On Research

I got out of my office for a short break while working on my thesis yesterday and just wandered the building to stretch my legs a bit. As I walked past some offices on the third floor, I stopped to read a little piece of paper that was taped to one of the doors. It read something like this:

If you understand it and can prove it, submit it to a math journal.
If you understand it but can't prove it, submit it to a physics journal.
If you don't understand it but can prove it, submit it to an economics journal.
If you don't understand it and can't prove it, submit it to a psychology journal.
If if attempts to make something important out of something trivial, submit it to a journal of education.
If if attempts to make something trivial out of something important, submit it to a journal of philosophy.

I chuckled when I read it, but I have to admit that I was also just a little bothered, particularly by the second-to-last line. And what bothered me in particular was the reason that the line rubbed me wrong. Now, my field of study is an oft-misunderstood field, and I often find myself trying to either explain or defend the kinds of things that go on in my field. There is at least one hugely popular (and hopelessly ignorant) website devoted to trying to crush our efforts to implement what we have learned in years of careful research and dialogue. So I am used to being misunderstood and misinterpreted, and part of me says that if someone thinks that the broader field of education that I am a part of is devoted to trying to find importance in what is actually quite trivial, it's really just because they don't understand what we do.

But what bothered me was not the misunderstanding. Rather, it was that I almost laughed aloud when I read the statement and thought, "How true it is!" and then suddenly had to confront the fact that I was agreeing with this perception of the field of educational research.

Okay, I'll say right here that I think there's a lot of really good, significant research out there in the field of education, and in my own, related field of study. I really do, otherwise I wouldn't be here, wouldn't be planning on pursuing a doctorate and quite possibly spending my life involved in the research (although it's the teaching that I'm most drawn to). It's just that sometimes I wonder if in our thirst for understanding something so complex we overreach and go far beyond anything practical.

This wouldn't be such a problem for me if we actually admitted it. The problem is that we are such an idealistically practical field (we want to change what happens in the classroom, help students learn and teachers teach and improve all of society in the process) that we make sure to show how everything we do has practical repercussions, maybe even to the point of forcing the practicality when it isn't really there.

I feel this way about my thesis research more often than not. I read and think and analyze data and draw conclusions, and in the end I think my conclusions are interesting, but I don't know that they are really that important or helpful. I began with a very grounded goal - I had tried something in all the classes I had ever taught and had run into problems every time, and I wanted to better understand where those problems came from. And to be honest, after spending a year and a half with this project, I really do have a better understanding of why I had such difficulty implementing this idea in my classes, and I do a much better job of it now, and I am better able to recognize what isn't working and to try to think about what might help. But it feels like this practical realization of my goal came indirectly, rather than directly, from my research. I keep feeling like my actual research is pretty trivial. Not everyone thinks this. My committee doesn't think it's trivial. My advisor wants me to pull something publishable out of my finished product. But this doesn't make me feel better - instead it makes me doubt the way that the value of research is judged in my field.

I don't always feel this way. Like I said, I think some very worthwhile stuff has come out of my field, especially in recent years. And sometimes I do feel good about my thesis. Occasionally I will tell someone what I am researching and they will smile and say, "Oh, that's interesting," in such a way that I know they don't think it's interesting. But sometimes I will tell someone about what I am researching and they will get excited and tell me (genuinely) how interesting it is and how usually when they see the titles of theses or hear someone talk about their thesis topic they think, "why is that really important?" but here I am doing something that is actually going to be useful to someone. And then I feel good because maybe what I am doing is interesting and useful to people outside my field, that maybe I'm not just trying to convince myself that it is.