Bridging the gap between educational research and educational practice: The need for critical distance

Questions about the proper relationship between educational research and educational practice have been around at least since the establishment of education as an academic field of study. In Germany this happened in 1779 when Ernst Christian Trapp became the first Professor of Education at the University of Halle. Other countries followed (much) later. England, for example had its first Professor of Education in 1873, and Scotland in 1876 (see Monroe, 1911, pp.401-409). Interestingly, Trapp gave research a central place in his conception of a science of education, although he also argued for a clear separation between educational practice and educational research and warned that teachers should not be burdened too much with the tasks of observation and experiment (see Ruprecht, 1978, p.145). The contributions to this special issue not only show that the question of the relationship between research and practice is still very much alive today. They are also testimony to the persistent nature of this question. This suggests that the issue of the relationship between research and practice may well be an endemic feature of the field of education (see, e.g., Miedema, 1986; Lagemann, 2000).