Conference Agenda

Amid escalating global turbulence characterized by rapid technological change, geopolitical instability, widening inequalities, climate-related disruptions, and post-pandemic pressures schools and educational institutions face complex, shifting demands that outpace prevailing approaches to school and educational development. These conditions amplify uncertainty in teaching and learning, strain resources, and magnify equity concerns, while simultaneously accelerating expectations for digital transformation and data-informed practice. Research–practice partnerships (RPPs, e.g. Farrell et al., 2021) offer a robust mechanism to respond: they align evidence generation with local needs, build capacity for adaptive problem-solving, and sustain iterative innovation through trust-based collaboration. By co-designing solutions, integrating practitioner expertise with research insight, and developing shared infrastructures for learning, RPPs help schools and educational institutions navigate volatility, enhance resilience, and ensure that educational change remains both context-sensitive and equitable.

This symposium examines research–practice partnerships (RPPs) across educational contexts in Northern and Central Europe and North America, covering topics at the school, city, national, and international levels and within professional development and innovation networks. The central research question in this symposium is: Which fostering and challenging factors influence the creation and sustainability of RPPs in these contexts?

Prior literature identifies challenges to sustaining RPPs that include organizational constraints (timelines, resources, turnover), cultural integration, and power dynamics (Farrell et al., 2018; McGeown & Sjölund, 2025). Educator attitudes and participation opportunities also shape the trajectory of partnerships (Korhonen et al., 2024). Notably, some hindering factors can become productive sites for learning; negotiations at boundaries can create opportunities for joint work (Sjölund & Lindvall, 2024). Conversely, clear allocation of resources and time, targeted professional development (Korhonen et al., 2024), and professional networking (Fischer-Schöneborn & Ehmke, 2023) are known enablers. Most recently, McGeown and Sjölund (2025) highlight four key enablers for sustaining RPPs: infrastructure, funding, training, and incentives.

The symposium aims to present and critically evaluate factors that enable or impede sustainable RPPs. The contributions offer comparative perspectives across settings where RPP-like approaches are enacted under varied conceptual frameworks and methods, thereby addressing how RPPs manifest in European contexts while engaging US colleagues to broaden the discussion. Responding to calls to close the international research gap on RPP processes, outcomes, and evaluation (Fischer-Schöneborn & Ehmke, 2023), the symposium provides an opportunity to identify enabling and impeding conditions, share experiences, and foreground locality and contextual contingencies.

The symposium draws on frameworks that conceptualize core characteristics and principles of effective RPPs. Henrick et al. (2023) delineate five dimensions of effectiveness with associated indicators: cultivating trust and relationships for sustained joint work; engaging in inclusive research or inquiry to address local needs; supporting practice or community organizations in making progress toward jointly set goals; engaging with the broader field to improve educational practices, systems, and inquiry; and fostering ongoing learning while developing infrastructure for partnering. Application of these principles must be sensitive to each partnership’s goals, composition, and context.

This symposium offers an integrative overview of factors influencing the initiation, structuring, and sustainability of RPPs across diverse educational settings. By highlighting enabling conditions, boundary challenges, and collaborative roles that shape co-construction, professional learning, and system-level improvement, the symposium advances a shared, evidence-informed understanding of key issues and promotes mutual learning among participants.

The Swedish ULF reform (Utbildning/Education, Lärande/Learning, Forskning/Research) is a systematic effort to establish long-term local partnerships between higher education institutions (HEIs), local education authorities (LEAs), and schools. It aims to strengthen teacher researcher collaboration and to support educational improvement and equity (Prøitz & Rye, 2023). ULF was implemented as a pilot 2017-2024 involving 26 HEIs and 150 LEAs. It was institutionalized in 2025 through a ten-year national agreement between the HEIs’ and LEAs’ national organizations and an increasing number of local partnerships (Jarl & Andersson, forthcoming). The agreement provides formal structures for collaboration and strategic leadership. However, its implementation faces several challenges such as teachers’ participation in research risks being limited by different views of knowledge and power relations and hierarchies among partners. It is fruitful to turn to other sectors that already handled research collaborations with multiple stakeholders to get perspectives regarding these challenges. In the Swedish health care sector, clinical research based on the knowledge needs of the clinical practice and the professions is well established. There are national and regional infrastructures for formalized collaboration and strategic management between universities and regions responsible for health care. Evaluations show that research has “been successfully translated into practice and has led to positive economic and societal impact both in Sweden and with international reach” (Vetenskapsrådet, 2018, p. 63). Swedish health care has developed a comparatively stable and institutionalized infrastructure for research–practice collaboration, whereas ULF represents a more recent infrastructure in-the-making. This study explores the institutional design of the national infrastructures for formalized collaboration for research in health care: How has the Swedish health care system designed and governed infrastructure to support sustained research–practice collaboration? What policy decisions and historical developments were critical for sustaining collaboration over time? What risks and tensions have emerged as collaboration infrastructures scaled up in health care? Based on the neo-institutional perspective, the study emphasizes the formal structures of organizational systems and the norms and values that develop alongside these structures (March & Olsen, 1989). We use qualitative methodology and analysis of policy documents, regulations, evaluations, and expert interviews with key actors. The study contributes with knowledge about research practice partnerships (RPPs), defined as long-term, collaborative research relationships between researchers and practitioners, designed to tackle real-world problems for equitable educational improvement by intentionally sharing power and diverse expertise (Farrell et al., 2021). It increases the understanding how infrastructures enable and sustain RPPs in education.

Farrell, C.C., Penuel, W.R., Coburn, C., Daniel, J., & Steup, L. (2021). Research–practice partnerships in education: The state of the field. William T. Grant Foundation. Jarl, M. & Andersson, K. (forthcoming). Research-practice partnerships in Swedish education. In Manolo, E., Uesaka, U., Chuang, H., & Shiba, S. (eds.) Equal and Mutually Beneficial Relationships between Researchers and Practitioners: Co-Creating Solutions to Educational Challenges. March, J. & J. P. Olsen (1998). Rediscovering institutions: the organizational basis of politics. New York: The Free Press. Prøitz, T. S. & Rye, E. (2023). Actor roles in research-practice relationships: equality in policy-practice nexuses. In Prøitz, T. S., Aasen, P., & Wermke, W. (Eds). From education policy to education practice. Unpacking the nexus (pp. 287-304). Springer. Vetenskapsrådet (2018). Utvärdering av den kliniska forskningens kvalitet vid de landsting som omfattas av ALF-avtalet. Vetenskapsrådet.

Improving the integration of theory and practice in teacher training with the help of innovations in structures, formats, and methods was a fundamental goal of the Future Center for Teacher Training Network (ZZL Network) at Leuphana University Lüneburg, Germany, funded by the German Government (BMBF) as part of the Quality Initiative Teacher Training. For eight years, nine cross-institutional so called Development Teams (DTs) have been working to further develop university teaching and improve school teaching practice in co-constructive cooperation, for example by designing learning modules or developing teaching materials. The teams comprised representatives from four actor groups: university (researchers), schools (teachers, school leaders, representatives from study seminars etc.), extracurricular partner organizations (e.g. foundations) as well as teacher students. In this way, they were to contribute to a successful interlinking of theory and practice in teacher training (Ehmke et al., 2022; Fischer-Schöneborn & Straub, 2022). The design of the ZZL network with its DTs combined all principles of RPPs (Farrell et al., 2022). In these eight years, a total of more than 230 stakeholders from more than 45 organizations and institutions have been participating in the ZZL network. The cooperation in the DTs was evaluated at three time points and across the four stakeholder groups using an online questionnaire with open and closed questions: in 2017 (n=77), 2021 (n=105), and 2023 (n=102). This symposium contribution will present results from the May/June 2023 survey (response rate 57.8%, n=59), which aimed to 1) uncover commonalities and differences between the actor groups in their perceivements of the work in RPPs, 2) identify possible existing modes of co-constructive collaboration as well as 3) identify drivers for successful RPPs. Twenty questionnaire scales were used for the operationalization of the following criteria: a) motivation to participate; b) collaboration; c) modes of co-construction; d) perceived competence enhancement; e) satisfaction; and f) personal improvements on quality criteria of teacher training (focus on cognitive activation, problem orientation, adaptive learning support, dialogic culture of conversation). Most of the scales derived from existing research literature (e.g. van den Bossche et al., 2011; van Schaik et al., 2019) and were adopted to the RPP context. The results of this study contribute to a deeper understanding of collaboration, participant motivation, and learning effects in RPPs and advocate their establishment in teacher education.

Ehmke, T., Reusser, K., & Fischer-Schöneborn, S. (2022). Interlinkage of theory and practice as a constituent element of the ZZL network. In T. Ehmke, S. Fischer-Schöneborn, K. Reusser, D. Leiss, T. Schmidt, & S. Weinhold (Eds.), Innovationen in Theorie-Praxis Netzwerken – Beiträge zur Weiterentwicklung der Lehrkräftebildung (pp. 12–35). Beltz. Farrell, C.C., Penuel, W. R., Coburn, C. E., Daniel, J., & Steup, L. (2021). Research Practice Partnerships in Education: The State of the Field. William T. Grant Foundation. Fischer-Schöneborn, S. & Straub, R. P. (2022). The ZZL Network at Leuphana University of Lüneburg - Overview of Goals, Structures, Networks and Results. In T. Ehmke, S. Fischer-Schöneborn, K. Reusser, D. Leiss, T. Schmidt & S. Weinhold (Eds.), Innovationen in Theorie-Praxis-Netzwerken – Beiträge zur Weiterentwicklung der Lehrkräftebildung (pp. 36-57). Beltz-Juventa. ISBN 978-3-7799-6530-5. van den Bossche, P., Gijselaers, W., Segers, M., Woltjer, G., & Kirschner, P. (2011). Team learning: building shared mental models. Instructional Science, 39(3), 283–301. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11251-010-9128-3. van Schaik, P., Volman, M., Admiraal, W., & Schenke, W. (2019). Approaches to co-construction of knowledge in teacher learning groups. Teaching and Teacher Education, 84, 30–43. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tate.2019.04.019.

In research-practice partnerships (RPPs), researchers work closely with practitioners, and sometimes students and community members, to collaborate on school improvement and bridge the long-standing divide between research and practice in education (Arce-Trigotti, et al., 2018; Farrell et al., 2021; Penuel et al., 2025). As RPPs are relatively new, it is important to examine how macro (policy) and meso (organizational) contexts interplay with the micro-discursive practices within RPPs. In RPPs, researchers engage collectively with others who occupy different power positions within these contexts, yet the impact of their presence on power dynamics has been unexplored (Denner et al., 2019; Gamez-Djokic, 2024). In this paper, we examine how researchers, teachers, administrators, and students—across two RPPs in Switzerland and the US—utilize the space and leverage interests to achieve their particular goals within a broader policy context. We draw on video/audio-recorded meeting data collected in two RPPs over multiple years. While our earlier analyses (Authors, 2024; 2025) focused on examining patterns in RPP meeting discourse, in this paper, we analyze the micro-level of selected interaction practices and highlight connection to the organizational and policy contexts. Findings reveal that in the US policy context there was strong pressure to base school practices on empirical evidence. District administrators viewed researchers as experts capable of partnering on developing solutions to pressing problems, supporting the legitimation of the RPP. In the Swiss RPP, collaboration was initiated by researchers and the topic (student participation) received support within the school primarily due to policy pressures - such as school law - and the administration’s favourable view of this topic. However, administrators were not directly involved in the partnership and did not convey its importance, and there were no educational policy forces to sustain RPPs. In both cases, educators leveraged the presence of researchers to push their aims. In the US case, teachers also used the RPP space strategically as it have allowed them a venue for airing concerns with district leadership. In the Swiss RPP, the presence of a researcher meant a meeting topic was taken up for discussion between teachers and students when it otherwise may not have been, yet the researcher had little voice in the dialogue thereafter. This study has important implications for understanding the dynamics in RPPs and their intersections with policy and for promoting a reflective approach to collaboration (Penuel et al., 2025).

Arce-Trigatti, P., Chukhray, I., & López-Turley, R. (2018). Research–practice partnerships in education. In B. Schneider (Ed.), Handbook of the sociology of education in the 21st century (pp. 561–579). Springer. Denner, J., Bean, S., Campe, S., Martinez, J., & Torres, D. (2019). Negotiating Trust, Power, and Culture in a Research–Practice Partnership. AERA Open, 5(2), 2332858419858635. https://doi.org/10.1177/2332858419858635 Farrell, C. C., Penuel, W. R., Coburn, C. E., Daniel, J., & Steup, L. (2021). Research-practice partnerships in education: The state of the field. William T. Grant Foundation. http://wtgrantfoundation.org/research-practice-partnerships-in-education-the-state-of-the-field Gamez-Djokic, B. (2024). Of boundaries and borders: A micro-interactional examination of consensus and knowledge-construction in a research-practice partnership. Learning, Culture and Social Interaction, 45, 100802. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lcsi.2024.100802 Penuel, W. R., Farrell, C. C., & Daniel, J. (2025). Research–practice partnerships: Linking policy, practice, and research for equity (pp. 417–436). In L. Cohen-Vogel, P. Youngs, & J. Scott (Eds.), Handbook of education policy research (2nd ed.). American Educational Research Association. https://doi.org/10.2307/jj.31510356.24

A central challenge in school-university collaboration concerns the establishment of mutuality in joint work between practitioners and researchers. Research-practice partnerships (RPPs) seek to address this challenge through an equitable approach to collaborative research (Vetter et al., 2022). In line with their guiding principles, RPPs aim to develop evidence-based solutions, align research more closely with real-world challenges of practice, and promote co-design, diversity of perspectives, and shared responsibility (Farrell et al., 2021). In doing so, RPPs differ from more traditional forms of university-school collaboration in which practitioners have limited opportunities to shape research agendas. Despite the considerable benefits attributed to RPPs, challenges remain, particularly in designing and sustaining these partnerships. Challenges such as differing expectations regarding the pace of work stem from cultural, professional, and organizational differences between research and practice communities (Penuel et al., 2015). These differences have been conceptualized as boundaries and, when constructively navigated through people, practices, and objects, are understood to entail learning potential for both researchers and practitioners operating at the boundaries of joint work (Farrell et al., 2022). However, little is known about how practitioners make sense of their involvement in joint work. This study aims to deepen understanding of school practitioners’ experiences of RPPs conceptualized as joint work at the boundaries (Penuel et al., 2015). It addresses the following questions: How do school practitioners reflect their experiences over the course of an RPP, and how, if at all, do boundaries emerge in their accounts? The study draws on twelve semi-structured interviews with school practitioners participating in a three-year RPP project between the Zurich University of Teacher Education (PH Zurich) and four secondary schools. The data were analyzed using reflexive thematic analysis as the interviews provided detailed accounts on individual experiences, understandings, and perceptions (Braun & Clarke, 2021). Following an iterative and reflexive coding process, overarching themes were developed to capture shared patterns of meaning across participants’ accounts. The findings reveal three broad themes: (1) pragmatic collaboration “try it when it fits”; (2) collaboration as boundary experience – “adjustments were made on both sides”; and (3) navigating collaboration through relational practices “you have to push people on things”. The study contributes to the symposium’s broader discussion by illustrating how collaboration in RPPs emerges as a pragmatic and context-sensitive form of practitioner engagement in which boundaries are interpreted and negotiated through relational practices.

Braun, V., & Clarke, V. (2021). One size fits all? What counts as quality practice in (reflexive) thematic analysis? Qualitative Research in Psychology, 18(3), 328–352. https://doi.org/10.1080/14780887.2020.1769238 Farrell, C. C., Penuel, W. R., Allen, A., Anderson, E. R., Bohannon, A. X., Coburn, C. E., & Brown, S. L. (2022). Learning at the Boundaries of Research and Practice: A Framework for Understanding Research–Practice Partnerships. Educational Researcher, 51(3), 197–208. https://doi.org/10.3102/0013189X211069073 Farrell, C. C., Penuel, W. R., Coburn, C., Daniel, J., & Steup, L. (2021). Research Practice Research-Practice Partnerships in Education: Partner The State of the Field. William T. Grant Foundation. Penuel, W. R., Allen, A.-R., Coburn, C. E., & Farrell, C. (2015). Conceptualizing Research–Practice Partnerships as Joint Work at Boundaries. Journal of Education for Students Placed at Risk (JESPAR), 20(1–2), 182–197. https://doi.org/10.1080/10824669.2014.988334 Vetter, A., Faircloth, B. S., Hewitt, K. K., Gonzalez, L. M., He, Y., & Rock, M. L. (2022). Equity and Social Justice in Research Practice Partnerships in the United States. Review of Educational Research, 92(5), 829–866. https://doi.org/10.3102/00346543211070048