Boundary-Spanning Roles and Practices of Graduate Students in Educational Partnerships

• In Event: Advancing Research-Practice Partnerships: Leveraging the Positionality of Graduate Student Researchers

Abstract

Purpose:

To sustain research-practice partnerships (RPPs), actors must navigate cultural and organizational differences across contextual boundaries to establish norms and routines (Penuel et al., 2015). Although graduate students often work closely with practitioners in RPP initiatives, their roles as boundary spanners have not yet been conceptualized. This project characterizes boundary practices from a graduate student perspective by investigating two research questions: How do different contexts of a research-practice partnership shape graduate students’ roles and boundary practices? What tensions might graduate students face when navigating boundaries?

Theoretical Framework:

In recent years, the sociocultural concept of boundaries has been applied to educational partnerships. Boundary spanning refers to a person’s interactions in spaces where they unfamiliar and unqualified (Suchman, 1994). Recognition of differences across boundaries is necessary for constructing routinized practices that enable joint work in RPPs (Penuel et al., 2015). This collaborative process creates opportunities for stakeholders to learn and improve (Akkerman and Bakker, 2011). Attention to boundaries highlights why RPPs are more appropriate and effective than approaches that seek to translate research into practice (Penuel et al., 2015).

Graduate students are often on the front lines of partnerships, carrying out research and facilitating practices in multiple contexts. A number of boundary spanning roles have been conceptualized (Weerts & Sandmann, 2010), but graduate students may not have the skills, confidence, or legitimacy to fulfill all expected functions. Conversely, graduate students may have technical or social affordances that position them to perform boundary spanning tasks better than other stakeholders. The structure and effectiveness of a partnership depends on the capacity of graduate students to navigate boundaries.

Methods and Data Sources:

Study Context. The present study is based on a RPP with a STEM-focused charter school in southern California. The school primarily serves low-income Latinx youth. The RPP is based on a research alliance model that is subsumed within a larger networked improvement community.

Data Sources. Meeting notes, agendas, artifacts, and field notes from the author’s communication with a variety of stakeholders were collected over the past two and a half years.

Analytic Strategy. Ethnographic participant observation and a combination of content and narrative analyses were employed to process the data.

Findings:

Role Dimensions. The author identified multiple contexts within the school site and the university, each with separate norms that required different roles and boundary practices. Five dimensions emerged as determinants of the author’s role as a graduate student in each context: power/agency, tasks/expectations, values, resources, and personality.

Tensions. Tensions emerged in each of the role dimensions, originating from differences in perspectives between actors in the partnership. The functions of the RPP were dependent on the author’s framing of his own role and the author’s ability to mediate differences between actors in the partnership.

Significance:

The present study proposes a tentative framework for graduate students’ boundary practices and roles in educational partnerships. Explicit attention to boundary spanning roles of graduate students can increase the effectiveness of RPP initiatives, cultivate scholars capable of partnership work, and advance understanding of boundary crossing in RPPs.

Author

• Christopher Wegemer, University of California - Los Angeles