STORIES OF RPP IMPACT: SIX RESEARCH VIGNETTES

What does authentic RPP work look like? How does RPP research make an impact in the real world? We share six stories of RPP research and impact, as told by partnerships within NNERPP from various settings and contexts, to get at answering these questions.

LEARNING TO CO-DESIGN INSTRUCTIONAL MATERIALS FOR SCALE AND SPREAD

The inquiryHub partnership, a design-based RPP, is co-developing high school instructional materials for biology, chemistry, and physics. What are students’ experiences of the curriculum, and how do they vary by race/ethnicity and by gender? How do teachers judge and experience the materials? iHub gives a behind-the-scenes look at partnership research exploring these questions by field testing curriculum materials.

CENTERING COMMUNITY VOICE IN RPP WORK THROUGH CIVIC IMAGINATION AND STORYTELLING

Civic imagination is defined as a way of shaping a vision for the future through the uniquely human capacity for storytelling. Digital Promise shares how civic imagination not only played a vital role in their RPP work seeking to expand rural students’ understanding of computational thinking, but how its principles may also play out in other RPPs as a way to help center the voices of practice-side participants.

DO RESEARCH-PRACTICE PARTNERSHIPS DO ‘POLICY’? HOW RPPs ENGAGE IN AND THINK ABOUT POLICY-RELATED WORK

“I don’t think research-practice partnerships (RPPs) do any policy work since the ‘P’ in RPP stands for ‘practice’ and not ‘policy’.”
This is an assumption we have seen surface, yet at the same time, from what we know, a sizable majority of RPPs actually engage heavily in policy-related work. In this article, we invite our membership to reflect with us and explore what the “practice” in “research-practice partnership” really refers to.

WHAT YOU REALLY NEED TO KNOW ABOUT STARTING AN RPP

What are the essentials of establishing an RPP? A recent study invited RPP leaders from various contexts to share their insights. Seven things to know about starting and maintaining an RPP emerged from their responses.