Speed on the Latest Developments

¶ … speed on the latest developments in the field. From there, the researcher must narrow down a research topic and select a research question that adds to the current body of study. At that point, the research is conducted and the findings analyzed. The University of Hong Kong's (2012) write-up on the subject notes that the processes of creation, research and writing are difficult to separate.

As a scholar, the reason that the processes are impossible to separate is self-evident. The point of scholarship is to advance one' learning, and the works that are produced are intended to be holistic studies, fully integrated examples. A scholar should not, mentally, separate this processes. The writing aspect of research is critical because knowledge is not particularly useful if it cannot be adequately communicated.

The research process is essential to learning because it provides an accepted framework for finding and disseminating knowledge. Working outside of the accepted research framework of modern academia invalids the content of your work, so you need to ensure that to be considered a scholar in the modern age that you follow the creation and writing process of modern research. The process guides you from the point where you first begin to understand what other people have written, to where you might be able to draw a conclusion of your very own.

Writing for research using this framework identifies your status as a scholar. Thus, understanding this process is critical for the validation of your work. The choice of words and diction must conform with modern standards of impartiality and modern standards of citations as well. Writing for research emphasizes citations, such that as many as you can fit on the page to support your ideas makes you a better scholar. There may come a point when you are allowed to have your own thoughts but initially attribution of ideas is important.

In addition to learning about your role in academia by way of becoming expert on the prescribed process of creation and writing for research, you also learn how to learn. For most scholars when they arrive at a doctoral program, they have no idea how to learn, and following the research and academic process corrects that deficiency. One undertakes rigorous study of his or her field as part of this process. This study is critical, because it helps to avoid duplication (studying things that have already been studied by others) and guides the scholar to new areas of learning, so that the scholar can contribute to the body of knowledge in a meaningful way.

Having studied the process, I think that it is valuable. When we have a means of learning and scholarship that has been established as the one true way of learning, we need to take heed of that, trust that people who decided that are inherently correct, and follow the path they have set out. When you work through the process of creating academic works, you learn a lot about your field of study, and the objective is to become something of an expert. Over time, the scholar begins to make his or her own contributions to the body of knowledge, following on the lead of others and working with the current knowledge in the field.

The concept of the scholar-practitioner is an interesting one. Traditional scholarship reflects a method of learning that focuses entirely on books and journals. The scholar-practitioner concept places value on personal experience outside of the ivory tower. By synthesizing the expert knowledge in journals with one's own practical experience, the scholar-practitioner can gain insights that scholarship alone, without practical experience, cannot gain.

I think for myself the scholar-practitioner concept has a lot of merit. There is a role for real world learning. While one cannot run a regression analysis on personal experience, no doubt to the confusion of many modern scholars, personal experience provides a unique filter by which to understand the concepts presented in the scholarship side. I would suspect that any one scholar-practitioner might only carry biases from their experience, but if many are put together, their collective experience should reduce that bias, eliminating all but the most evident of truths that people can realize through the synthesis of academic scholarship and real world pragmatism.