Research-practice partnerships (RPPs) is one of the most topical fields in educational research and policy-making (c.f. Coburn et al., 2016; 2021). In the past decade, a growing number of RPPs have been used, with varying aims and in multiple forms, to bridge research, policy, practice, and community efforts in the production and use of knowledge (Arce-Trigatti et al., 2018). In a broad sense, an RPP is an approach to locally-driven collaborative research which is aimed at educational improvement and transformation across the educational system, and is principally dedicated not to other researchers, but to the partners (Farrell et al., 2021a). Notably, RPPs aim to  get a diversity of perspectives involved, thus bringing together people from different educational, managerial and community/family/youth organizations.

Studies of RPPs have mainly focused on describing partnership activity, roles, impacts and challenges, as well as investigating how RPPs operate and the conditions for their success. Yet, concern for context has not been as substantive. Indeed, in a recent review, one of the ‘pressing issues moving forward’ identified for this field of educational research pertains to “the wider ecologies of RPPs”, namely “plac[ing] questions about an RPP’s efforts within the context of the local educational ecosystem and with attention to historical, political, and cultural dynamics of that setting” (Farrell et al., 2021a, pp. 30-31). A recent exploration of RPPs and the COVID-19 pandemic also found that more awareness is needed regarding how RPPs are situated in, and respond to the larger context in which they operate (Popa et al., 2023, p. 696). This paper argues that educational researchers should pay greater attention to contextual factors, as it can enrich our understanding of the conditions under which partnerships thrive, and thus make an important contribution to the growing role of RPPs in shaping the future of educational practice.

Here, I view RPPs, as a social and professional activity that involves people coming together across differences to collaborate in workplace settings and learn from one another: research is the leading activity, a process of joint work that involves both drawing on the expertise of a variety of stakeholders and shifting power relations among partners; learning within an RPP takes place within and across the boundaries of their respective professional, cultural, organizational and community affiliations (Farrell et al., 2021a). Although partnerships work toward educational improvement and transformation, partnering does not always lead to learning and change. This is in part because RPPs operate in dynamic contexts, and partners may not have the ability to productively interpret and navigate their forces, influences and variations. Our current understanding of RPPs lacks a clear conceptualization of how context matters to RPPs. How do partnerships interact with the contexts in which they are embedded? What are the elements of contexts that support or hinder partnership activity and learning? Specifically, this paper explores what context means for focus group participants in the USA and in Sweden. 

In the first part of the paper, I propose a tentative set of terms to conceptualize context. It borrows words and concepts from the PELP coherence framework (Childress et al., 2009) and the Evidence for Improvement integrated approach (Sherer et al., 2020), both designed to support educational leaders and networks in their improvement approaches. Drawing from this literature, I define and elaborate on two key notions: environmental factors and stakeholder actors. The purpose of articulating a set of terms is to eventually develop a common language and shared meanings about context, and also to produce an analytic lens to understand how partners navigate contexts to facilitate RPPs.

In the second part of the paper, I illustrate this conceptualization of context with examples from an explorative focus group study that brought together researchers and practitioners from two different organizations: the ULF initiative (Utbildning/Education, Lärande/Learning, Forskning/Research) in Sweden and Project Zero (PZ) in the USA. Both have been engaged in creating the conditions for deeper collaborations between educational researchers and practitioners. The ULF initiative is a national project commissioned by the Swedish government including 25 universities and nearly 150 school providers (public and independent), has been experimenting with collaboration models since 2017, with the aim of creating a new and sustainable infrastructure for collaborative research in education. PZ is an educational research center at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, which has been dedicated for over fifty years to understanding and enhancing learning through research projects that involve close collaboration with practitioners and with a commitment to melding theory and practice for scalable and sustainable educational innovation. The focus group included around twenty participants and took place via Zoom in March of 2023. It engaged participants to talk about context using the set of terms I provided them as an initial guide, and also about how they navigate contexts to facilitate RPPs, focusing on learning from each other’s personal and professional experiences. Participants were purposefully selected to include ULF’s and PZ leaders and their affiliated partners (researchers, school leaders, district/municipality coordinators, and teachers). The stated aims of the conversation were: 1) to deepen participants' knowledge about environmental factors and their influence; 2) to map and monitor important elements of the environmental context; and 3) to reflect on managing relationships with external actors. Building on the “Art of Conversation” method (ref), the focus group was structured by two generative inquiries: “name an experience when environmental factors positively shaped the work done in your particular RPP(s)” and “How can your organization best navigate contexts?”. An inductive-deductive textual analysis approach (Fereday and Muir-Cochrane, 2016) was used to find out what were the key themes to emerge from the conversation.

I found that the elements of context at play for members of ULF and PZ had to do with the following four themes: gaining practitioner buy-in, creating equality in partnerships, collaborating consistently and thoroughly, and balancing the unequal distribution of funds. Gaining practitioner buy-in involves attending to school staff and the characteristics of the particular community in which the partnership is situated, therefore requires intentionally considering stakeholders' interests and assessing community capacity for change. Solving the puzzle of equality involves attending to identities and regional and historical circumstances, and therefore requires better strategies for creating the conditions for joint work, and for negotiating equity in partnerships’ process and outcomes. Collaborating with practice partners consistently and thoroughly involves attending to the research field and school-based and university-based staff, and therefore requires engaging in organizational learning about collaborative research and developing an infrastructure to promote research use. The uneven distribution of funding involves attending to funding priorities, policy arenas, and governing bodies, and therefore requires a more proactive relationship with funders. I present these themes by emphasizing participants’ accounts, by comparing what is common and different in their experiences, and by discussing the findings in relation to existing literature about the conditions under which RPPs succeed (Farrell et al., 2021b). The paper concludes by arguing for strengthening organizational capacity to see, think, and act in relation to context. The paper also highlights the relevance and limitations of using the initial guide to discuss how context matters to RPPs, and offers suggestions for a possible framework and a specific avenue for future theory development and elaboration.

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