Research-practice partnerships (RPPs) between academic faculty and school-based educators hold promise for bridging gaps between the topics and methods used in educational research and the needs, interests, and realities of practicing educators and the communities in which schools are situated (Coburn & Penuel, 2016; McGeown, 2023). In recent years, there has been a surge in scholarly attention to understanding the dynamics of research-practice partnerships (Coburn & Penuel, 2016; Ross et al., 2010), their potential to deliver educational improvement and facilitate more equitable teaching practices in disadvantaged communities (Vetter et al., 2022), and the different roles played by researchers and practitioners in meeting these goals (Farell et al., 2019; Sjölund et al., 2023).

Despite the rising interest in RPPs by academics, funders, and policymakers, as Denner and colleagues (2019) noted, “education researchers are rarely trained to work effectively with practitioners” (p. 1), and establishing sustained collaborations with non-academic partners remains a challenge. For instance, education researchers might lack the knowledge of the contextual and community-based determinants that impact teaching at a given school, misinterpret the motivation of educational institutions for participating in the RPP, or have a different vision about the desirable outcomes from the partnership (Farell et al., 2019). Researchers might also experience tensions between the academic career demands for publishing, and engaging in RPP work in service of communities. 

Objective

This study aims to shed light on the dilemmas and challenges experienced by researchers throughout the process of establishing and maintaining an RPP, and the various roles adopted by them in the different stages of RPP work. Based on relevant documentation collected within a partnership between a team of researchers at a research-intensive university and one primary school in the Netherlands, this paper illustrates how researchers enacted their roles and navigated challenges, and discusses implications for tackling these challenges and addressing the institutional constraints experienced by researchers aspiring to do RPP work. 

Research Questions

Drawing on previous literature, including a typology developed to describe researcher/partner roles (Kennedy, 2022), and using the case of a school level RPP in which a small team of researchers collaborated with one principal and his team of teachers at an elementary school, this study addresses the questions:

• What roles do researchers play in a school-level RPP?
• What challenges do researchers face in the RPP?
• How do researchers balance accountability demands of academia with ethical demands of RPP work?
• What affordances and constraints shape how researchers enact this balance?

Conceptual Framework

RPPs bridge epistemological gaps between what Cochran-Smith and Lytle (1999) called “knowledge-for-practice” (often generated by researchers about practice), “knowledge-in-practice” (collected by educators through practice), and “knowledge-of-practice” (p.250, synthesized through rigorous analysis by educators in their own contexts). Academic researchers play the following knowledge-related roles in an RPP, which draw upon these epistemological similarities and differences: 

• Knowledge broker: identifying and distributing existing research (Farrell et al., 2021); 
• Knowledge use facilitator: supporting practitioners’ use of research in practice (Farrell at el., 2021); and 
• Knowledge development facilitator: generating new knowledge from practice (Kennedy, 2022). 

These roles may serve different needs of the partnership at different times, and describing various roles in these ways may provide insights into how the researcher can navigate conflicts between the demands of academia and practice. These conflicts include those related to the:

• Content focus of the research during knowledge development (Sjölund et al., 2023);
• Timescale of the research undertaken (Barnett et al., 2010); and
• Time demands of being responsive to partners versus writing up results (Gamoran, 2023).

We drew upon this conceptualization of researchers’ roles and challenges during data analysis.

Context This RPP is a partnership at one primary school in the central belt of the Netherlands that built upon existing relationships within an initiative that began in 2021 and formalized as a partnership between a team of research-oriented advisors, including three university faculty, and the school principal in 2022. The school enrolled approximately 120 students across grades 1-8, nearly all from ethnic minority backgrounds. The focus of the RPP was on improving equity for underserved pupils. In the fall of 2023, the researchers and teachers met to identify a research approach and agreed to begin with a study about parental involvement at the school. Despite changes in personnel, this partnership continues to develop and build upon these initial activities. Data Sources We used a case study approach to describe and illustrate researcher experiences in the partnership as we developed our roles and began partnership work between 2021 and 2023 (Stake, 1995). During this time, we carefully documented activities through formal interviews (approved by the university institutional review board), the archiving of meeting agendas, minutes, and other RPP artifacts such as documentation of presentations (n=50). Data Analysis and Trustworthiness We individually reviewed these materials with the research questions and conceptual framework in mind. We first selected the documents and artifacts that related to researcher roles and challenges and then used findings to select critical incidents that illustrated how we navigated our roles (Halquist & Musanti, 2010). To identify the critical incidents, we triangulated sources that captured different aspects of the same incident (Lincoln & Guba, 1985). For example, one document of advisory board meeting minutes captured our discussions about a professional development presentation to the teachers, and the presentation itself was another document for analysis. We drew upon these two documents to identify one critical incident. During subsequent analytic conversations, we presented our individual findings, discussed similarities and differences, and agreed upon the critical incident that best illustrated the roles we played, the challenges we faced, and how we negotiated those challenges. After writing a draft of preliminary findings, we asked another member of our research team to audit the analysis by examining the original data sources, our individual findings, and our shared results. We neither claim that this work is reproducible nor generalizable but we present descriptions and documentation to allow readers to engage in naturalistic generalization by applying relevant findings to their own research and contexts (Stake, 1995).

As we examined our roles and how we navigated challenges, we identified one consistent consideration: The need to develop and sustain relational capital as a foundation for all partnership activities. At the beginning of the partnership, we engaged in surface-level consensus, or superficial agreement that masked deeper disconnections or conflicting perspectives that could have sidelined activities at that stage. We noted that referring to kansengelijkheid, the value named as the core focus of our RPP (roughly translated as “equal opportunities”) allowed us to elicit a shared meaning and purpose even as our conceptualizations of this value may have differed substantially. As the partnership progressed, we adapted our approach to maintaining surface-level consensus as we carefully considered how to navigate conflicting views. The priority to develop and sustain relational capital shaped our enactment of all our roles and affected various challenges encountered. We did face all the challenges identified above: those related to the content focus of the research, the timescale of the research, and the time demands of being responsive versus writing it up. We particularly noted how surface-level consensus and the focus on relational capital played roles in the selection of our first research topic (i.e., parental involvement), which allowed us to challenge educators’ deficit views while also sustaining relational capital by affirming their expertise and addressing their problems of practice. Similarly, how we enacted our roles as knowledge broker, knowledge use facilitator, and knowledge development facilitator reflected a navigation of knowledge-for-practice, knowledge-in-practice, and knowledge-of-practice. We take the lessons learnt from the enactment of these roles to offer insights on possible ways to balance the accountability demands of academia and the ethical demands of the RPPs and conclude by discussing possible future-oriented strategies researchers engaged in RPP work can use for navigating the challenges identified in this study.

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