2-164 - Researcher-practitioner partnerships in early childhood education: Benefits, processes, successes, and challenges

Session Type: Conversation Roundtable

Integrative Statement

This conversation roundtable will engage four panelists and attendees in a discussion regarding the benefits, processes, successes, and challenges of forging partnerships between researchers and education practitioners. Researcher-practitioner partnerships have become more commonplace over the past several years. Evidence of this is present in the foci of several public and private funders of education research including the Institute of Education Sciences, William T. Grant Foundation, and Spencer Foundation. Given the traditional lack of effective communication between researchers and education practitioners as well as the importance of the use of evidence to inform practice and policy, these researcher-practitioner partnerships have emerged as one way to allow for collaboration between researchers and practitioners.

Clare Irwin, Ph.D., will moderate the session which will include a brief introduction to this collaborative approach to conducting education research, the challenges it poses, and an overview of several such partnerships followed by a question and answer session with the four panelists. Caroline Ebanks, Ph.D., is a program officer at the Institute of Education Sciences who oversees several researcher-practitioner partnerships. Ebanks will represent a funder’s perspective on the promise of and difficulties in implementing researcher-practitioner partnerships. Panelists Katherine Pears, Ph.D., Rebecca Bulotsky Shearer, Ph.D., and Michael Strambler, Ph.D., each lead a researcher-practitioner partnership focused on early childhood education. Each will weigh-in on why they have chosen to take a partnership approach to their research, the pros and cons in so doing, and how they see this type of work impacting education research in the future.

Sub Unit

• School Readiness/Childcare

Moderator

• Clare Waterman Irwin, Education Development Center, Inc.

Panelists

• Caroline Ebanks, National Center for Education Research, Institute of Education Sciences

• Katherine C. Pears, Oregon Social Learning Center

• Rebecca Bulotsky-Shearer, University of Miami

• Michael J Strambler, Yale University School of Medicine