Mending the Research-Policy-Practice Gap: Conceptualising Research as Social Change in Education

There is a widely acknowledged gap between research, policy, and practice owing to a lack of capacity to translate and mobilise research results to end-users including policymakers, practitioners, and community members. Acknowledging the divide amongst researchers, policymakers, and practitioners, this conceptual paper seeks to address the following: How do we devise ways to strengthen the research-policy-practice nexus in the education landscape such that research institutions can better attend to the needs of policymakers and practitioners? How can we facilitate greater interaction among researchers, policymakers, practitioners, and other stakeholders to create a common understanding of the challenges, needs, and what works for all stakeholders? To do this, we propose a new approach that employs research as a mechanism for social change and uses the consciousness of the self as a resource for research. More specifically, we develop a framework that facilitates the conditions for the mutual understanding of norms, operational roles, academic rigour, and policy and practice outcomes among all stakeholders. Additionally, this framework seeks to foster increased inter-stakeholder conversations and dialogues to narrow the divide between researchers and policymakers and, correspondingly, improve policy translations from academic research.