It is acknowledged that EA professors face contradictory expectations: they are
members of an intellectual community that promotes “scholarly activity” and yet they are
supposed to prepare practitioners who value a practice-oriented knowledge base (Mayo
et al., 2006). The “neo-liberal” political and economical climate further exacerbates this
conflict, as it requires EA professors to generate applied knowledge aimed at improving
the practice and informing the work of practitioners, while the current academic culture
impels them to take a more critical view of educational “reality” (Gunter, 2002).