Working Together in Pervasive Uncertainty: Analyzing Core Tensions in a Research-Practice Partnership

• In Event: "Designing for" to "Designing With" Partners: Emergent Challenges in the Co-Design Process

Abstract

Research-practice partnerships can be an effective means for partnering with teachers to address problems of practice and to design and implement educational innovations (Coburn, Penuel, & Geil, 2013). While the strength of these partnerships emerges from the collaboration of different stakeholders, the resulting heterogeneity can be challenging for group/project functioning, particularly with respect to status and authority, and the negotiation of roles and interactional norms (Carlone & Webb, 2006; Coburn, Bae, & Turner, 2008; Farrell, Harrison, & Coburn, 2019).

In this paper, we reflect on our attempt to explicitly renegotiate existing relationships between a group of university researchers and elementary-school teachers who had a long history of working together in traditional hierarchical ways. This work is situated in a larger project focused on supporting teachers’ and researchers’ collaborative extended inquiry into socioscientific and sociopolitical issues. Using critical discourse methods, we analyzed video from early project meetings where researchers and teachers worked together to make decisions concerning the scope and direction of the project, including discussions about individual/collective goals, the process of building new kinds of relationships, as well as negotiations around what outcomes are possible and/or desirable in the scope of the project.

With analyses that connect specific moments of interaction to cultural/institutional hierarchies and interpersonal histories, we aim to model some core tensions that arise in the project and relationship scoping work. These tensions are in part emotional and interpersonal, including building trust (Vakil, McKinney de Royston, Nasir, & Kirschner, 2016) while working with and through pervasive uncertainty about project and relationship scoping (Coburn, Bae, & Turner, 2008; Rosen, 2010). Early discussions around project scoping have demonstrated that researchers and teachers generally focused on outcomes/goals at different institutional scales, with teachers at times focusing on what is needed in classrooms and researchers highlighting courses of action aimed at a broader, institutional level (Gee, 2004; Carlone & Webb, 2006). An analysis of these tensions lays bare the institutional and interactional asymmetries in the group. Our work, as participants in these partnerships, is to understand the complexity and stickiness of asymmetries within partnerships, in the entwined work of project and relationship scoping. By critically examining moments and trajectories of tension, we are hoping not only to understand our missteps but also to find opportunities for working towards more mutual partnerships (Linn, Shear, Bell, & Slotta, 1999) given the heterogeneity across partners participating in the project.

Authors

• Jennifer Radoff, University of Maryland - College Park

• Erin Ronayne Sohr, University of Maryland - College Park

• Tara Marie Brown, University of Maryland - College Park