Research-Practice Partnership Meetings as a Site for Deepening and Sustaining Commitment and Action for Racial Justice (Poster 2)

• In Event: Centering Equity in Research-Practice Partnerships

Abstract

Purpose: This research explores how internal meetings in an RPP have deepened and sustained commitments and actions toward justice in science education since the racial justice uprisings of 2020.

Theoretical Framework: RPPs that seek to promote equity vary in how they define and pursue goals for equity and justice (Farrell et al., 2021). Partnership meetings are boundary zones where goals for equity are articulated and negotiated (Ryoo & Kekelis, 2016). We adopt a cultural model of meetings, which understands the work of meetings to achieve particular kinds of relations (e.g., egalitarian, centering voices of marginalized groups) as a social accomplishment, mediated by tools and processes used by the group (Sprain & Boromisza-Habashi, 2012). We explore how meeting spaces create opportunities to imagine and pre-figure the kinds of relationships between research and practice and between partnerships and communities that RPPs aspire to create.

Study Context: This study focuses on an established research-practice partnership in education, the InquiryHub. Since 2007, this partnership has developed and studied a range of innovations in mathematics and science education. For the past two years, the InquiryHub has been working to “clean up its own house” by enacting its larger values around anti-oppressive pedagogies in its day to day workings, particularly in its bimonthly team meetings.

Methods: This study employs ethnography of communication methods, which we use to explore both micro- and macro level processes and dynamics (Sprain & Boromisza-Habashi, 2012). We focus on whole team meetings, which take place on Zoom and in person every two weeks and include up to 21 different participants from the university and school district. The main data sources include notes, which have been kept in a running Google document begun in 2014, workspaces used in meetings (e.g., Jamboards), field notes taken by the first authors, and socilicted diaries and interviews. These documents have been analyzed using a combination of open and theoretically driven coding characteristic of informed grounded theory (Thornberg, 2012).

Results: One of the major transformations of the group has been to establish regular check-ins, particularly since the multiple pandemics initiated in 2020. These check-ins have functioned to humanize relations among participants and create structures where project hierarchies are less salient. In addition, a practice has evolved to rotate leadership of meetings and integration of tools for democratizing participation.Third, the meetings have become transformed into study and learning spaces for engaging with ideas related to, for example, political clarity in science education (Madkins & McKinney de Royston, 2019) and culturally sustaining pedagogies (Waitoller & Thorius, 2016).

Scholarly Significance: This study is informing the ongoing work of the partnership directly, by providing formative data on key aspects of the meeting that team members find beneficial and problematic for advancing justice goals. In addition, it advances our understanding of how we can co-construct research agendas with communities that are “of consequence” to those communities, in the context of an RPP in science.

Authors

• Melissa R Campanella, University of Colorado - Boulder
  Presenting Author

• William R. Penuel, University of Colorado - Boulder
  Presenting Author