Linking research and practice: The variety of approaches

Andrew Morris, Co-founder, Learning and Skills Research Network, UK From nursing care to environmental action, important advances flow when research interacts with practice. As readers of this journal are aware, it’s increasingly the case in education as well. By combining knowledge from rigorous studies with that from practitioner experience, new ideas, better methods and more effective tools are emerging. Working out how best to combine these disparate realms has been the subject of experimentation and discovery by many players over recent decades. In this article, I outline a variety of approaches adopted in initiatives with which I have been involved. It is a personal perspective, rather than a systematic overview; the aim is to demonstrate just how varied are the means available. Practitioner – academic collaboration As a physics teacher and manager in colleges in the 1980s, I was keen to learn from – and contribute to – research about teaching and the curriculum. A cha