In this article, the authors begin with a look back at the emergence of English education in the social and political context of the United States as a nation, situating the development of the research-practice divide narrative in debates concerning the nature and purpose of English as secondary-school subject in changing times. The authors turn next to researchers' efforts to provide generative implications for classroom practice as they have widened the scope of their inquiries to situate individual learners in an expanding array of contexts--and ultimately challenged not only the field's traditional focus on language as the prime mode of representation but also its early preoccupation with national identity. As notions of "context" are destabilized by the globalized, digitalized environments of a new century, the time is right for rethinking as well traditional conceptions of the separation of research and practice. Beyond considering the robust implications of research to date, they look to recent efforts to bring the work of research and teaching together in ways that not only offer profound integration but also begin to dissolve altogether the distinction between the work of English educators in the secondary classroom and the academy. Finally, they close by calling on the field to develop more generative theoretic frameworks to enhance everyone's understandings of how research can and does inform practice and to explore how varied research traditions might more explicitly inform one another in moving them toward richer understandings of literacy teaching and learning. (Contains 1 note.)