The Graduate School of Education understands the importance of building strong relationships with the communities that surround our campuses. Our faculty and students value what we can learn from our community partners and how we can offer solutions to persisting challenges that impact them. Ultimately, we believe that our work as researchers is more impactful and better informed when embedded within, and applied to, real-world contexts. To guide our collaborative work, we have developed a shared set of principles. We form partnerships around genuine problems of practice and community concerns. We collectively work to increase local capacity. Partnerships are engaged only as long as needed.
Partnership-building and Problem Generation:
- We develop and adhere to routines, norms, and expectations for our shared work.
- We communicate timelines and constraints that may apply to university researchers, community-based organizations and institutions, funding agents, and projects themselves.
- We develop data-sharing policies and practices that allow for understanding problems and concerns as well as tracking impact over time.
Data Collection and Analysis:
- We communicate findings and results in multiple formats and to a range of audiences to ensure knowledge-sharing among practitioners and scholars alike.
Communicating Findings and Solutions:
- We communicate findings and results in multiple formats and to a range of audiences to ensure knowledge-sharing among practitioners and scholars alike.
Research-Practice Partnerships (RPPs) are a specific form of partnership characterized by several key features:
- Long-term, sustained collaborations that are intended to span multiple projects
- Focused on problems of practice, or challenges faced by those engaged most directly in the work of community-based educational institutions
- Mutualistic, with jointly-developed focus and shared authority
- Data-informed, with collaborative analysis and interpretation that is designed to inform answers to problems of practice