Further advancement toward the laboratory/research concept in any program would require a resolution of some of these tensions identified at the Bob Steele Reading setting that would need to reconcile the needs of practice, research, and theory construction. To deny its possibility is to assume that reality is closed. To assume that it can be easily accomplished is to fly in the face of much history, but not of history yet to be written as the present and future invariably becomes transmuted into the past. The development of such centers, if well designed and operated could go a long way in contributing to important knowledge construction that could be of much value to students, instructors, program developers and designers, and academic scholars. We made some initial stabs in this direction at the Bob Steele Reading Center, notwithstanding the ever-distant gap between the vision and the reality in which the quest for the ideal helped give shape to the actuality of what we became.

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