Strategies for Centering Social Justice Values in Research-Practice Partnerships (Poster 7)

• In Event: Rising Education Scholars Interrogating Research-Practice Partnerships in Pursuit of Truth and Justice

Abstract

Research-practice partnerships (RPPs) have emerged as an effective approach to address issues of educational equity by working collaboratively with educational practitioners to undertake projects of mutual interest (e.g. Penuel, 2017; Potter et al., 2021). However, equity in research processes is necessary for achieving equity in research outcomes in RPPs (Denner et al., 2019). Drawing from a long-term partnership with a local school, we aim to advance justice-oriented RPP strategies by examining the development of relationships between researchers and practitioners.
A growing sub-field within RPPs focuses on equitable processes (Tanskley & Estrada, 2022), paralleling community-based participatory research (CBPR) literature that centers social justice values in research (Israel et al., 1998). Building on recent scholarship that advances professional norms of community-based research (Campano et al., 2015), our work seeks to merge extant RPP and CBPR literatures. Specifically, we combine CBPR literature’s focus on social justice values (e.g., Israel et al., 1998) with the RPP field’s implementation tools (e.g., Henrick et al., 2017).
Our research utilized a case study of a four-year partnership between a university and a Title 1 middle school. Employing a grounded ethnographic approach (Eriksson et al., 2012), we drew from researcher reflections and auto-ethnographic memos to develop five themes (“relational principles”) representing intentional strategies for equitable relationship cultivation and infrastructure development, rooted in social justice values.
We found that the five relational principles we enacted within our partnership corresponded to the following adages: “don’t assume neutrality,” “recognize the means create the ends,” “move at the speed of trust,” “broaden ideas of benefit,” and “strive for responsiveness, not perfection.” In not assuming neutrality, we adopted an epistemological perspective that attended to the histories of harm many communities suffered at the hands of researchers (Tuck, 2009), in contrast to positivist notions that situate research neutrally (Tuck & Guishard, 2013). By recognizing that the means create the ends, we developed inclusive norms that prioritized equity in not just what we researched but how we researched (Denner et al., 2019), framing relational equity as an outcome itself. Through moving at the speed of trust, building mutual trust was not only a means to accomplishing our research goals, but a necessary quality of our justice-oriented partnership that positioned community members as holders of knowledge and power (Tuck & Guishard, 2013). In broadening ideas of benefit, we developed collective understanding of the benefits of research with our partners, through transparent conversations about needs, desires, and tradeoffs when approaching new research projects. Lastly, to strive for responsiveness and not perfection, we conceptualized the adoption of social justice principles not as a goal, but as a process that helped us continuously cultivate a critical orientation towards ourselves as researchers.
Our study builds on recent research (Denner et al., 2019; Tanskley & Estrada, 2022) to advance RPP strategies that foreground equitable processes. Together, our five principles showcase the potential for synthesizing value-driven CBPR approaches with practice-oriented tools from the RPP field to facilitate educational partnerships that center social justice.

Authors

• Jennifer R. Renick, University of Memphis
  Presenting Author

• Christopher Wegemer, University of California - Los Angeles
  Presenting Author