The disconnect between research and practice is a global phenomenon. Research-practice partnerships (RPP) are a relatively new type of collaboration between educators and researchers that are seen as a possible solution to this problem. The diversity of the team composition should support the emergence of new ideas and solutions to existing problems. In RPPs, researchers and educators create meaningful, trusting partnerships to address urgent problems of practice: “These partnerships are intentionally organized to connect diverse forms of expertise and shift power relations in the research endeavor to ensure that all partners have a say in the joint work” (Farrell et al., 2021, p. iv).

As RPPs deliberately bring together people with varied expertise, communication is a critical issue (Farrell et al., 2021). As Brown and Allen (2021) state, “Practitioners and researchers live in different professional worlds, each with its own institutional language and norms, hierarchies, incentive systems, and approaches to solving problems” (p. 21). Partners often need to navigate different timelines, communication tools, and ways of describing their work (Denner et al., 2019; Penuel et al., 2015). Learning can occur in part through generative dialogue within RPP space. However, we have little information on how discourse unfolds in RPPs.

There are discourse characteristics likely to be common in generative discourse in education: (1) revealing problems from teaching practice, (2) providing evidence or reasoning, (3) making connections to general principles, (4) building on others’ ideas so members may have a shared frame of reference, and (5) offering different perspectives to be able to understand a problem in a new way (Lefstein et al., 2020, pp. 8–10).  It is useful to examine whether these and other characteristics of generative discourse are present in RPPs.

The RPP in this study is embedded in a project “Participative School Improvement - Improve Instruction with students” using a design-based research approach (Fishman & Penuel, 2018). The aim of the project is to develop, implement, and routinize participatory settings where students can express their needs and form the learning context of their school. The project aims to change school practices based upon student participation. Our approach is based on practice theory where “bundles of practices and arrangements are the central unit of conceptuality and analysis of social life and social phenomena” (Schatzki, 2019, p. 27). The implication of this theoretical approach is that to better understand school improvement and changes in schools, we need to study everyday practice in situ (Little, 2012; Maag Merki & Werner, 2013; Spillane, 2012) as they are carried out in everyday life.

Team meetings are an important part of everyday practice in schools and in RPPs. Since the RPP is new for both educators and researchers, new routines for collaboration must be established. Most studies analyzing collaborative discourse understand learning as a social process and emphasize a strong interdependence between learning and discourse (Lefstein et al., 2020). RPPs are strongly associated with the expectation that learning takes place on both sides - researchers and educators. This study is especially interested in identifying generative discourse sequences during RPP meetings.  

The main topic of this paper is building knowledge within the RPP setting: How can discourse within RPP meetings be described, and what are the generative discourse sequences? How do they arise?

RPP meetings were videotaped and coded using MAXQDA qualitative coding software. We chose to analyze videos as they allowed us to capture the situation as it was experienced by the participants in situ. Coding video data in MAXQDA allows for systematic data management without having to rely on extensive transcription in which the spirit of an interaction is not as well captured (Hennessy, 2020). We developed an analytical tool to describe and compare RPP meetings according to four main categories (Lefstein et al., 2020). We have distinguished (1) generative and (2) non-generative utterances according to the definition of generative discourse from Beech et al. (2010, p. 1342), as “engagement between two or more people that goes beyond the trivial, which changes some meanings or processes and/or creates some new knowledge.” In order to code all utterances we examined two additional main categories of discourse, (3) structuring the meeting (e.g., opening greetings) and (4) utterances outside of a content-related discussion (e.g., chit chat). Each segment was coded with only one code and all utterances within the meetings were coded. Data sources We analyzed eight RPP meetings taking place between 05-2021 and 05-2022 embedded in the project. The RPP project supports student participation in four secondary schools (grades 7 to 9) in iterative cycles: designing, testing and improving participative settings. In particular, it aims to strengthen student voice (Mitra, 2018) in improvement processes that are intended to support students’ learning at school. Data analyzed in this paper come from one project school located in the Canton of Zurich, Switzerland. The RPP work involves frequent meetings among researchers and a school teacher. The main activities of the meetings were planning and reflecting on different school events allowing for student participation, especially in designing their own learning during lessons. Three persons from the research team and one teacher at the studied school participated in the meetings. The meetings lasted from 60-120 minutes.

Results The results show the central elements of the RPP meetings: (1) 44.6% of the utterances were generative (2) 46.2% of the utterances were non-generative; (3) only 1.2% of the utterances belong to the category ‘structuring of the meeting’; and (4) 7.7% of the utterances were outside of the content-related discussion. RPP meetings are rich in generative utterances, which is an important characteristic of deep discussions supporting learning. Whether this result is due to the diversity of the group members having different kind of experiences and knowledge remains to be clarified. The analysis also shows special characteristics of the generative utterances according to the concrete aims of the RPP. For example, participants co-constructed plans for events to promote student participation and jointly reflected on their results. Additional categories which were salient in the coding pattern will be described in the presentation. The coding software also allows us to portray the dynamics of single meetings processes. We present and compare two different meetings as examples: A planning meeting and a reflection meeting. The reflection meeting contains a higher proportion of generative utterances than the planning session. The result can be explained by the fact that many concrete organizational details had to be clarified at the planning meeting. This paper helps to lay the foundation for further studies using a similar methodology. We know of no other studies that have analyzed meeting data from RPPs in such a detailed way, yet such an analysis can yield rich information about the types of discourse present and also allows for an in-depth analysis of specific sequences that are especially pivotal for the RPP functioning and relationships. Researchers and educators involved in RPPs can use the findings to consider how to make their meetings most generative.

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