Problems of Practice & Practicing Problems: Problems as Sources of Stability and Change in Research-Practice Partnerships

• In Event: Making the Invisible Visible: Dynamics, Processes, and Outcomes of Research-Practice Partnerships

Abstract

Problems of practice are positioned as central, organizing objects across research-practice partnership approaches and enactments (Farrell et al., 2021). Identifying problems is often positioned as a crucial phase of work that happens in the initiation of collaborative research projects (e.g., Bryk et al., 2015; Penuel et al., 2011). RPP scholarship has examined the work of identifying and selecting problems, revealing how problems are negotiated at the start of a collaborative project (Penuel et al., 2013), how this work comes to be political (Meyer et al., 2022). We build on this work while noting that it often makes invisible how problems unfold long past RPP initiation. Through a study of an improvement network, we illustrate that problems are not static objects that emerge in discrete phases of work, but are momentary instantiations of problem-making, where RPP members constantly generate and engage problems throughout RPP enactment. Taking a strong process ontology (Langley et al., 2013) and a practice theoretical frame (Feldman & Orlikowski, 2011), we examined how RPP members came to generate and engage with problems within an RPP that had long “established” a focal problem of practice. In taking a practice and process frame, we focused our attention on stories that emerged from these data conversations following scholarship on story work and organizational becoming (Boje, 1991). We analyzed five data conversations in an improvement network focused on preparing teachers to engage in linguistically-sustaining practices. Data conversations were organized around data collected from the network’s measurement system during the second year of the network’s operations. We drew on Feldman and colleagues’ (2004) rhetorical approach to analyzing stories to help us extract and gain insight into the implied nature of problem work. Our analysis of stories revealed how making problems was dynamic and ongoing, well after the problem of practice had been “settled.” Analysis also revealed that network members made problems in, through, and with interleaved structures and contexts, including at the intersections of their own organizations and the network. Finally, our analysis revealed that problem-making work served as both sources of change and stability. Network members often made problems in ways that pointed to stable organizational work that they viewed as either a) constraining their capacity to make change, b) a potential site for change, or c) needing to be upheld and leveraged in order to make change. This finding is counter to notions of problems in RPP work that positions them as catalysts for change. Our study aims to contribute to RPP scholarship and practice in two ways. First, we illustrate how problem-solving is an ongoing process that can be designed for and supported throughout the life of an RPP. Second, our work seeks to reconceptualize problems and broaden the scope of possibility for generating insight into problem work in RPPs by examining how problem work emerges throughout the life of an RPP. Given the centrality of problems of practice to RPP work, we see opportunities for more nuanced and deeper investigations into problems of practice.

Authors

• Carlos Sandoval, Clemson University

• Elizabeth A. van Es, University of California - Santa Barbara