Conference Agenda

Research-Practice Partnerships (RPPs) are increasingly discussed as a promising approach to bridging the persistent gap between educational research and practice (Schlicht-Schmälzle et al. 2024). Within the international and European discourse, RPPs are conceptualised as long-term, problem-oriented and capacity-building collaborations characterised by mutuality, shared ownership, and rigorous inquiry (Coburn et al. 2013; Farrell et al. 2021). Recent studies point to a structural tension between these normative aspirations and the realities of contemporary research funding regimes, which are predominantly short-term, project-based, and output-oriented (Henrick et al. 2017; Fischer-Schöneborn & Ehmke 2023; Schlicht-Schmälzle et al. 2024). This tension becomes particularly visible in the initiation phase of partnerships, where roles, expectations, problem definitions, and power relations are still being negotiated. While the evaluation of RPPs has gained increasing attention, empirical insights into how such partnerships are initiated and stabilised under these conditions remain limited.

This paper draws on the German BMBFSFJ-funded joint project TOBIS – Transprofessional Organisational Development: Innovative Cooperation between School Authorities on Digital Change and OER/OEP. TOBIS provides a structured network for initiating and accompanying RPPs with school authorities across Germany. Thirty school authorities participate, organised into three governance-related networks (rural, urban, and private school authorities, ten each) and three cross-cutting thematic networks focusing on OER/OEP, governance, and transprofessional collaboration. The project responds to the need for actively shaping digital transformation in education (Giannoutsou et al. 2023) and to the changing role of school authorities in times of datafication and digitalisation of schooling (Jarke & Breiter 2019). While traditionally responsible for “external” school matters such as infrastructure and equipment (Avenarius & Füssel 2010), school authorities in Germany increasingly shape “internal” dimensions of school development, especially in the context of educational technologies and digital transformation (Forum BD 2020, Hermstein 2021; Rau & Geritan 2021). At the same time, they operate within complex constellations of stakeholders and power relations, facing financial constraints, political expectations, and limited pedagogical expertise.

While TOBIS conceptualises school authorities, media centres, school leadership, and functional roles in schools as interrelated practice partners within RPPs, the study takes seriously that such roles are not given, but negotiated. Building on role-oriented RPP research (Sjölund et al. 2022) and boundary-crossing perspectives (Hartmann & Decristan 2018), the analysis therefore examines how these actors position themselves—and are positioned by others—during the initiation of collaboration, and how these positionings shape emerging forms of partnership.

In TOBIS, the initiation of RPPs is supported through approaches as design-based research (DBR) and traditions of design-oriented educational research (DBRC 2003; McKenney & Reeves 2018). Yet, rather than applying DBR as a classical cycle of intervention and refinement, the project mobilises design-oriented processes as a means of partnership formation (Getenet 2019, Grunau & Gössling 2020). Through participatory workshops, shared problem-framings and project ideas related to digitalisation and OER/OEP (UNESCO 2019) were developed and specified collaboratively with the project partners. This led to the initiation of two OER-focused RPPs: “OER Support”, aiming at the individual support of schools in revising and developing quality-assured OER-compatible materials, and “OER Information”, focusing on the co-development of information materials for school authorities, which evolved into the design of a needs-assessment instrument to explore schools’ engagement with OER. In both cases, DBR-oriented activities functioned as a translational and mediating logic, enabling heterogeneous actors to negotiate shared goals, responsibilities, and time frames, thereby creating initial conditions for sustained research-practice collaboration.

Against this background, the contribution addresses the following research questions:

• Which possibilities and challenges lie in using DBR-oriented design processes for initiating and sustaining Research-Practice Partnerships under project-based funding conditions?
• How do these processes shape early partnership dynamics between researchers and school authorities, e.g. regarding power and equality?

Research-practice partnerships (RPPs) have emerged as a cooperative approach to strengthening connections between educational research and professional practice. By combining practical school experience and scientific insights, RPPs are assumed to contribute to school development and educational advancement. However, partnerships across institutional and professional boundaries carry the risk of entailing tensions regarding roles, authority, and participation (Euler, 2024).

While distinguishing features of research-practice partnerships have been widely discussed (e.g. Farrell et al., 2021), the processes through which participants’ roles, authority, and participation are brokered in cooperation remain underexplored. In order to evaluate the workings and quality of RPPs, it is eminently relevant to understand these role arrangements. To conceptualize such negotiations, this study refers to positioning theory (Harré & van Langenhove, 1999) which illustrates that positions can be transformed in the course of interaction and thereby differentiates from the static notions of roles. Therefore, positioning theory provides a useful analytical lens for examining how individuals position themselves and others within collaborative partnerships such as design-based research (DBR). DBR is characterized by iterative and sustained cycles of collaboration aimed at developing practically relevant innovations (Mc Kenney & Reeves, 2019; Euler, 2024). These iterative processes create room for negotiation and transformation over time, shaping how roles, expertise, and participation are positioned throughout the process of a DBR project.

Against this background, this study addresses the following research questions:

1. How do researchers and practice partners position themselves and each other within design-based research partnerships?
2. In what ways are positioning processes accomplished through interactional and communicative practices?
3. How do positioning processes change over the course of a DBR project, and how do these changes shape participants’ roles and participation?

Based on positioning theory, there are three relevant background conditions affecting interactions and simultaneously constituting one another: positions, storylines, and illocutionary forces (Harré & Moghaddam, 2015). Through practices such as storytelling, sharing competences and knowledge or assigning responsibilities, participants put themselves and others in certain positions, hence legitimizing utterances and actions. In partnerships between university researchers and teachers, positioning processes resulting from interactions are particularly conspicuous as different forms of professional expertise collide. While teachers contribute extensive practical knowledge, researchers bring theoretical and methodological expertise to the project. Additionally, positioning processes are shaped by different working cultures which are reflected in diverging time management, communication styles and approaches.

During the collaboration, initial positionings may be challenged and thus re-arranged. The process of repositioning can cause major changes within a partnership concerning participation, engagement, and competences. Consequently, focusing on positioning processes enables a systematic perspective on how cooperations develop within DBR and how repositioning shapes opportunities for learning and capacity building among partners.

To demonstrate the interactional dynamics between university and school experts, this study resorts to a jointly developed project (DiPoSa; Schroeder et al., 2025), in which an interdisciplinary university team cooperates with expert teachers from primary schools in inclusive settings. Given the specific structural conditions shaping research-practice partnerships in the German education system, exploring the interplay of different institutional and professional cultures gains special relevance for understanding positioning processes within RPPs.

Background and objectives

This paper examines contradictions that emerged from Participatory Action Research (PAR) in and around Manchester (UK) examining how to build solidarities across diverse population needs. The Collective Communities Action (CCoAct) project brought together 36 academic and community leads (L) from charities, grassroots movements, and third-sector organisations working with racially, gender, and class diverse non-dominant populations. Building on previous work with Pakistani communities during COVID-19 where PAR activities created spaces for transforming individual experiences of inequalities across education, health and environmental concerns into collective resistance (Christinaki et al., 2025; Choudry et al., 2024), the team designed 3 workshops (W1-W3) to explore how solidarity functions within and between communities and academic researchers working towards social change.

However, what emerged were profound tensions within our (the team's) research practice itself. Despite emancipatory intentions (Farrell et al., 2021), our approach reproduced the very power imbalances we sought to challenge. Through reflexive analysis, I examine how the project team's understanding shifted from attempting to build solidarity with communities to recognising that solidarity must be enacted in the research process itself.

The project team hypothesised that diverse non-dominant (Choudry, 2024) groups, despite different experiences, might share underlying structural conditions of oppression often unrecognised in their narratives. However, what emerged were conflicts within community approaches to collective action and between the project team and participants. Here, I differentiate between tensions, subjective experiences of impossibilities, and contradictions, systemic tensions within and between activities (Sannino, 2008). I ask:

How do contradictions within research-practice partnership activities reveal the need for solidarity to function as both the object of inquiry and the mediating process for equitable community-university partnerships?

By analysing tensions that emerged within our practice and between team and community leads, I demonstrate how working through these impossibilities requires enacting the very solidarity we sought to study, contributing methodological insights for global researchers working with non-dominant communities beyond deficit frameworks.

Theoretical Framework

The analysis synthesises Engeström's expansive learning framework with Bourdieu's field theory and collective perezhivanie. Engeström (2015) identifies contradictions as the driving force of development in activity systems, not simply interpersonal conflicts but historically accumulating structural tensions creating double bind situations where following existing rules makes the object impossible to achieve. Engeström's (2013) expansive learning framework provides seven types of learning actions: questioning, analysing, modelling, examining, implementing, reflecting, and consolidating; plus two recent additions: organising initial ideas and resisting (Hyrkkö & Kajamaa, 2025), revealing how contradictions manifest.

However, Cultural Historical Activity Theory (CHAT) alone cannot fully capture how power operates through legitimacy, which knowledge is recognised as valuable in particular social spaces. Bourdieu's field theory (1990) becomes necessary. Within the academic field, university researchers hold dominant positions because their forms of knowledge (theoretical, published, peer-reviewed) are recognised as legitimate. Community organisations operate with what I term non-dominant capital (Choudry, 2024): expertise essential for real-world problems but unrecognised within academic hierarchies. CHAT identifies that contradictions existed; Bourdieu explains why: our research embedded field structures positioning community knowledge as data rather than expertise (Tuck, 2009).

I draw on collective perezhivanie (Black & Choudry, under review) to understand how the team experienced and worked through contradictions. Perezhivanie refers to lived emotional experience where current ways of being are inadequate and qualitative change becomes necessary (Vasilyuk, 1988; Vygotsky, 1994). Collective perezhivanie extends this from individual psychotherapy to joint research-practice activity, recognising personal conflicts as subjective experiences of structural contradictions. When our team felt uncomfortable with workshop lead roles, this was experiencing the contradiction between academic knowledge production norms and participatory solidarity, showing how working through impossibilities collectively required enacting the very solidarity we sought to study.