Kezar, Peter Eckel
Description
As higher education has emerged as a recognized professional field, tensions have continued to grow around the competing demands of theory, research,
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and practice. Researchers and practitioners rarely contribute to each other's understanding and instead operate on parallel tracks, missing key opportunities to capitalize on each other's diverse perspectives, insights, and different ways of knowing. In this issue the chapter authors-both researchers and practitioners-explore, reframe, and offer solutions for moving beyond the research-practice gap. The contributors identify the forces that perpetuate the gap, such as the socialization and tenure process among faculty, and offer ways for altering the relationship between scholars and practitioners. They provide a wide range of suggestions for overcoming the research-practice dichotomy, such as creating a learning community that involves all the stakeholders-policymakers, faculty, administrators, and academic leaders-and using campus reading groups to help practitioners engage with scholarship. They also include numerous examples of currentefforts that have already begun to bridge the gap, outlining, for instance, how national organizations can serve as change agents to advance higher education thinking and application.
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