Educational Research and Policy-Making. Questions, Challenges and Perspectives for a Pedagogical Debate

Throughout the world countries agree that education is a key matter to responding today’s challenges concerning societies, cultures, economies, health and progress. Our lifetime, even defined “postmodernity”, characterized by wider and wider globalization, referred not only to economic systems but also to technological, sociocultural, political, and biological factors, is involved in an uncontrolled and unstoppable process of continuing and faster changes. In the first part, G. Aleandri deepens shared education policies and reforms towards lifelong learning and education. Education is essential both for individuals and for socio-economic well-being of countries: it provides knowledge, competencies and skills, essential to participate effectively and to cooperate together in society and to contribute to the growth of economic, scientific and cultural knowledge. OECD (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development) countries agree that is important to know how efficiently each education policy is adapting to new global challenges and issues. Reform in education is a key question in most countries, but it is important to verify if education reforms actually renew policies, practices and outcomes. The international indicators by OECD offer a comparative framework for analysis, useful for education policies to improve quality in the educational offer. The data analyses show that human capital is one of the most important factors for all countries growth. Aleandri chose some international indicators enclosed in each survey since Education at a Glance 2006 (EAG 2006) till Education at a Glance 2009 (EAG 2009), so we can analyze some data of the same indicator across four years. The hope is that more and more kinds of cooperation and partnership among policy makers, pedagogists and education researchers will be promoted, as well as networking among school institutions, universities, other learning organizations, all stake-holders and private companies too, so to make more shared and finally both contemplated and democratic choices and decisions. In the second part, L. Girotti considers the complex relationship between research and policies through a pedagogical approach. In fact, this partnership/cooperation needs serious reflection and deep investigation by educational research about related questions and challenges. The pedagogical/educational research can benefit from the relationship with public policies not so much in terms of gaining recognition and/or cultural-political influence but because this relation calls for ethical, scientific and methodological challenges that may help to explain its goals, perspectives and contributions. L. Girotti recognizes this contribution in term of resources to validate the experiences of guidance in school, to sustain the guidance function of education/school system, to formulate public policies for guidance. The aim of this article is to draw attention on this last aspect for stressing pedagogical debate on some research perspectives.