Roundtable Participant: Pamela Walters, Past Editor, Sociology of Education

DR. WALTERS: When I think the issue of structured abstracts for the Journal of Sociology of Education, which was what I took to be my charge, I have to back up to think about the subfield or subdiscipline of sociology of education, and then backing up further to sociology, and further to the social sciences.

And from that kind of larger vantage point, one of the things that has frustrated me about this discussion, and makes it hard for me to answer the basic questions that have been posed is that I think the discussion as it has unfolded, not only today, but the sort of larger discussion about quality in education, has tended to conflate questions about quality and rigor in research on the one hand, with jumping quickly to an assumption that research on the effectiveness of interventions is the only thing that's really worth talking about. And I think we are doing that here as well.

And if the question is about how to better communicate to practitioners, the results of research on the effectiveness of classroom interventions, then sociology is not part of the conversation, to put it really bluntly, because this is not what sociologists do, by and large.

Sociologists and sociologists of education have an eminently social view of schooling, have a very broad definition of schooling, as Teresa was talking about, schooling and education as a process that takes place in lots of institutions, not just in things formally called schools.

And what we tend to see as the technical component of learning in classrooms is only one particular slice of it -- an important slice, a very important slice, but not the only one. And we tend to be much more concerned with social institutions and social arrangements, and ask questions about the organization of instruction, schools as delivery systems, schools as organizations, institutional arrangements between schools and other social institutions.

And so, that has to be taken into account in any discussion about how sociology as a discipline, or sociology of education as a subdiscipline would fit into this conversation. I think if we broad the question, or slightly reframe the question to be one about would greater uniformity in the way that abstracts are constructed and findings are summarized help improve the dissemination of sociological research, well, the answer is yes.

But I should say that I get nervous about templates of any sort, because there is such an enormous substantive and theoretical and methodological range of work in sociology, that any one template is likely not to be particularly useful.

I also want to kind of put on the table at the outset that I really think the question of audience is critical here. And we have talked about it some, but from my perspective it has to be really front and center. The implicit audience for the structured abstract appears to me to be practitioners. And again here I'll speak for myself, I don't really expect many practitioners to be reading my research.

And when sociologists turn to a question about how to get our findings into an audience beyond the scholarly community, we don't typically think of our scientific journals doing that work for us. We think about other kinds of outlets.

And so again, the conversation about getting research findings into the hands of practitioners is simply not something that would be very much on the radar of a sociological audience, and I suspect the same is true for much of the other social sciences.

Policymakers are another question entirely. When I think about the discussion about how to improve the decision-making on the part of practitioners, the first thing that comes to my mind is that teachers have a very limited range of choices about what to do. They are constrained by the organizational and institutional arrangements for education in the United States today.

And sociological research is much more likely to speak to policymakers who have control to some degree, over at least some of those organizational and institutional arrangements. So, part of what I would like to do is to get other external constituencies onto the table, including importantly policymakers and sort of an engaged public among other folks.

DR. FLODEN: Just a question. And do you think that the policymakers read?

DR. WALTERS: No.

DR. FLODEN: So, it's another mechanism to get to them as well?

DR. WALTERS: Yes, but I think if we are talking about -- no, I do not think policymakers regularly read Sociology of Education. But if we are talking about trying to get our work into the hands of people for whom -- people outside of the academy for whom it could be of influence, I want to make sure policymakers are there, because I think the policymakers have control over the more significant -- I'm blanking on what word I want here, but arrangements about education.