Implementing Research-Practice Partnerships to Facilitate Racial Justice in Education: Opportunities, Complexities, and Benefits

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session 3
  In Roundtable Session: Leveraging and Unstructuring Techniques and Analysis in Qualitative Research

Abstract

Persistent inequities and instantiations of racial injustice in education warrant the increased use of Research-practice partnerships (RPPs) as justice-driven vehicles for educational change. In this paper, we draw upon observational, interview, focus group, oral history, and some survey data, to describe and analyze our efforts to design and coordinate an action-oriented, anti-racist RPP aimed at dismantling the school-to-prison pipeline in a large, Midwestern city. Our foundation-funded research collaborative is a networked, intergenerational RPP that links predominantly African American, community-based action research teams composed of university, youth, and community practitioner researchers. Attention to integrating explicit anti-racist goals in RPPs is under examined in scholarship, yet we emphasize how we directly tackle anti-Blackness and merge critical methodological frameworks with practice.

Authors

• Camille M. Wilson, University of Michigan

• Carolyn Hetrick, University of Michigan

• Richard J. Smith, Wayne State University

• Jasahn M. Larsosa, Focus: Hope