Cautious Collaboration to Perfect Partnership: An Account of a Successful Stakeholder-Academic Engagement

• In Event: Researcher-Practitioner Partnerships for Developing and Assessing Informal STEM Learning Experiences

Abstract

Aim & Perspectives: Research supports a strong connection between embodied activity and cognition (e.g., Glenberg, 2010; Barsolou, 2008), particularly around science ideas (Goldin-Meadow & Beilock, 2010). Informal settings like science museums are in a strong position to contribute to this field by providing opportunities for learning through physically interactive science exhibits (Haden, 2010). This poster highlights how successful and active collaboration of stakeholder parties (in this case science museum practitioners) and academics contributed towards understanding the role of embodied interaction in young children’s learning about science in informal settings, which enabled the co-design of an embodied interaction tool and exhibit that assesses and supports embodied learning processes. We therefore adopt an embodied theoretical perspective (Lakoff & Nunez, 2000).
We suggest that although academics and practitioners often collaborate, the pursuit of academic goals can limit the real-world impact of collaboration because stakeholders were not fully engaged across the process of design, were not part of the process to develop practical solutions, or where academics failed to consider the stakeholder appetite or practicalities of implementation (Maloney & Hill, 2016). There are several reasons for strengthening practitioner-academic collaboration including: greater opportunities for translating research into practice, increased engagement and uptake from practitioners, generating a lasting research legacy for academics particularly when efforts are made to make research outputs accessible, increased capacity of academics to identify where their work has most value, and inform more ecologically valid theory.

Mode of Inquiry & Evidence: We describe the challenges experienced throughout a collaboration between an inner-city science centre and university in conducting research with pre-school children and illustrate how reflective practice allowed us to examine our expertise, identify gaps in our knowledge, address these through collaboration, and generate a greater sense of successful research. We describe the journey we took from initially adopting more traditional roles--researchers designing and implementing the study; practitioners managing the logistics of fieldwork in the science centre environment (including keeping children engaged), toward a much more integrated collaboration using a design-based research process (Barab & Squire, 2004) where an intervention was co-created as a solution to a problem that was then iteratively analysed and re-designed. Success of our project is attributed to our collaborative process; we observed interactions in the science centre and actively shared experiences, developed study design iteratively, swapped roles, organized joint knowledge-exchange activities and immersed ourselves in our partners’ organisations.

Results & Significance: Our paper presents details of these examples and shares analysis that identifies five key characteristics leading to successful collaboration between practitioners and academics: proximity; willingness to learn, listen and adapt; frequent communication; mutual accountability; and shared understanding of goals. We will share how these characteristics led to introspective reflection about areas of expertise (and lack of) which laid the foundation for moving forward in research co-design evidenced by the development of a practitioner assessment tool and a new embodied science exhibit. We will conclude by presenting working guidelines for practice for academics and practitioners alike who wish to engage in collaborative research to advance our understanding of informal science learning.

Authors

• Zayba Ghazali-Mohammed, University of Edinburgh

• Susan Meikleham, Glasgow Science Centre

• Sharon Macnab, Glasgow Science Centre

• Andrew Manches, University of Edinburgh