Advancing Inclusive Education Systems by Connecting Stakeholders to Spark Community-Engaged Research and Catalyze Innovation

• In Event: 29.030 - Advancing Educational Opportunities Through Inclusive Education: Community-Based Research in Special Education

Abstract

Objective
The Wisconsin Collaborative Education Research Network (the Network) builds relationships among researchers, leaders, educators, and community members to collaboratively innovate, advance, and transform education through research, policy development, classroom practice, and community engagement. The role of the Network is not to engage in research but rather to facilitate the relationships between schools and universities. This paper presents an overview of this critical yet often invisible aspect of community-based research.

Methods and Data Sources
The Network represents a partnership between the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Education, the Wisconsin Center for Education Research, and the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction. Through this partnership, the Network facilitates research with the students and communities whose lives are impacted by multiple cultural trajectories, and advances education opportunities for historically marginalized youth
The Network brings knowledge and action together through three Network initiatives to enact their mission:
• NetworkED Events convene innovators from across public and private domains to collaborate on some of the most pressing challenges facing public education. In the past year, the Network has hosted NetworkEd Events on bridging the opportunity gap, envisioning the future of public education, and envisioning the future of special education. Future events are determined based on topics that emerge from education stakeholders as critical challenges in education. This in turn facilitates research grounded in the issues facing local schools.
• The NetworkED site (wcernetwork.org) is an education resource that allows researchers, teachers, and community members to browse where the promising ideas, innovative people and influential programs are situated all across the world to build social capital by connecting with each other.
• The Network Fellows Program supports knowledge to action by connecting graduate students from across University of Wisconsin-Madison with education stakeholders to collectively engage in problem formulation, research question development, data collection, analysis, and policy development. Fellows not only bring to bear university research and knowledge in service to the public good, but also by developing multi-tier systems of support with school and community members. Moreover, by engaging graduate students in CBR and policy development, we are reframing and disrupting the research-to-practice gap by directly engaging our future scholars with education stakeholders to collaboratively examine pressing issues and solve complex societal problems.

Results and Significance
Through these initiatives the Network one outcome that has specifically supported CBR was facilitating collaboration between an urban school district and special education faculty and graduate students to provide a comprehensive review of special education literature that informed the district’s special education improvement plan. In this vein, the Networks helps bring researchers and schools together, facilitates the relationships, and supports researchers in understanding local problems through the perspectives of local education stakeholders.

One of the key lessons learned through this work is the cumulative value of high-quality interpersonal interactions. This is an example of the Network’s ability to maximize social capital, knowledge and resources to address the complex and daunting realities facing our public schools and their communities.

Author

• Jack C. Jorgensen, University of Wisconsin - Madison