Abstract

Abebe A. T

For many years, university based educational research has been blamed for being dominated by
positivistic research tradition at the near exclusion of field based ethnographic work. Several findings
have also portrayed this domination among the major explanations for practitioners’ lack of interest in
educational research literature. With the recent popularity of qualitative work in the educational
research parlance, the question however remains whether a paradigm shift from positivistic research
tradition to ethnographic and field based approach brings the interest among practitioners to turn to
research literature. On the basis of data from both practitioners and researchers, this study argues that
while most ethnographic studies “approximate” the “narrative” experiences of public school teachers
much better than quantitative works, the available ethnographic studies either suffer from the same
norm that distances the university based positivistic researchers from practitioners or fall in the traps
of institutional and organizational factors that have remained so resilient in bridging the gap between
the world of research and practice in education.