Mutualism and Race: Embedding Sociohistorical, Racialized Selves Into the Creation of Antiracist Research-Practice Partnership (Poster 3)

• In Event: What Is the Value-Add of Research-Practice Partnerships?

Abstract

Purpose:
In this current socio-political moment of heightened racial tensions and efforts to legislate away curriculum that acknowledges the structural nature of racism, there is a great need to understand how we might leverage research practice partnerships (RPPs) that grapple with the racist legacies of schooling and research.This study illuminates how partners racialized understandings and personal histories shape RPP work from its initial inception and foundation.

Theoretical framework:
Current research has begun to highlight how RPPs can be deliberately structured to facilitate processes oriented towards racial justice (Penuel, 2019). The development of such processes is dependent on shared sense making about race, equity, and the RPP its members (Milner, 2007). We focus our analytical attention on the specific relational and dialogic moves among (and between) researchers and practitioners (e.g., Hennessy et al., 2020) that we suggest can help develop essential aspects of an RPP’s relationship structures, dialogic norms, organizing tools, and goals intentionally embedded in the partnership that position the RPP to effectively support equity.

Methods:
In the current study, we present the first year of a network of RPPs in K-12 schools that formed to tackle issues of anti-racist change. Through a corpus of qualitative data, we analyze how attending to race and equity in partnership activities shaped the relational and dialogic moves we made with one another across the RPP network.

Data sources:
Our qualitative data corpus consists of RPP team meeting notes, a self-study conducted by the partnership that began with members interviewing one another about their past experiences and racialized histories, and artifacts from conjecture mapping activities that we utilized to iteratively focus the RPP teams on joint projects. In total, our materials consisted of 54 sets of meeting notes, four semi-structured interviews of RPP teams, and an iterative conjecture mapping process.

Results:
We document the work that is necessary when initiating RPPs that aspire towards anti-racist outcomes, as researchers must approach new partners with contextually sensitive racial justice conjectures. For example, we identified the ways that our research team (of varying racial identities, ages, and positionalities within the university) could approach school communities composed of students who predominantly held racial identities and socioeconomic statuses that differed from our own. Further, comparisons between our RPP cases highlighted variance in researcher positionality, anti-racist motivations, types of evidence preferred, and expected relationships between practitioners and researchers, which provide insight into key tensions in equity-oriented research (Philip, Bang, & Jackson, 2018). Overall, our study provides a template with which researchers can engage prior to beginning new partnerships.

Significance:
Without attention to racial justice, RPPs risk amplifying deficit-based perspectives, misidentifying problems of practice, and misguiding analyses, which ultimately could produce harm to communities (Denner et al., 2019; Minkler, 2004). Through investigating the unique challenges and opportunities of implementing design-based approaches to establish anti-racist processes and infrastructure in new RPPs, we respond to the recent call to develop equitable strategies for RPPs and the use of research evidence (Kirkland, 2019).

Authors

• June Ahn
  Presenting Author

• Kimberley Gomez, University of California - Los Angeles
  Presenting Author

• Ung-Sang Lee, University of Nevada - Las Vegas
  Presenting Author

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