educational experience as received, and its consequences. Taken as a whole, TLRP
may well provide a vehicle for this type of analysis and provide an evidence-base for
it. We might eventually, as a result, produce more secure educational policy, more
fulfilled, confident and flexible learners (and teachers) and also, higher standards.
Such thinking could, of course, tap the developmental narratives of life which remain
strong within popular culture, and thus make possible some exciting engagements
with the media. A significant achievement of the Programme would thus be to have
contributed to the development of more sophisticated ways of thinking about
learning, teaching and the sequence of institutions that support them.
A second reason for suggesting that the Programme should consider a lifecourse
meta-analysis relates to other developments. At the time TLRP finally reports,
research on the human genome and in the field of neuro-science is likely to be even
more prominent than it is today. Irrespective of the qualified findings and analyses
that we may expect from researchers in these fields, there is a considerable risk that
such work will be interpreted as demonstrating fixed characteristics and abilities. It is
therefore extremely important that the work being done in these fields is
complemented by clear and accessible accounts of social and educational factors in
human development - of agency, adaption and growth.
Will anyone really take any notice? User engagement
Practitioners, policy-makers and the public are quite used to making decisions
without significant reference to educational research. In preference, they often draw
on folk-theory, hunch or intuition. Indeed, it seems that everyone’s personal
educational experience, in a sense, warrants their educational opinions in later life.
However, this is clearly a weak position and there is wide-spread acceptance of the
idea that policy and practice should be evidence-informed. The modernist rationality
of our times thus still holds the door open for educational researchers - but, at the
same time, there is a ready relapse to hunch or pragmatism if research findings or
recommendations jar.
Researchers thus have a very difficult job in both communicating and disseminating
findings to maximise impact. To be convincing, to claim authority, we have to
demonstrate both the relevance and quality of our work. As Charles Desforges often
argued, we must try to operate in Pasteur’s quadrant - to provide use-inspired, basic,
high-quality research.
This is the rationale for the authentic engagement of research users at every stage of
the research process, from the conceptualisation of key research issues onwards.
Relevance and validity should be enhanced thereby, though technical matters of
research design, data collection and analysis will of course draw on the unique
expertise of research teams. At the point of evaluation of the work and consideration
of its application, the goodwill and expertise of user partners is again essential. At
best, projects need user ‘champions’ who, having participated in or advised on the
work throughout, can lend credibility to the outcomes and offer promotional
infrastructures for dissemination.
One way of expressing this is to say that we should aim to transform research
knowledge into accessible forms, to present it in ways that enables users to
appropriate it, and then to ‘give it away’. We cannot sustain it. It must become