France is a centralized country in which educational decisions are made at the national level. The University House of Education launched the first initiative in France on research-practice partnerships (RPPs). RPPs 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, IV). Trust and power sharing have been identified in the literature as key levers in creating RPPs. To what extent are these levers key to create RPPs in a centralized country? Bryk and Schneider (2002) defined trust components as respect, competence, integrity, and personal regard. Kochanek et al. (2020) found four strategies that practitioners and researchers spontaneously use in RPPs to foster trust: (1) responsive, transparent communication, (2) opportunities for human connection, (3) authentic, internal-facing roles that value practitioners’ voices and, (4) relevance of the partnership’s research agenda. Denner et al. (2019) revealed that power dynamics (1) are rarely part of researchers' training, leaving them ill-equipped to deal with them, (2) are rarely an object of discussion within RPPs and, (3) represent one of the RPP challenges. In France, the lack of a collaborative culture between school district leaders and researchers adds to the challenges in creating RPPs. Also, the goal of this qualitative study was to explore trust and power-dynamics between researchers and school district leaders in a centralized country as a leverage to create RPPs. We interviewed eight school district leaders and ten researchers about their collaborative experiences with each other and conducted a content analysis (Corbin & Strauss, 2015), categorizing codes and identifying themes to make sense of their experiences. We invited participants throughout the coding process to propose and critique emerging themes. Results indicated that collaboration in such a context (1) is a one-way process (i.e., from practice needs to research, or from research needs to practice), (2) is built on any intentional strategy to foster trust and manage power dynamics and; (3) is highly vulnerable to any change or disagreement. In conclusion, creating long-term collaboration between practitioners and researchers aimed at educational improvement through engagement with research in this context cannot be based only on practitioners’ and researchers’ willingness. We suggest a strategy that includes brokers who serve as the bridge between researchers and practitioners in partnerships, working intentionally to build trust and manage power dynamics (Wentworth et al., 2023).

Bryk, A., & Schneider, B. (2002). Trust in Schools: A Core Resource for Improvement. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. Corbin, J., & Strauss, A. (2015). Basics of Qualitative Research. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Denner, J., Bean, S., Campe, S., Martinez, J., & Torres, D. (2019). Negotiating Trust, Power, and Culture in a Research–Practice Partnership. AERA Open, 5(2). https://doi.org/10.1177/2332858419858635 Farrell, C. C., et al. (2021). Research-practice partnerships in education: The state of the field. William T. Grant Foundation. Retrieved from http://wtgrantfoundation.org/research-practice-partnerships-in-education-the-state-of-the-field Wentworth, L., Arce-Trigatti, P., Conaway, C., & Shewchuk, S. (2023). Brokering in Education Research-Practice Partnerships: A Guide for Education Professionals and Researchers (1st ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003334385