Politicized Trust: Theorizing a Critical Component of University-Community-School Partnerships

• In Event: School and Community Partnerships as Geographies of Opportunity

Abstract

This paper describes a university-school-community partnership that involved university researchers, a district office, and a community-based program that sought to both improve Black male students’ connection to their schools, and to provide learning spaces that aligned with students’ cultural and political ways of being and knowing. Exploring the initiation and growth of this partnership over several years provides insight into the critical ingredients to make such partnerships optimally reciprocal and productive, in the service of supporting young people. More specifically, we focus on how race and power mediate relationships between researchers and communities in ways that significantly shape the process of research.

With a fundamental commitment to improving both theory and practice, design-based research (DBR) has the potential to substantively improve the quality of educational experiences made available to students from historically non-dominant communities. With origins in the work of Brown (1992) and Collins (1992), DBR aims to create interventions that promote learning and contribute to theoretical knowledge on cognition and learning, by iterating cycles of design, examination, and redesign Cobb, Confrey, diSessa, Lehrer, & Schauble, 2003). In traditional DBR, not much attention has been given to the ways that race plays out in the relationships between researchers and school and community partners, nor to the ways that community membership and geography may mediate the nature of partnerships. Equity-oriented researchers have challenged the field to expand the purposes of design research (e.g., beyond narrowly defined notions of disciplinary learning) and have problematized the “how” of design research to scrutinize what are often hierarchical relationships between researchers and participants (Bang & Medin, 2010; Engestrom, 2011; Gutierrez & Vossoughi, 2010). However, analyses of race and power in the process of establishing and maintaining partnerships are rare.

In this paper, we reflect on one partnership between researchers at UC Berkeley, the Oakland Unified School District, and the Office of African American Achievement to explore the ways that race, community, and geography played out in the establishment and development of the partnership. We found that the establishing and maintaining of trust was fundamental to the research endeavor and, moreover, was a key site of racialization. We describe how politicized trust was established, contested, and sustained between researchers and research participants, beginning with the premise that establishing trust with community partners, especially in communities that serve students from non-dominant groups, requires not only a personal working relationship but also a political or racial solidarity. In this case, politicized trust was assumed given prior interactions between the African American researchers and African American community members and was iteratively re-accomplished in ways that shifted traditional university–community power asymmetries and created new pathways for research and collaboration. We highlight the ongoing fragility and negotiation of race and power dynamics between the researchers and the researched (especially salient given the history of abuses in such relationships), as politicized trust was established and maintained. (475)

Authors

• Na'ilah Suad Nasir, Spencer Foundation

• Sepehr Vakil, University of Texas - Austin