We are so excited to officially release version 2.0 of the NNERPP RPP Brokers Handbook! The RPP Brokers Handbook codifies the work of brokers in education RPPs, thereby identifying the specific and essential role they play in enabling public scholarship and social impact, in hopes of strengthening the craft of brokering and helping current and aspiring RPP brokers in learning about and honing brokering skills. Our newly released expanded version features a number of new cases, tools, and vignettes that aspiring or current brokers might use to inform their RPP brokering practice. 

For those readers who are new to the term and concept of brokering in RPPs, we include the following definition of brokers here, as put forth in the Handbook: A broker is “a person who helps members of research and practice organizations integrate into an RPP by cultivating and maintaining the relationships needed to effectively support research production and use.”

Background

Before we dive into the specifics of this Handbook, let’s take a short walk to explain how we got here. The RPP brokers conversation started at NNERPP back in 2017 during the Annual Forum, our yearly gathering of members and friends where we talk RPP shop. In this earliest of phases, we didn’t actually use the word “broker” to describe the work and role but instead, focused on exploratory conversations examining the situations requiring a “go-between” in RPPs. It was a year later at the 2018 Annual Forum where a session on “Brokers” first made an appearance. Led by Carrie Conaway and Erin O’Hara, who were both leading RPPs at the time and representing practice and research perspectives, respectively, the session invited participants to identify the challenges present in RPP work and how RPP brokers could attend to those. The very early formings of a framework were introduced at that session as well, with a single table listing the activities and responsibilities taken up by brokers in moving between a purely policy/practice oriented space and one focused purely on research. 

In the year leading up to the 2019 Annual Forum, the conversation on brokers intensified, with more folks in the NNERPP community recognizing themselves and their work in this new space. By the time we got to the Forum, there was already talk of a Handbook that might formally introduce a definition of RPP brokers and contribute examples of how they show up in RPPs. The 2019 brokering session at the Forum was led by Laura Wentworth and Carrie Conaway, who would then lead us towards the development and writing of the Handbook you see today. In the 2019 session, session attendees were invited to stay connected with the work in a number of ways going forward; one of these ways involved sharing cases, vignettes, or tools that people might have used illustrating how their brokering practice took place in real life. Laura and Carrie led a tremendous effort to collect these over two years, editing and providing feedback along the way. Eventually, Samantha Shewchuk was invited to join the team given her extensive expertise in knowledge mobilization, a closely related area of work to brokering activities. Samantha helped provide a robust literature review that would help the authors connect the real-life experiences of RPP brokers with evidence and findings from research. As a “behind the scenes” supporter of the work all along its history, Paula Arce-Trigatti finally joined the team in an official author capacity in 2021, helping edit the Handbook and contributing key ideas that would inform the framework (in addition to designing the figure itself).

Why the RPP Brokers Handbook

The NNERPP RPP Brokers Handbook is intended to be a practical, research- and experience-informed handbook that clarifies the various activities that collectively make up “RPP brokering”. Its key contributions to the world of RPPs include a framework for how to conceptually understand the role of two defining aims that organize the work of brokers – brokering to strengthen partners and brokering to strengthen partnership – in addition to providing practical guidance from those who have engaged in brokering practices to support RPP work. It joins a short list of books in the RPP space (see for example here and here), and is the only one that focuses exclusively on how to enact the critical role of brokering within partnerships. Our hope is that the Handbook provides much needed knowledge for those aspiring to become a broker, as well as those currently tasked with such activities. We also hope that the Handbook helps make visible a number of key responsibilities and activities that often go unnoticed in RPP work, and yet are absolutely essential to its survival and success.

We provide a brief overview of the six components that make up the RPP Brokers Handbook here; for a more detailed description, please see pages 7 and following and 16 and following in the Handbook itself. As mentioned above, there are two overarching buckets of work that organize the six primary activities that we think brokers engage in: brokering to strengthen partners and brokering to strengthen partnerships. In the first of these buckets, we include (i) competencies: the brokering activities necessary to build individual partners’ competency for engaging in an RPP; (ii) relationships: the activities necessary to develop and nurture relationships to weather partnering challenges; and (iii) research use: the activities necessary to create the conditions that will support research production and use within the partnership. Together, this group of activities is focused more on developing the capacity for individuals that will make up the RPP to effectively partner. The second set of components instead focus on the necessary “invisible” structures that the partnership itself will be built on. In this bucket, we include: (i) governance and administration: the brokering activities necessary to develop partnership governance and administrative structures; (ii) process and communication: the activities necessary for designing partnership processes and communications routines; and (iii) assessment and continuous improvement: the activities necessary to support the assessment and continuous improvement of the RPP. 

How to Use the Handbook

For users of the Handbook, we recommend reading through the different components of the framework first (page 6), to get a sense for which types of activities tend to constitute “RPP brokering”. We then invite readers to dive into the numerous examples, tools, and vignettes curated for the Handbook to better understand how the components of the framework work in practice. These real-world examples can be especially helpful for guiding RPP brokers in their own practice, especially when concrete actions might be needed.

Coming Next

We have two follow-up initiatives on the horizon for this effort: first, we are in the process of writing an open source version of the Handbook that will be published in the next year. Second, we have completed a pilot version of the RPP Brokers Workshop through NNERPP and are now preparing to offer a live version soon. Please stay tuned!

In the meantime, if you find yourself engaging in RPP brokering activities and would like to contribute an example, case study, vignette, or tool that may be featured in the upcoming published version of the Handbook, please reach out to Laura Wentworth (laura@caedpartners.org) for more information. 

Happy brokering!

Paula Arce-Trigatti is Director of the National Network of Education Research-Practice Partnerships (NNERPP).

Suggested citation: Arce-Trigatti, P. (2022). Introducing the NNERPP RPP Brokers Handbook, V. 2. NNERPP Extra, 4(3), 16-17.