In terms of pursuing "purer" research, or at least research and theory construction that doesn't have to prove itself in the immediacy of practice, I feel free to follow the direction of my own emerging reasoning and interests. For me, that has a strong academic orientation even if my subject matter stems from some aspect of direct learning/teaching experience. In this, I am seeking to contribute to the slowly emerging scholarship of the field, first and foremost for the sake of clarifying theory, and secondarily for the sake of improving practice. Keeping both my roles in mind (daily practitioner and researcher/theorist), my underlying assumption is that both practice and scholarship have their own respective logics. While sometimes the twain shall meet, more frequently they go their separate ways and often so for very solid reasons based on what proponents of each are seeking to accomplish. As a practitioner/theorist-researcher I feel the pulls of these diverse and often conflicting logics, sometimes in creative, sometimes in highly uncomfortable ways.

Scholarship may or may not have a direct applicability, even in an applied field like education. Even when not, examining issues beyond the immediate purview of practicality can open up insights that may not be apparent at the level of immediate practice, which nonetheless may be important for the broader construction of the field. An innovative theoretical framework through which to (re)interpret experience is an obvious point of reference. In all fields, applied research depends and builds upon pure research without which new knowledge would greatly atrophy. Such is, or can be, the case also with adult literacy education. "Pure" research, so to speak, is only a problem if (a) it is viewed as irrelevant, which it often is; (b) if implications are not drawn out for application (not necessarily by the same persons), which it often isn't; and (c) if the different functions between pure and applied research and theory construction are not clearly articulated for academics and practitioners alike, which also, often is not the case.

This is a constant reality in my function as a director of Basic Literacy Programming in my agency. From the management perspective, my formal writings are viewed as not having much relevance to the daily challenges at hand, including articles that have in-depth case study material from the program. This is not a critique of management, which operates out of its own respective logic, but it does point to a challenge or a limiting factor that perhaps other practitioner/researchers-theorists face, whose writing may be quite relevant to the work on site, but not necessarily in obvious ways that generally gains the interest of management to the extent of being viewed as valuable. How generalized my experience is, I don't know. I doubt it's peculiar to me.

The consequence is a somewhat polarized outlook between what I do at my agency and what I write about, even when the writing is grounded in what I've experienced on-site in running daily programs. While much of what I write is an effort to grapple with the theory/practice nexus, little of it translates into a readily accessible discourse that would easily have direct impact on practice as currently constituted.