Resumo

ALMEIDA, Maria Isabel de. Social reality and challenges in educational research: reflexions about our path. Psicol. educ. [online]. 2010, n.31, pp.35-43. ISSN 1414-6975.

The propose of this communication is to discuss the centrality of educational research, its public dimension and the articulation between academic world and social surroundings. It recalls the path lived by Brazilian educational research from its beginning in the 1930's with INEP creation, until the fist decade of 21st century, when the existence of 104 post-graduation programs in education holds most of the knowledge production about education nowadays. During these past eight decades, the educational research reached a certain level, where can be outlined: the dedication to studies referring to the constitutive elements of educational public systems; the pursuit for understanding educational phenomena in their sociohistorical complexity; the effort to aim at possibilities, ways or tracks that can contribute to improve educational quality and scholar performance; the pursuit for collective production studies conducted by institutional or inter-institutional research groups; the researchers' organizations roles such as ANPED e a ANPAE, of events like ENDIPEs, and of CAPES as a quality certifier of formation of boards and area production. Can also be high lightened some weaknesses and problems that equally mark the field of educational research: the growth of research volume without the necessary expansion correspondence of financial resources, infra-structure, number of advisors; the charges made by productive control and by administrative duties; the incitement on wrangling about financial resources; the slow decrease of time for conducting researches; the insufficient number of scholarships; the absence of actions toward pedagogic formation in most post-graduation programs, action that despises the fact that these post-grad students will execute, in most cases, teaching actions on future employer institutions.

Palavras-chave : Brazilian educational research; post-graduation in education; study conditions and research in education.