Engaging with Community Histories, Lived Experiences, and Grounded Wisdom in a Research-Practice Partnership.

• In Event: Decision-Makers at Every Stage: Designing, Implementing, and Reflecting on a Community-Centered Research-Practice Partnership Project

Abstract

Objectives
Remedy and repair are often done in ways that lack critical examination of who is being served and what say they have in what happens. Particularly in communities where youth and parents are constant subjects of research and assessment, and suffer from research fatigue (Clark, 2008), who gets to be part of the research process and how is critical. This submission highlights who was part of the SCORE project and how their leadership drove the project’s process and impact. In this presentation we will detail the relationships and positionalities of SCORE stakeholders, particularly youth and parents, through the lens of a short documentary highlighting work in two SCORE sites.

Perspectives
This presentation examines how choices for which stakeholders led the SCORE work impacted the project’s process and its impact. We highlight how SCORE addressed issues of race, power, and equity, when most RPPs do not center those questions (Ishimaru, et. al., 2022). This is done through a reflective analysis of who took part in SCORE and how their leadership played out in practice. SCORE centers the leadership of those most impacted by educational inequities in determining the project’s direction and strategy. This central tenet of Critical Participatory Action Research (CPAR) (Fine, 2013) led to youth and parents making pivotal decisions and bringing their lived experiences into the work.

Modes of Inquiry
We draw on a short documentary, “SCORE Stories,” produced by RPP researchers in partnership with a film production company, and transcripts from an interview with the film’s director. We focus on a thematic analysis of the film as an encapsulation of SCORE’s multi-stakeholder engagement of researchers, parents, youth, community-based organizations, and district leaders. The film highlights how the engagement of these stakeholders impacted SCORE and how being a part of SCORE impacted their analyses of their educational context and understanding of participatory research methods. We use an interview with the film’s director to explore the documentary production process as a values-aligned way to uncover the importance of narrative storytelling in the context of RPPs.

Data Sources
This presentation draws on two sources of data:
1) the “SCORE Stories” film as text
2) semi-structured interview with the film’s director (from the documentary's promotional video)

Results & Significance
The “SCORE Stories” film uncovers personal and historical narratives that undergird the importance of inclusive community-based and community-driven research processes. In service of creating a community-derived set of educational equity priorities and indicators, the connections between community histories, contemporary lived experiences, and educational aspirations are instructive for the focus and direction of our research and practice.

The SCORE project highlights a modality of RPPs that goes beyond dominant definitions, and instead brings a focus on equitable transformation and a commitment to honoring diverse expertise and shifting power relations (Farrell et al., 2021). Who engages in leading research processes and how they do so are highlighted by SCORE community research teams and their leadership. The grounded wisdom gained through a community-engaged approach to research-practice partnership is a necessary foundation for authentic and relevant outcomes.

Author

• Juan Pablo Blanco, Roger Williams University