Windows of Possibility: Perspectives on the Construction of Educational Researchers

Within the field of education, a major aim of doctoral preparation, postdoctoral training, and the early years of the professorial career is to learn to conduct research and to position oneself as a competent and contributing educational researcher. These tasks are inherently social in that they take place in the context of communities of research. They are also psychological in that they involve changes in the hearts and minds of those seeking to make research a recurring activity in their lives. Learning research and constructing the self as an educational researcher are careerlong tasks that typically are launched during doctoral study. Even more important than these activities, however, is learning how to learn as the vividness of graduate school fades with time and new challenges. Learning both about how to enact educational research and how to keep learning research throughout one's career will shape the quality of that career and, thus, the quality of one's contribution to educational research. Given escalating calls for the improvement of educational research (Shavelson & Towne, 2002), we can think of no more important undertaking for education and educational research than helping beginning educational researchers to make good choices about how to learn about educational research throughout their future years (Argyris & Schon, 1978).

AUTHOR'S NOTE: The research reported in this chapter was made possible by a grant from the Spencer Foundation. The data presented, the statements made, and the views expressed are solely the responsibility of the authors. Our thanks go to Matthew Prentice for contributions to the framing of these ideas, to section editors King Beach and Betsy Becker for thoughtful comments, and to the Spencer Foundation for project support.

The enormity of this project—learning to engage within multiple professional communities, rethinking what and how one knows, connecting one's personal values and intellectual [Page 430]aims, and learning to do this not just once and for all but also throughout the length of a career—broaches the question of how entrants to the field learn research and become researchers. What can doctoral study provide these individuals to help them scale the task that lies before them, not just through coursework, qualifying exams, and their dissertations but also well beyond? What can beginning educational researchers learn—about their work, themselves, and their communities—that they will keep, for further development and change, throughout their future careers? This chapter grows from the assumption that in its historic and current form, doctoral study in the field of education addresses the task at hand partially and sometimes superficially. Yet this criticism is not new. Even scholars who have led the construction of educational research as a field of professional and intellectual endeavor have questioned the quality of research and the value of the knowledge it yields. Speaking for the National Academy of Education more than three decades ago, Cronbach and Suppes (1969) wrote,