Co-creating and Co-implementing Research to Uncover Local Solutions to Education Challenges: Lessons from the Data Must Speak Positive Deviance Research.

• In Event: Co-creating evidence from the bottom up: The Schools2030 approach to understanding what works in raising holistic learning outcomes.

Proposal

To better understand the challenges that schools are facing as well as their underlying causes, data and evidence must be generated, collected, and reviewed collaboratively based on trustworthy relationships between the research teams and education stakeholders. It is about learning from communities that know their context much better. These principles are at the heart of the UNICEF Innocenti’s Data Must Speak (DMS) Positive Deviance research, which aims to uncover grassroot solutions to complex education issues, sometimes in the most challenging contexts.

This panel presentation aims to share the experience of the DMS research from listening to school stakeholders to identify grassroot positive deviant behaviours and practices that help in understanding why some schools perform better than others in similar contexts. It is about tapping into attitudes, practices, behaviours, and social norms at the school and community levels, which are important factors that affect learning but that are often under-explored.

Not only is the programme turning to positive deviant schools for answers, but it is also co-creating and co-implementing the entire research process with Ministries of Education and local stakeholders. The presentation will therefore explore a range of lessons generated from several participating countries across Africa, Asia, and Latin America. It will demonstrate how research questions are tailored to specific policy concerns relevant to each country and how research tools are co-created with national and local education stakeholders to respond to those concerns. The presentation will also delve into the co-implementation practices taking place at every stage of the research at the country level. They allow key partners to share their knowledge and expertise and strengthen their research skills and technical capacity to manage education data and generate evidence. This approach ensures that existing datasets are leveraged to analyse the education ecosystem and that data systems are strengthened. This results in stronger ownership of the research findings and more national investment to implement policy recommendations.

The presentation will explore the following questions:
(i) Why is it important to turn to schools to find local solutions to national education problems?
(ii) How to co-create and co-implement large-scale education research with Ministries of Education, local academics, and in-country partners, especially in a challenging context of a global pandemic?
(iii) How likely will co-creating and co-implementing education research improve learning and the national quality of education?

The presentation will use multiple country examples from different regions to illustrate a range of participative research practices, their strengths, and weaknesses. The goal is to contribute to the critical discussions around research co-creation and co-implementation with schools and local stakeholders using the experience of a multi-country international study.

Author

• Renaud Comba, UNICEF