A case in point is my ABE article, "Motivation and the Adult New Reader: Student Profiles in a Deweyan Vein" (ABE 2001, #2, 80-108). This essay consists of three case study profiles of Basic Literacy students covering a period from 18 months to four years, and draws on John Dewey's concept of "growth," or progressive development, as a theoretical frame that I drew on to construct the profiles. I worked closely with the three students and drew much on my personal experience as well as data analysis and theory construction in putting the article together. However contestable my construction may be, the essay seeks to get at many of the nuances that go into the developmental process by which students learn. The issue, however, is that the very format of the academic article is something that has not resonated at the managerial level of the three organizations of which I have been associated since 1987.

This, I imagine, is a more generalized phenomenon beyond my experience. Assuming that to be the case, at least for the sake of this discussion, short of a substantial culture change, lack of managerial support for research is likely to be an ongoing dilemma throughout the field. Whether that is an inherent problem, is another matter, which it may not be. Rather, it may simply be the price of doing business in undertaking research, particularly when its significance may not be readily grasped in relation to other pressing needs in an institutional context. The issue, I would argue, is cultural and political all the way down in how knowledge is constructed and disseminated in organizational settings, as a reflection itself of the broader politico-cultural frameworks in which institutions are embedded.

As a director of a basic literacy program and as a theorist, and as someone who has studied political culture I experience core limitations almost on a daily basis. In my list serv and more formally published writing I've sought to compensate by largely ignoring them or subjecting them to counter interpretations, which at least in theory, seek to deconstruct the seemingly omnipresence of their limiting factors. This is accomplished by positing theory and practice in polar-like perspectives, each having relevance in their respective spheres. In my role as a practitioner, I largely accept the "realities," which seem imposed on the situation of daily program operations, knowing that I have room to maneuver, but only within some very powerful constraints. This, I juxtapose to a more scholarly role in which I seek to make sense of the interface between experience and theory, lest for the sake of bringing the two together, than to draw on practice to draw out some issue related to theory or research, such as the literacy as growth thesis I've articulated, drawing on the educational philosophy of John Dewey. As a practitioner-scholar, my ideal is to bring the two realms together. However, my more basic inclination remains theory clarification. While I hope for practical application, it is primarily by the indirect route of clarifying some facet of experience through theory that I seek to engage my ideal reader a practitioner-intellectual, thoroughly versed in the intricacies of both realms.