Conference Agenda

Recent scholarship has examined the difficulties research-practice partnerships (RPPs) grapple with, such as their implication in sexist and racist projects (Tanksley & Estrada, 2022) and their potential to suppress onto-epistemological difference (Gamez-Djokic, 2024), pointing to an uncertain present and future for RPPs despite deep attachments to ideas of improvement, inclusion, and empowerment. In this paper, I extend this scholarship to think about the “partnership” in RPP as an assemblage of complex affective attachments, in excess of coordinated practices and interactions across organizational boundaries (Penuel et al., 2015.). I draw on Lauren Berlant’s notion of cruel optimism as a “relation of attachment to compromised conditions of possibility” (Berlant, 2011, p.24) that exists “when something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing” (p.1). I use this framework to understand how actors might approach partnerships as a mode of “endurance” in an object of desire.

This paper asks: (1) what attachments do RPP actors bring to their work?, (2) how are these attachments mediated by RPP norms and practices, and (3) how do these attachments impact the work. Through an examination of three cases, I identify how the partnership was mobilized by attachments to ideas of improvement, (em)power(ment), and civic/civil inclusion, which ultimately served as obstacles to the actors’ and partnership’s “flourishing”.

In the first case, I examine how teacher participants’ metaphorical usage of workforce language, such as “employer” and “boss”, and “employee” and “worker” to describe their and their students’ roles in the partnership exemplify an attachment to an experience of power rooted in capitalistic notions of ownership and control. Although the partnership is organized around creating opportunities of civic inclusion and empowerment, the teachers approached this design as an approximation to a particular kind of dominative power that promised status and feelings of professionalism and (em)power(ment) they felt they lacked. This eroded the possibility of civic and civil inclusion for racial, economic, and gender minorities.

In the second case, I examine Dr. Angello’s[1] critiques of and rationalization of he and his students’ exploitative interactions with partnerships. Dr. Angello openly critiqued the tendency of partnerships like the RPP to exploit, or “pimp”, Black teachers and students as markers of their benevolence and as a successful funding tactic, though he rationalized this as a necessary exchange in order for his students to gain access to various forms of capital. Dr. Angello’s critical consciousness of fraught partnership politics at once attenuates wholesale participation in the “scene of fantasy” of empowerment and civic/civil inclusion at the same time that it “endures” in a form of civic participation that ultimately reifies he and his students’ civil abjection (Wilderson, 2010; Mills, 2014).

In the last case, I examine momentary breaks in the neoliberal “impasse” (Berlant, 2011) invoked by students’ remarks about the “ghostliness” and purpose of turning a former charter school, now-abandoned building, into a mixed-income housing community, and by their calls to “fuck shit up” during Black Lives Matter protests. I argue that these remarks demand an attention to lingering in the ruins of indeterminate urban and education reforms. Ruins and ruination (Navaro-Yashin, 2009) are antithetical to improvement and compel a disarticulation with contemporary modes and genres of living and interaction. In this particular instance, I argue that calls to “let it [the building] be” and “fuck shit up” reject attachments to normative modes of empowerment and civic/civil inclusion and pose a threat to the affective investments in improvement that are both the form and content of the partnership (in this case, a partnership between a university, a high school class, and a non-profit organization focused on affordable housing).

[1] All names are pseudonyms.

A teacher shortage is being experienced globally (Australian Government, 2022; European Commission, 2023; UNESCO, 2023) with resulting challenges for recruitment and retention of teachers. The ability of traditional models of initial teacher education (ITE) to produce classroom ready teachers who remain in the profession is being challenged (Green et al., 2019), with internships or extended placements seen as a way of continuing to forefront experiential learning and increase the quality of graduates (Ledger & Vidovich, 2018). This movement is resulting in a wide range of initiatives that not only continue to prioritise school-university partnerships but do so through the establishment of new forms of sustained, school embedded experiences. These initiatives build on a traditional perspective of teacher internship (Ledger & Vidovich, 2018) but use a range of terminology such as teaching schools in the United Kingdom (Chapman, 2013; Conroy, 2013), teacher training schools in Finland and South Africa (Gravett et al, 2014), and employment based pathways and teaching school hub programs in Australia (Alphacrucis University College, 2024; La Trobe University, 2024; University of Melbourne, 2024).

However, even though a focus on school embedded models is of vital importance to the future of teacher workforce supply, it is currently impossible to research effectively at scale making implementation of what is understood by school and university partners inherently problematic. There are two key reasons for this. First, there is a morass of disconnected terminologies used to explain school embedded models across primarily small-scale research. This inhibits broader understanding of these models and results in an inability to elevate or apply findings in different contexts with confidence. Second, there is no clear synthesis available regarding the key factors and conditions (core ingredients) within school embedded models that directly contribute to enhancing the readiness of initial teacher education students. Identifying these core ingredients and framing them within a shared definition can help to provide a common foundation for partners in new and existing initiatives, which in turn can lead to greater cohesiveness of understanding across future research.

This paper will share insights into these two areas, drawing on critical engagement with international literature explored as part of a rapid review (Cirkony et al, 2022, Garritty et al, 2021; Wollscheid & Tripney, 2021). The review forms the preliminary stage of research into the government funded National Embedded Cross Sector Teacher Education Program pilot (NECSTEP) in Australia, a joint project of Alphacrucis University College and The University of New South Wales (UNSW). The NECSTEP pilot brings together over 70 schools and 200 initial teacher education students, with the author the NECSTEP Research Director. The paper will highlight challenges and implications for school-university partnerships through layering a proposed definition and core ingredients emerging in the literature with an examination of school-based teacher education models across history from the French ‘ecoles normales’, to the spread of the ‘normal schools’, ‘model schools’, apprenticeship traditions and teaching schools (Aspland, 2006, Cornu, 2015; Loukomies et al, 2018; McNamara et al, 2014). In addition, it will critically engage with the recognition given in the literature regarding key epistemological and theoretical approaches for how they inform understanding of the conditions in ‘situated’ spaces that support initial teacher education readiness. This includes the role played by communities of practice (Lave & Wenger, 1991), Dewey’s experiential learning theory, the evolving concept of a third space (Beck, 2020; Daza et al., 2021; Zeichner, 2010), traditions of work-integrated or work-based learning (Dean, 2023; McNamara et al, 2014), and approaches borrowed from other industries such as the clinical model for teacher education (Darling-Hammond, 2009, McLean Davies et al, 2015).

Global and societal change requires the development of basic skills in order to be able to (re-)act proactively, sustainably and in a solution-oriented manner (Fernbach, 2020). In this context, social entrepreneurship is becoming increasingly important. It means recognizing social problems and solving these by using entrepreneurial approaches (Gerholz & Slepcevic-Zach, 2015). (Social) entrepreneurial spirit and personal skills such as initiative, self-confidence, constructive handling of failures, social responsibility and Empathy - which are important for both, a vibrant civil society and a functioning market economy (Lindner, 2016), should not only be addressed at Higher Education Institutions. According to a resolution of the EU Parliament, fostering the development of these skills already at a young age is crucial (EU Parlament, 2015). Therefore implementing corresponding learning environments in classwork is important, which calls for enabling and encouraging practicing teachers in school service as well as teacher trainees to act as multipliers for sustainable, (social) entrepreneurial acting.

This was the starting point of the project ‚Teachers as Changemakers‘, which is funded by the Bavarian State Ministry. As a part of this project we shaped – inspired by the changemaker program in Vienna and Graz (Schlömmer & Dömötör, 2022; Kamsker et al., 2023) – a learning environment for students in university-based primary and vocational teacher training (business education), which is carried out over the course of one term and encompasses partnerships with primary and (upper) secondary schools in the region of Bamberg, Germany. The teacher trainees are trained and support students in schools in finding and pursuing social entrepreneurship projects. The latter complete – accompanied by tandems of teacher trainees – the entire process of a social entrepreneurial challenge: from becoming aware of societal issues and sustainable development goals via coming up with ideas, using the social business model canvas, implementing the idea as well as marketing and pricing activities right through to offering the resulting products and service ideas on a market day and reflecting on the process subsequently. The cooperations with local schools are beneficial for all involved: For the teacher trainees they offer the chance to try out didactic-methological approaches of teaching social entrepreneurship as well as the relationization of theory and practice (Caruso et al., 2022). The schools and practicing teachers in school service get to know the mentionned approaches in a low-threshold way through simply accompanying the lessons conducted by the teacher trainees. And the students in school learn in an action-oriented way plus might develop self-efficacy and competences for taking innovative action and for collective problem-solving (Alden-Rivers et al., 2015; Kalemaki et al., 2019).

The first realization during summer term 2023 has been evaluated formatively and summatively. This contribution aims to i) point out organizational conditions for successful practical phases and to investigate ii) whether the teacher trainees perceive Social Entrepreneurship Education (SEE) differently after the course and which situations made them think about SEE.