Research-Practice Partnerships With University-Partnered Community Schools as Contexts for Doctoral Student Training: Sustained Community Building Through Graduate Student Assets

Overview

In this chapter we examine, from our perspectives as graduate students, how equity-focused research-practice partnerships (RPPs) (Coburn & Penuel, 2016) with university- partnered community schools (Quartz et al., 2017) served as contexts for our professional learning. RPPs have been conceptualized to facilitate learning across researchers and practitioners through joint work focused on persistent problems of practice and have become increasingly legitimate approaches to educational research (Coburn & Penuel, 2016; Gutiérrez & Penuel, 2014; Penuel, Allen, Coburn, & Farrell, 2015). Despite the increasing demand for RPP work to improve educational outcomes, scholarly literature lacks insight into the ways novice researchers participate in, and learn through this dynamic and relational form of research (Bang & Vossoughi, 2016).

Each of us engaged in targeted, long-term partnership projects across two university-partnered community schools as members of a university research group in a large research university’s education department. Drawing on Heidelberger and Uecker (2009), we constructed a case study (Merriam & Tisdell, 2015) based on scholarly personal narratives to examine our own learning through our participation in RPPs as graduate students. We reflected on how characteristics of the university’s partnership programs and RPP practices shaped our participation in RPPs and to our development as researchers. We identified three characteristics of our participation in the school-university partnership program that facilitated our professional learning. These included our participation in a university-based cross-disciplinary learning community named the Research Apprenticeship Course (RAC), sustained responsiveness to practitioners and community members, and building our RPP projects through our existing and emerging assets.. Furthermore, we found that these characteristics facilitated the following learning outcomes for graduate students:

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  Refined social justice-oriented researcher positionalities

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  Impact on local educational practice through research

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  Expertise communicating RPP findings to multiple audiences

These findings will be used to consider how RPPs with university-partnered schools can be leveraged to provide graduate students with learning opportunities that prepare them for emerging demands as researchers and professionals.