Comments on Bulterman-Bos: The Dysfunctional Pursuit of Relevance in Education Research

Abstract

Responding to Bulterman-Bos (2008), the author argues that the effort to make education research more relevant is counterproductive. Teachers and researchers have different orientations toward education that arise from different institutional settings, occupational constraints, daily work demands, and professional incentives. These are not dysfunctional differences to be resolved by creating the proposed composite role of the clinical researcher but useful alternative perspectives, with each providing what the other is lacking. Relevance is a tricky quality to define because it is easier to recognize in retrospect than in prospect, and efforts to make research more relevant can make it useless or misleading. Scholarly work that neither arises from a quest for relevance nor demonstrates any particular utility at the time it is carried out may turn out to be highly useful at a later time and in a different place.