Exploring Center Affiliation in an International Research-Practice Partnership

• In Event: Transforming the Future of Educational Research: RISE Caribbean

Abstract

Though most federally funded centers programs require that centers be composed of faculty from multiple universities, presumably to facilitate collaboration across institutions of higher learning, it has been found that affiliation does not necessarily increase the time allocated to working on research with faculty at other universities. Rather the productive intentions result in “add on” duties. While center affiliated faculty may spend significantly more research time working with researchers in their immediate work groups, with researchers at the same university, and also with researchers in U.S. industry, the effort intentions in the aforementioned implied that center management (usually the principal investigators for the center) have failed to coordinate adequately researchers who are not co-located or, more pessimistically, that the lead investigators have no intention of collaborating outside their own university, at least not extensively enough to alter their reported time allocations. As such, potential oversight can be deployed by centers’ programs regarding the potential benefits that may result from the diversity of stakeholders to which researchers are exposed by the way of center affiliation. Notwithstanding, center affiliated researchers have a significantly higher ranking on the cosmopolitan scale than non-center affiliated faculty and level of center multidisciplinarity has been found to be significantly correlated with industry collaborations. This is probably related to the fact that industry collaborations could be more focused on the commercialization of research or technology transfer—both of which would probably draw on specific disciplinary skills (Boardman & Corley, 2008; Gibson, Daim, & Dabic, 2019). In this conceptual presentation, we describe an international research-practice partnership (Weinstein & Worrell, 2016) undertaken by The University of the West Indies Cave Hill, with the University of South Florida as a partner, to collaboratively launch the Caribbean Educational Research Center designed to serve Barbados and the Eastern Caribbean. Guided by the concepts involved in undertaking a research-practice partnership, we discuss the degree to which the international partnership played a role in enabling researchers to navigate center affiliation during Year I of the RISE Caribbean project implementation. This presentation has implications for universities, districts, schools, and communities seeking to extend beyond perhaps limiting national and local discourses to bridging gaps across global communities in ways that allow for emerging portraits of discursively constructed ‘truth’ in what is increasingly viewed as a post-truth era.

Keywords: RISE Caribbean, Caribbean, research-practice partnership, RPP, partnerships, international, research centers

Authors

• Patriann Smith, University of South Florida
  Presenting Author

• S. Joel Warrican, University of the West Indies
  Presenting Author

• Constance V. Hines, University of South Florida
  Presenting Author

• Coreen J. Leacock, University of the West Indies - Cave Hill
  Presenting Author