This article borrows an analogy from Michael Cole’s Cultural Psychology: A Once and Future Discipline. A man loses his car keys and searches unsuccessfully for them only in the area illuminated by the streetlight. Cole urged psychology to study thought by illuminating human activity in cultural and historical context. Lanier and Shulman similarly urged the study of teaching as multidisciplinary research. An applied field, our research is responsive to problems of practice. However, when these problems are framed rhetorically as crises, we are apt to respond to their urgency by seeking simplicity, authority, and order in our research. Paradoxically, this move reduces the sources of light diverse research traditions and genres can offer. We should resist (a) pitting approaches to research against one another, (b) privileging approaches merely because they are compatible with the language of policy, (c) accepting uncritically any approach to research, and (d) disregarding research emphasizing local knowledge.
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