the teacher view, while still selling teachers on the value of the researcher view.

The model that I am talking about here comes from ESL. I mean, I am thinking about teaching research as a second language.

What does that mean in practice? It means making a case for taking advantage of the opportunity of being in a doctoral program, where you are not in charge of the class any more.

You are not responsible for everything that is going on, and you now have a chance to sit down and figure out the things you never could have done when you were in charge.

Making a case for the value of acting based on an understanding informed by research, that means making a case for the value of intellectual skills in understanding education, making a case that relating to and caring about kids is not enough, that you also need to develop some skills in interpreting evidence about those students.

We need to make a case for the value of theory as a mirror to practice, as a way of showing both what is in common across different sites of practice and what is different there.

We need to make a case for the experience as one form of knowledge about education. So, if teaching experience is one form of knowledge about education that is valuable, so is research.

Basically, it is making a case for an additive model of research knowledge adding onto the teacher knowledge, rather than a substitutive knowledge.

So, I have been talking about an institutional problem, the status of ed schools. I have talked about the knowledge space problem and about the culture clash problem.

The last one i am going to talk about is the mismatched education expectation problem. When teachers arrive in programs to prepare educational researchers, they come with a particular mix of educational experiences.

They typically come in with an undergraduate degree in education or in a discipline with an education certification program attached.

They typically come with a master's degree in education. They have good academic records. They have strong test scores, strong professional experience, and in general, they come into the programs feeling they are educationally prepared for doctoral study.

Faculty in these programs often disagree. They often see a certain lack of educational preparation that is needed for successful pursuit of a doctoral program.

They find that students are often lacking in a broad background in the liberal arts. They complain that they have trouble reading, writing and arguing in the kind of analytical way that scholars appreciate, that they don't have a strong background in history, a culture in theory, and they don't have a good foundation in the academic knowledge about the field and the literature in that field.

It winds up being a pretty jarring experience often for both faculty and students around these kinds of issues.

Now, one interpretation is that this is a conflict between the professional and the academic. My own preference is to think of it as a conflict between two kinds of professional education that are not very compatible. Either way, it is a mismatch.

Consider this problem from the perspective of a hypothetical, unsympathetic faculty member who adopts a deficit view of the whole thing.

In that case, you find three levels of educational deficit that they confront with these programs, one at the general liberal education level, one at the initial professional education level and a third at the advanced professional education level.

On the first, like most U.S. undergraduates, teachers don't get a very strong liberal education, and that problem doesn't get fixed in their teacher preparation program.

At best, the best of the teacher preparation programs are focusing on issues of practice, rather than issues of disciplinary knowledge and liberal arts, which people are supposed to be getting elsewhere on campus.

At their worst, as we know, teacher education is often both anti-intellectual and academically stultifying. At the master's level, this is not something that gets necessarily fixed either, in part because education master's programs are quite different from academic master's programs.

In an academic masters, in the disciplines, the focus on master's studies, in some ways, is the first step toward doctoral work, that covers the basic issues and literature in the field as a foundation for later academic study.

In education, this is not designed as an education program. It is designed as a professional program. In fact, it is a professional development program for practitioners and, at its best, it does that professional development well.

At its worst, as we know, master's programs in education are little more than selling credentials to people who want a pay increase.

So, what are the consequences for researcher education from this deficit model perspective? It means that you need to provide, in these programs, an introduction to liberal learning.

It means that you need to provide foundational knowledge in the field, and an overview of the literature of that knowledge.

You need to provide specialized knowledge in a particular area that is appropriate depth and breadth for someone receiving a terminal degree.

It means we need to train them in research methods. It means that we need to mentor them through a piece of original research that is going to eventually make a contribution to the theoretical literature. We are supposed to do all of that in, if we are lucky, five years.

It is not surprise that that often doesn't work, especially considering the relatively weak position we are in, in ed schools, to socialize students authoritatively into educational research, considering the high demands for methodological sophistication that education carries with it, as a field of knowledge, and because of these conflicting world views that I have been talking about.

The current response to this kind of a deficit problem is educational remediation. We try to fix the problem at the last stage here, dealing with the accumulated deficits that confront us.

Obviously, another fix would be to start earlier, by shoring up liberal education in the university. Good luck on that one.

Potentially, also, an area where we have more control, shoring up the academic content of teacher education and master's programs in education.

That is certainly more plausible, but it seems a dangerous road to go beyond a certain point, because it means making professional programs for teachers more like professional training programs for future researchers and, in fact, we need very few researchers compared to the number of teachers, and that seems like serving a tiny number at the expense of the greater number.

An alternative, of course, would be to abandon this kind of deficit model that I have been explaining here from this hypothetical, unsympathetic faculty member.

We could, by abandoning that view, adopt the view of the teachers themselves. That means making researcher education programs more professional and less academic. It means moving researcher education closer to teacher education in many ways, and researchers closer to teachers.

That is great up to a point, but I think there is only so far we can go in that direction without abandoning the notion of researcher education entirely.

Educational researchers need an irreducible minimum of academic skills, and we would be remiss if we didn't hold our ground in insisting on accomplishing those skills in our students.

We need to sell our students on the value of research knowledge in addition to teacher knowledge, not as a replacement for it.

We need to sell them on the concern to spend the time and effort that is necessary for them to develop this kind of knowledge. Thank you.

[Applause.]