Closing the Distance in Community Research Partnerships: Considering the Roles of Technology and Expertise in Relationship Building (Poster 5)

• In Event: Educational Partnerships as Collective Resistance: Perspectives From Emerging Scholars and Collaborators

Abstract

As scholars continue to argue for the humanization of research (Paris & Winn, 2013), a range of partnership-and community-based approaches have flourished across education research contexts. Our team has joined these important efforts and embarked on a journey to understand what community-driven research looks like. Informed by community-based design research (Bang et al., 2016) approach informed by community participatory action research (Belkacem, 2009) and research-practice partnerships (Coburn & Penuel, 2016), we currently conceptualize community-driven research to center Indigenous communities’ sovereign role across our research efforts. Specifically, we have employed community-driven design research (Authors, 2023) in our work to develop technologies that are sustainable, humanizing, and reciprocal to the culture and needs of our partnering communities. Through this work, our team has identified two practices that can create distance in a partnership, and, in response, we have identified ethical stances that critically shape the types of relationships we are able to cultivate within a given partnership.
The first ethical stance is toward technology. In our multiyear partnership work, we have noticed how defaulting to Western uses of technology can disrupt our partnership goals of building trust, co-creating, and respectful relations. We have found that this practice of "using" technology within partnership building can create distance. These uses include everything from sending an email to holding virtual meetings to designing augmented reality experiences. Within a partnership, it is critical to question the use of any and all technologies, especially when working with Indigenous communities and seeking to establish technological sovereignty (Winter & Boudreau, 2018). Implementing technology rather than creating technology together disrupts the importance of who designs and how design happens (Authors, 2023). In this sense, technology can create distance from the work of making research a personal journey and taking steps to get to know a community in person. From this ethical stance, we invite designers to use technology deliberately in their work.
The second ethical stance is toward the process of research itself. The process of research is usually invisible or black-boxed from the public and, therefore, communities. Drawing from our own experience in our research process, making every level of the research process transparent allows more sharing of knowledge and expertise. By moving these concepts toward one another, we close the distances in research partnerships.

Authors

• Christina Morgan, Utah State University

• Breanne K. Litts, Utah State University

• Dallas Haws

• Melissa Tehee, Utah State University