The gap between research and reality: teachers' voice

To be effective and valuable, educational research should be rooted in practice. After all, the reason for conducting such research is to find the truth of experience. However, the research aim must not only be to understand the educational reality but to determine how to improve it. Thus, it follows that a good researcher is one who develops knowledge that is useful to the community – something that improves the quality of people’s lives. However, there is often no relationship between the fieldwork in education and the educational practice. This can create a gap between the research and the reality, undermining the effectiveness of the research – or worse, rendering it useless – for those working in educational contexts. While this issue is discussed in the literature, it rarely starts with the lived experiences of teachers. To bring out their voices, we set out to conduct explorative research with the aim of verifying if practitioners working in educational settings feel this gap between the research and the reality.