Calls from regional commissions and research in rural education have emphasized the importance of collaboration to build economic resilience, support communities, and provide students with access to resources for educational opportunities. This study took place in the context of a partnership in a rural, Appalachian region of Virginia focused on providing recurring hands-on activities for middle school students to explore engineering in classrooms with the support of local engineering industry professionals, university affiliates, and teachers. The purpose of this study is to describe how university affiliates explained collaboration using a process framework of collaboration defined around governance, administration, organizational autonomy, mutuality, and norms of trust and reciprocity. Utilizing a single case study methodology, five semi-structured interviews with university affiliates after the second year of partnership were analyzed using a qualitative thematic analysis approach primarily informed by deductive methods and guided by the theoretical framework. Findings from the analysis suggest that university affiliates understood that there are unequal benefits for participating in the partnership, meaning that some partners got more out of the partnership than they might have been able to contribute. Additionally, participants suggested that each partners’ roles and responsibilities were unclear at times, which could have been clarified and strengthened through building relationships and trust among partners. Finally, participants suggested that tensions were present between what teachers were asked to do in the partnership and what might have been required of them by their schools given school expectations around preparation and testing around standards of learning. This research leads to recommendations around building future partnerships and sustainability of partnerships keeping in mind the importance of relationship building and being responsive to the needs of each partner. Additionally, future research could examine specific partnership roles from lenses related to sensemaking and boundary spanning.
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Beginning school–university partnerships for transformative social change in science education: Narratives from the field
These narratives explore what it might entail to begin school–university partnerships towards the goal of transformative social changes through the voices of two women scholars of color. Using two school–university partnerships as focal cases, we unpack the complexity, tensions, and possibilities that arise through collaborations driven by the objective to promote new and more just forms of science learning within public schools. In this article, we use three key dimensions of participatory design research (namely, critical historicity, power, and relationality) as analytical lenses through which to reflect upon school–university partnerships that we are in the beginning stages of forming. Through this methodology, we shed light on: (a) the historical genealogies of equity-oriented work and (b) the tensions that we encountered as we strived for beginning partnerships with K-12 schools. These narratives unveil the dynamic and contentious nature of forming school–university partnerships that always occurs within a sociopolitical landscape impacted by intersecting and powered identity markers, including those around race, gender, language, culture, and status. We provide specific recommendations for supporting education researchers who aspire to transform the learning of sciences at schools through a collaborative and sustainable partnership. These recommendations include ideas around how to collectively generate goals with schools centered on transformative science learning; attention to the role of language and race in shaping partnership role-remediation; and creating infrastructure for developing school–university partnerships toward transformative social changes, including financial, human and relational resources, as well as new forms of recognition systems.
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- PAR ID:
- 10331178
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Science Education
- Volume:
- 106
- Issue:
- 5
- ISSN:
- 0036-8326
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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This paper reports findings from the efforts of a university-based research team as they worked with middle school educators within formal school structures to infuse computer science principles and computational thinking practices. Despite the need to integrate these skills within regular classroom practices to allow all students the opportunity to learn these essential 21st Century skills, prior practice has been to offer these learning experiences outside of mainstream curricula where only a subset of students has access. We have sought to leverage elements of the research-practice partnership framework to achieve our project objectives of integrating computer science and computational thinking within middle science classrooms. Utilizing a qualitative approach to inquiry, we present narratives from three case schools, report on themes across work sites, and share recommendations to guide other practitioners and researchers who are looking to engage in technology-related initiatives to impact the lives of middle grades students.more » « less
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null (Ed.)Through school-university partnerships that situate learning within culturally relevant educational experiences, faculty, preservice teachers, and school-based educators are able to co-construct and share scientific knowledge. This knowledge consists of pedagogical content knowledge and funds of knowledge that include both knowledge and skills developed in cultural context that have evolved historically. In early childhood education, culturally relevant Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Mathematics (STEAM) learning experiences are particularly important for young children's cognitive and social emotional development. This paper describes how intentional co-planning and collaboration to celebrate the US Read across America Day provided over 100 preschool children in eight classrooms with access to STEAM lessons virtually led by university preservice teachers in partnership with educators in the school. These activities engaged children in exploring art, computer science, physical science, engineering, and mathematics within the context of a culturally relevant version of the fairy tale Goldilocks and the Three Bears. Lessons implemented as part of school-university partnerships support Black and Latinx children's development of a sense of belonging in STEAM. Further, these experiences enhance teacher candidates' abilities to engage in culturally responsive STEAM teaching while receiving ongoing guidance and education from university faculty and school-based educators. Teacher education programs within higher education institutions should embrace school- university partnerships as contexts for the development of shared scientific knowledge and discourse since the benefits are twofold. First, children and teachers gain access to, and engage with, innovative STEAM experiences. Second, preservice teachers learn culturally relevant research-based instructional strategies through university coursework situated in authentic learning experiences; thus, their learning as teacher candidates is enhanced through planning, implementation, evaluation, and critical reflection.more » « less
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Abstract Background Calls to improve learning in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM), and particularly engineering, present significant challenges for school systems. Partnerships among engineering industry, universities, and school systems to support learning appear promising, but current work is limited in its conclusions because it lacks a strong connection to theoretical work in interorganizational collaboration.
Purpose/Hypothesis This study aims to reflect more critically on the process of how organizations build relationships to address the following research question: In a public–private partnership to integrate engineering into middle school science curriculum, how do stakeholder characterizations of the collaborative process align with existing frameworks of interorganizational collaboration?
Design/Method This qualitative, embedded multiple case study considered in‐depth pre‐ and post‐year interviews with teachers, administrators, industry, and university personnel during the first year of the Partnering with Educators and Engineers in Rural Schools (PEERS) program. Transcripts were analyzed using a framework of interorganizational collaboration operationalized for our context.
Results Results provide insights into stakeholder perceptions of collaborative processes in the first year of the PEERS program across dimensions of collaboration. These dimensions mapped to three central discussion points with relevance for school–university–industry partnerships: school collaboration as an emergent and negotiated process, tension in collaborating across organizations, and fair share in collaborating toward a social goal.
Conclusions Taking a macro‐level look at the collaborative processes involved enabled us to develop implications for collaborative stakeholders to be intentional about designing for future success. By systematically applying a framework of collaboration and capitalizing on the rich situational findings possible through a qualitative approach, we shift our understanding of collaborative processes in school–university–industry partnerships for engineering education and contribute to the development of collaboration theory.
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In combination with contextualized human interpretation, computational text analysis offers a quantitative approach to interrogating the nature of participation and social positioning in discourse. Using meeting transcript data from the development of a co-design research-practice partnership, we examine the roles and forms of participation that contribute to an effective collaboration between a multileveled school system and researcher partners. We apply computational methods to explore the language of co-design and multi-stakeholder perspectives in support of educational improvement science efforts and our theoretical understanding of partnership roles. Results indicate participation patterns align with documented roles in codesign partnerships and highlight the space dedicated to process reflection, context sharing, and logistical coordinationmore » « less
- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1002/sce.21723
