Practical Wisdom in the Service of Professional Practice

he work of both scholarship and practice progresses as a consequence of dialogue, debate, and exchange. I am T grateful to Rodney Evans ("Existing Practice Is Not the Template," this issue of Educational Researcher [ER], pp. 553-559) for his comments on an earlier ER article that I cowrote with three colleagues at The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching (Shulman, Golde, Bueschel, & Garabedian, 2006, "Reclaiming Education's Doctorates: A Critique and a Proposal").' It is gratifying that Evans took our work seriously enough to prepare a carefully argued and passionate critique of our proposals for reclaiming the education doctorate. When the dust settles, I anticipate it will be clear that we agree far more than we disagree. Much of our apparent disagreement is a consequence of our uses of language, our backgrounds, and the sources we regularly use. I am also grateful to the editors of ER for encouraging this exchange of ideas and proposals. Evans's critique is based largely on a misreading or misrepresentation of our argument, its rationale, and associated proposals. The critique employs a familiar set of rhetorical devices. It begins by summarizing the essence of the earlier argument in terms that are readily attacked, by transforming the original set of ideas into their caricature. This is an important move, not only because it sets up the critique so beautifully. It is quite possible that the misreading at the heart of the caricature is one that other readers (and our critic, as well) might indeed have made, and thus it is useful to have the caricature before us so we can clarify and elaborate the original argument rather than merely attempt to refute the criticism.