ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses on a way of celebrating conversations and opportunities, by paying close attention to, doubting, questioning and critiquing various ways of articulating the relationships between the aims and claims of educational research. Richard Pring's point is about the substance of research and the political use of its results to shape practice, but it could equally be applied to issues of design, methodology and more widely to the politics of research. The chapter focuses on research practice is subject to reflection and scrutiny, aims for research that are purely instrumentally connected to objectives, targets and means are neither straightforward to stipulate nor easy to defend. It remind readers only that the pursuit of any kind of research aim is fraught with philosophical and practical difficulties, but that the articulation and discussion of difficulties are far from common practice in the reporting of empirical educational research.
