HOW MIGHT SITUATIONAL MAPPING BE USED IN RPPs?

Research-practice partnerships (RPPs) –long-term collaborations bringing together diverse forms of expertise to foster educational improvement or equitable transformation through engagement with research– have the potential to address long-standing and pressing issues in education systems. However, the complexity of developing and sustaining these partnerships often creates challenges that can impede progress. In our own partnership with a state agency, situational mapping analysis emerged as a promising collaborative approach for supporting partnership work because it provides a structured framework for examining complex social situations and relationships. By visually mapping the people, resources, policies, and conversations within a partnership, situational mapping can make visible the often hidden factors influencing partnership work.

We suggest situational mapping as a systematic way to build knowledge on how to better support anyone wishing to conduct collaboration-dependent systemic research, whether they are doctoral students, early career researchers, or experienced practitioners. We hypothesize that this approach is particularly valuable for RPPs, where diverse stakeholders with different institutional priorities must navigate complex systems while maintaining productive collaboration. In this article, we explore how situational mapping can serve as both an analytical tool and a developmental practice for strengthening collaborative skills essential to RPP work and we introduce our plans to conduct a situational mapping analysis on the process and manner in which team members worked together during a recent RPP study.

SITUATIONAL MAPPING

Situational mapping is a research approach that uses visual mapping to identify and illustrate the complexities of social worlds and arenas of actions. The approach creates three types of maps to examine different aspects of the partnership:

1. Messy situational maps that identify all the major elements in the research situation–including people, organizations, resources, policies, and key conversations–and explore how these elements relate to each other
2. Social worlds maps that identify the different groups involved, their key resources and priorities, and the areas where they must work together or negotiate with each other 
3. Positional maps to identify the range of perspectives that exist (and don’t exist) around controversial or complex issues within the partnership 

These maps serve as analytical tools that focus on revealing complexities – the key elements and conditions that characterize the situation being studied. Researchers use these maps to construct memos describing diagrammed relations; memos provide researchers with an opportunity to ask questions about relations that teams can collaboratively explore.

SITUATIONAL MAPPING AND RPPs

In the RPP model, researchers are often employed at public and private universities, research institutions, or community groups that conduct research, while practice-side partners often administer education through state education agencies, local education agencies, or schools.

In early childhood RPPs, these institutional complexities are magnified by the sector’s fragmented governance structure. Research partnerships must navigate coordination challenges across multiple provider settings, each with distinct operational requirements for funding, quality assurance and regulatory compliance. The distributed federal oversight and varying state-level standards create additional layers of institutional complexity that situational mapping can help teams systematically examine and understand.

Conducting research in an RPP typically requires communication, negotiation, and flexibility to cross organizational and/or role-defined boundaries in order to collaboratively achieve common goals (Denner et al., 2019; Penuel et al., 2015; Tseng et al., 2017). Partnership incentives often differ by institutional home: for example, researchers may seek to achieve professional goals that align with tenure or contract renewal, while policymakers may prioritize the revision of policies and the creation of products to guide practice. The two can be aligned, but competing interests in each industry (higher education vs. public preK-12 education) can position the two groups, and even team members, against one another rather than together on the same plane.

We propose that these elements and complexities make situational mapping a particularly useful tool for any RPP participant seeking to learn from their collaborative work. RPP participants may wish to use situational mapping to pursue the following goals:

1. Unveiling hidden complexity: The mapping process reveals the intricate web of influences, relationships, and factors that affect collaborative work, making implicit dynamics explicit. This visibility can help teams identify potential barriers before they become problematic.
2. Developing self-awareness: By reflecting on individual and collective positionalities, participants gain deeper understanding of how their backgrounds, experiences, and institutional contexts shape their contributions. This awareness can lead to more thoughtful and intentional collaboration.
3. Building collaborative capacity: The process illuminates essential skills needed for cross-organizational collaboration, potentially informing better preparation for future RPP participants. These skills include boundary-crossing communication, negotiation, and flexibility in research approaches.
4. Identifying structural barriers: Mapping can reveal systemic and institutional factors that hinder effective collaboration, leading to potential organizational or policy changes. Rather than attributing challenges to individual shortcomings, the process helps locate issues within broader systems.
5. Bridging diverse perspectives: RPPs involve stakeholders from different professional cultures with distinct values, languages, and priorities. Situational mapping provides a methodology to make these differences visible and negotiable. The visual nature of mapping can transcend professional jargon and create a common language. This aligns with social constructionism’s emphasis on how different social worlds can create their own terminologies and meanings, requiring deliberate work to build shared understanding. 
6. Addressing power dynamics: The mapping process can illuminate power imbalances between researchers and practitioners, creating space to address them constructively (The Collaborative Education Research Collective, 2023). By making these dynamics explicit, teams can work toward more equitable partnerships.
7. Managing complexity: RPPs operate in complex, multi-layered environments influenced by policy changes, funding constraints, and shifting organizational priorities. Situational mapping is specifically designed to analyze such complexity. It provides a framework for understanding how different elements interact and influence one another.
8. Supporting adaptability: As RPPs frequently need to adjust their approaches in response to emerging realities, situational mapping offers a structured way to understand and navigate these shifts. Regular mapping exercises can help teams track changes over time and adjust strategies accordingly.

These mapping exercises may be particularly valuable during specific partnership moments that demand collective sense-making. During initial theory of action development, teams might use mapping to surface unstated assumptions about how change occurs and identify potential misalignments in partners' mental models before they crystallize into problems. When mid-project pivots become necessary–due to recruitment challenges, unexpected findings, or shifting community priorities–mapping could provide a structured framework for reassessing directions while maintaining awareness of broader contextual forces. Similarly, when onboarding new team members after personnel changes, mapping exercises may help newcomers quickly grasp the complex web of relationships and constraints while revealing how their addition shifts existing partnership dynamics. The systematic nature of situational mapping provides structure for teams to process complexity during these critical transition points.

SITUATIONAL MAPPING IN OUR OWN RPP

In our own early childhood education RPP, we plan to explore how RPP team members worked together during a recent study by conducting a situational mapping analysis. We share more about our RPP and our plans for this study below.

Background: Our RPP Context

The New York City Early Childhood Research Network RPP aims to build New York City’s capacity to investigate and inform early childhood policy and practice for young children. Facilitated by the New York Early Childhood Professional Development Institute, RPP partners include a number of New York City agencies and universities and colleges. Our research team at the Bank Street College of Education collaborated with the Division of Early Childhood Education (DECE) in the NYC Public Schools on a convergent mixed-methods study examining racial and gender disparities in special education referrals and services provided to young children. 

The policymakers and practitioners in the NYC Public Schools who we partnered with were making high-stakes and systems-level decisions requiring timely recalibration of the research design and implementation to align the priorities and needs of each party. At the same time, we also had various organizations with competing priorities represented on the research-side alone, including six researchers and one research assistant across four higher education institutions. As we worked through the opportunities and challenges afforded by this cross-institutional study, we realized that conducting a situational mapping analysis to examine the multiple and interacting influences that have affected within- and cross-team collaboration might help us –and hopefully others– to learn from this experience.

Our team's experience navigating these multi-sector early childhood partnerships positions us to test situational mapping methodology within this particularly complex institutional landscape before recommending broader adoption.

Our Proposed Study

Some of the challenges we encountered included misalignment in the time required for proposal development with the funder and the DOE (December 2020-July 2022), the funding cycle (May 2021-April 2023), obtaining Institutional Review Board approval (June 2021-July 2022, with ongoing amendments), and the commencement of data collection (November 2022). In the research team, each member negotiated deliverables consistent with their roles, institutional priorities, and their positionalities. For example, one team member requested that a peer-reviewed paper be included to show progress toward tenure, an outcome we associate with a higher education positionality (tenure-track). Two team members became parents at the outset of the project  – a positionality associated with social identity (family) and higher education (maternity leave). Additionally, another team member navigated roles at two universities, working to complete doctoral preparation at one and employment with the other as a member of the project (co-existing personal identity positionalities).

Revision of team member roles and responsibilities on this project demanded ongoing negotiation, triggered by multiple macro-contextual influences including funder requirements, higher education budget cuts and the COVID-19 pandemic, participant preferences, job changes, and life transitions. A change of political administration in New York City also created additional influences, some of which we were not able to anticipate and are considering in completing the write-up of findings. While these factors might typically be viewed as external to the research process, they proved to be inseparable from and fundamentally shaped our partnership dynamics.

As we reflected on the challenges we experienced, our ideas for a situational mapping analysis in the context of this RPP study took shape. We plan to explore the following using Clarke’s three mapping approaches to systematically examine our collaborative experience:

• Messy situational maps -- Participating team members will each identify elements that inform study design and then perform a relationship analysis between influences by connecting and describing their individual (and perhaps collective) significance in the context of our project.
• Social worlds maps -- Participating team members will identify individual priorities, actions, and routes that prompted us to join and conduct our study. Through routine conversation, we will identify and compare subworlds in our collective market of higher education and the larger intersectional market of the RPP.
• Positional maps -- Participating team members will identify our individual positionalities on discursive elements associated with predictable and unpredictable events that occurred in both the higher education and RPP spaces.

Given personnel transitions among our original team and practice-side partners, we plan to begin this situational mapping analysis with the core research team members who remain available-the Principal Investigator and the Research Assistant at minimum. This approach will allow us to pilot-test our mapping protocols through systematic self-reflection on our own collaborative experiences and institutional navigation throughout this project. 

Systematic self-reflection will occur over 18 months through weekly individual mapping sessions, bi-weekly collaborative discussions, and quarterly interviews, emphasizing systematic self-reflection on how team members' positionalities influenced their responses to funding pressures, organizational changes, and policy shifts. We see this initial implementation as foundational work that will inform broader adoption of situational mapping methodology in future early childhood RPP projects within the New York City Early Childhood Research Network and beyond.

We plan to use a social constructionism perspective to frame this situational mapping process as a collaborative co-reflection on the process and manner in which team members contributed to the study design and implementation. Social constructionism emphasizes how knowledge and meaning are jointly created through interaction rather than discovered, making it particularly suitable for examining the collaborative nature of RPPs where multiple stakeholders negotiate understanding across different institutional contexts). We suspect that questions around investigator agency will emerge across maps.

Our aim is to use findings from this situational mapping process to generate recommendations that will promote the development of collaborative research skills for anyone wishing to partner in an RPP. This approach can serve as a practical innovation that empowers research teams to co-construct cross-positional understanding in RPPs.

ADDITIONAL CONSIDERATIONS FOR USING SITUATIONAL MAPPING IN RPPs

For those wishing to explore the idea of situational mapping in RPPs, we offer the following list of additional considerations that may be important to design around: 

1. Time constraints: The intensive nature of situational mapping requires significant time investment from already busy professionals. Teams may struggle to prioritize reflective activities alongside the pressing demands of research and practice.
2. Vulnerability concerns: The reflective process may reveal sensitive issues around power, competence, or conflicting priorities that participants might be reluctant to address. Creating psychological safety is essential but challenging.
3. Methodological expertise: Facilitating effective situational mapping requires specific competencies that may not be readily available within all RPP teams, including visual facilitation techniques, experience with grounded theory approaches, group process management, and skills in synthesis and pattern recognition across complex data. Teams also need expertise in mixed methods and multi-modal qualitative approaches, along with competencies in cross-panel facilitation and equity-engaged practice. Without these specialized skills, the exercise may not yield meaningful insights.
4. Balancing structure and flexibility: Finding the right balance between structured mapping activities and allowing space for organic insights is crucial but challenging. Too much structure may limit creativity, while too little may lead to unfocused discussions.
5. Skills mismatch: Effective situational mapping requires competencies that may not align with traditional academic preparation, including visual facilitation, cross-contextual translation between institutional languages, and ethnographic observation skills. These reflective and systems thinking capacities often receive limited emphasis in doctoral programs, yet are crucial for meaningful collaborative analysis.

In our own proposed study, we have had to navigate a number of these challenges already. For example, to manage time constraints while ensuring depth, we plan to structure our systematic self-reflection process with clear protocols: weekly individual mapping sessions, bi-weekly collaborative discussions with focused agendas, and quarterly comprehensive reviews. This approach balances efficiency with the sustained engagement necessary for meaningful analysis.

Our existing trust and shared commitment as long-term collaborators creates the psychological safety necessary for vulnerable reflection. We've established that sensitive insights will remain within our team and that this work represents a genuine investment rather than an additional burden.

To ensure methodological rigor despite varying experience with situational mapping, we will maintain procedural transparency through detailed documentation, create thick descriptions of our mapping processes, and engage in ongoing reflexivity about our collaborative dynamics. We plan to balance structure and flexibility by establishing clear frameworks for each mapping type while remaining open to organic insights that emerge through sustained practice.

IN CONCLUSION

As complex educational challenges continue to require collaborative solutions, approaches like situational mapping may offer valuable tools for building the necessary skills and awareness to navigate these partnerships effectively. By explicitly examining the multiple and interacting influences that affect collaboration, we can better prepare researchers and practitioners to engage in meaningful, impactful work together.

We are excited to undertake and learn from our own situational mapping analysis which we hope will contribute to the growing body of knowledge on effective RPP practice and to provide a practical tool that can strengthen these vital partnerships. 

In closing, here we share a number of resources for RPP teams interested in implementing situational mapping in their own contexts. Happy mapping!

1. Clarke, A. E. (2003). Situational analyses: Grounded theory mapping after the postmodern turn. Symbolic Interaction, 26(4), 553-576. https://doi.org/10.1525/si.2003.26.4.553   
2. den Outer, B., Handley, K., & Price, M. (2013). Situational analysis and mapping for use in education research: A reflexive methodology? Studies in Higher Education, 38(10), 1504-1521. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/03075079.2011.641527 
3. Martin, W., Pauly, B., & MacDonald, M. (2016). Situational analysis for complex systems: Methodological development in public health research. AIMS Public Health, 3(1), 94-109. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5690266/ 
4. Murphy, J. K., et al. (2019). Methodological approaches to Situational analysis in global mental health: A scoping review. Global Mental Health, 6(11), 1-13. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6582459/

Sarika S. Gupta recently founded Ecological Learning Partners LLC and Xiaohan Zhu is an Assistant Professor at Texas A&M University.

References

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), 1-11. https://doi.org/10.1177/2332858419858635

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, 20(1-2), 182-197. https://doi.org/10.1080/10824669.2014.988334

The Collaborative Education Research Collective. (2023). Towards a field for collaborative education research: Developing a framework for the complexity of necessary learning. The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. https://hewlett.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/Collaborative-Education-Research.pdf 

Tseng, V., Easton, J., & Supplee, L. H. (2017). Research-practice partnerships: Building two-way streets of engagement. SRCD Social Policy Report, 30(4), 1-17. https://doi.org/10.1002/j.2379-3988.2017.tb00089.x

Suggested citation: Gupta, S. S. & Zhu, X. (2026). How Might Situational Mapping Be Used in RPPs? NNERPP Extra, 8(1), 12-20.