Educational Research and Educational Policy in Dialogue - Learning Processes and Irritations

This contribution interprets the dialogue between educational research and educational policy since 1990 as communication between systems of different logic of action (power vs. truth) and of different time patterns and social modes, and it discusses how understanding has though become possible. Therefore it (i) identifies an emergent, at the same time stable and elusive form of communication and (ii) consensus in the theoretical modeling of the common issue, which are attractive for both actors, because they open knowledge production, cooperation and autonomous practice simultaneously, but (iii) without allowing total control about the communication outcomes. This leads likewise to mutual success, productive learning processes and irritations, just as educational research acts necessarily as "generator of discontent" that cannot serve - for systematic reasons - political expectations of immediate and practically relevant results, despite of all rhetoric about evidence. The current effect is not coincidentally sobriety with regard to the mutual expectations.