Research-Practice Partnerships
This year’s proposals include partnerships that will examine programs, policies, or practices that seek to reduce racial and economic disparities in K-12 educational outcomes; improve college enrollment, attendance, and completion among youth of color and youth from low-income families; divert youth from the juvenile justice system; and advance economic mobility for youth from low-income families and youth who are disconnected from education and employment.
One of the namesake challenges of the Institutional Challenge Grant is creating structural changes within research institutions in ways that value research-practice partnerships. In other words, we ask that applicants “propose a feasible strategy for institutional change that addresses observed structural, motivational, and financial barriers that inhibit research-practice partnerships at their institution.” While we do […]
Funders shape what research is conducted on which questions. Funders can also support the infrastructure that is vital to engagement between policymakers and researchers. And while the grants funders make are public knowledge and have received attention in the literature, we know far less about how and why funders decide on what to support.
In this webinar, deans from two current Institutional Challenge Grant teams join us to discuss the changes they intend for their respective schools, the concrete steps they are taking to encourage faculty to participate in engaged research, and the challenges they are navigating along the way.
These grants leverage the power and networks of universities to reduce inequality in youth outcomes, a persisting challenge that has become even more severe during the COVID-19 pandemic.
True equity-oriented research must upend traditional power dynamics where university researchers are viewed as apex knowledge producers. Democratizing the knowledge production process to recognize the valued and essential contributions of both the researcher and community partners is essential for creating equitable research collaborations.
We are very pleased to announce the finalists for the 2022 Institutional Challenge Grant competition. The Institutional Challenge Grant encourages research institutions to build long-term research-practice partnerships with public agencies or nonprofit organizations in order to reduce inequality in youth outcomes. To do so, research institutions will need to shift their policies and practices to […]
Community-engaged research is not the norm for social scientists. When it comes to faculty career advancement criteria, research institutions typically value studies that advance the field and generate publications more than collaborative knowledge-building that advances the public good. But research designed to address real-time policy and practice problems can be as methodologically rigorous as any […]
“We had to ask ourselves: How do we respond to complexity that was always there but is now heightened? What knowledge is relevant in practice, and how do we produce that knowledge for use in the practice world?”
By bringing together university researchers with practitioners and community members, RPPs in education help to ensure that the processes and outcomes of research directly enrich educational practice and policy in ways that community members most desire.
Even to a casual observer, the research-practice partnerships “tent” has expanded considerably since the seminal 2013 paper by Coburn et al., Research-Practice Partnerships: A Strategy for Leveraging Research for Educational Improvement in School Districts.
RPPs have the potential to forge relationships that lead to new possibilities for racial justice. However, they also run the risk of reproducing the very inequities that many claim to challenge. To avoid the second scenario, we need to confront racial injustice directly and build RPPs that are committed to dismantling it.
Research-Practice Partnerships in Education: The State of the Field expands on the 2013 white paper Research-Practice Partnerships: A Strategy for Leveraging Research for Educational Improvement in School Districts by scanning the current landscape of partnerships, identifying points of variation, and outlining shared principles.
How We Embraced the Challenge of Institutional Change to Pave the Way for Community-Engaged Research
At UC-Berkeley, where I trained in clinical-community psychology and have served as a professor for almost two decades, our recent strategic plan framed our public mission as: …a commitment to egalitarian and democratic values; to research and scholarly work that serves our community, our state, our nation, and the world; to providing access for students […]
In partnership with the Spencer Foundation and the Forum for Youth Investment, on June 10, we hosted a 90 minute panel discussion, “Power, Possibility, and Equity in Research Practice Partnerships.” RPPs have been an important approach to research that seeks to center issues of practice and the voices of educators in the research process by […]