One of the perennial questions of education is the relationship between educational research and educational practice (Condliffe-Lageman 2000) and attempts to improve schools by promoting teaching as an evidence informed profession continue to provoke debate in the UK and elsewhere (Oakley 2002; Slavin 2002). Forms of organization that encourage working across institutional boundaries have been identified as a means of achieving ‘collaboration in the spirit of inclusiveness’ (Pollard 2004) and so meeting the challenge of creating and translating knowledge about teaching and learning. School-university partnerships are one example of a context in which partners with mutual interests but different perspectives and experiences can collaborate in order to develop knowledge and understanding of educational issues. Reviews of the field of teacher research (Cochrane-Smith and Lytle 1993; Little 2002) found evidence of impact on practice being greater when there was a link with partners from universities but found very few studies examining the role of universities in such partnerships in any depth. With the exception of the work in the UK of the SUPER project (McLaughlin 2006), there is still a dearth of the kind of fine-grained analysis of the contribution made by university based researchers that is needed to test assumptions and identify salient features. The context for this paper is the work of the Research to Support Schools of Ambition a government funded three year project in which university researchers worked with secondary school teachers and local authority advisers across Scotland. We are interested in the perspectives of the university staff involved in terms of their evaluation of the success of the partnership and the impact of participation on their own professional learning. The paper draws on reflexive methodology, self-reflexivity, (Gewirtz and Cribb 2006) in this analysis. of the perceptions of the university based participants. The emergence of the frustrations of the university based staff when encouraged to reflect on their experience of working in a school university-partnership connects with attempts to problematise constructions of ‘partnership’ and ‘collaboration’ in the context of supporting teachers as researchers (Stronach and McNamara 2002). Consideration of the tensions leads us to explore the extent to which the activity of the university partners is conducive to the promotion of the practical inter-subjectivity identified in Dewey’s transactionalism, which breaks down distinctions between ‘knowing’ and ‘doing’ (Biesta and Burbules 2003).

Semi-structured interviews and focus group discussions with the participants from the partner universities form the principal source of data. The process of reflection captured by the interviews was supported by analysis of the university partners’ written accounts of examples of critical incidents illustrating challenges in fulfilling their role in the project. Documentation from the inception of the three year project (2006-09) including reports, minutes of meetings, draft instruments, research protocols and fieldnotes was also examined. The research was conducted by an experienced researcher within the lead university, but outside the project team, who had been invited to support the development of an explicit ‘reflexive strand’ to the work.

In depth investigation of an aspect of the processes of collaboration and partnership from the under-researched perspective of the university participants affords an opportunity to take advantage of a “…timely moment to unpack the meaning and consequences of professional community at the level of practice” (Little 2002). We make a contribution to our understanding of school-university research partnerships in terms of their mutual benefits and potential for knowledge construction across institutional boundaries. In addition, the attempt to practice methodological reflexivity provides a means of developing an ethically reflexive approach to the critique of partnership in the context of practitioner research in school settings.