Research-Practice Partnerships, Urban Education Reform and Teacher Positionality: An Examination of Community Change and Youth Empowerment

Partnerships between schools, universities, community organizations and private businesses have become an increasingly popular response to the privatization of resources accompanying market-based education reforms (Rodriguez, 2020; Warren, 2005). Through these partnerships, stakeholders mobilize resources across sectors and scales in an effort to support students, families, communities and schools. Some of these partnerships, such as public-private partnerships between schools and corporate organizations, have been critically examined as emblematic of the neoliberalization of public schooling (Giroux, 2013; Lipman, 2013). Research-practice partnerships (RPPs), “long-term, mutualistic collaborations between practitioners and researchers that are intentionally organized to investigate problems of practice and solutions for improving district outcomes” (Coburn, Penuel, Geil, 2013, p.2), have recently cropped up as a “promising” (Datnow, 2020), “hope-based” (Schneider, 2018) equity-oriented alternative to top-down reforms (Coburn et al., 2013). While these types of partnerships stand to generate important research and knowledge on schools and teaching and learning by involving multiple stakeholders and practitioners as well as youth in the research process, thereby expanding conventional modes of school-community-university collaboration, there is still a paucity of empirical research that supports the construction of RPPs as contributing to equity. Specifically, there is little to no empirical knowledge about how and the extent to which RPPs are intervening in and changing the structural issues they are positioned as redressing. Depending on the scholar and RPP, they are variously constructed as race-conscious or race-neutral. Furthermore, while scholarship has focused on the role of researchers in RPPs, and on the relationships between researchers and practitioners, few studies have focused specifically on what the experiences of teachers reveals about the impact of RRPs. Research-Practice Partnerships, Urban Education Reform and Teacher Positionality: An Examination of Community Change and Youth Empowerment (CCYE), takes up these issues. I examine CCYE, a RPP between a research center housed in a university in California, local civic agencies and business partners, and local urban high schools, that is focused on cultivating civic inclusivity of racially and economically minoritized youth. This dissertation asks: (1) How and to what extent do RPPs intervene in and/or reproduce the systems and structures they seek to redress? a. What do RPP actors’ communicative and discursive practices, such as their use of figurative language and speech interactions, reveal about RPPs’ functions and impacts? (2) What are teachers’ roles in RPPs and how do they make sense of their roles, experiences, and work in RPPs?/nTo answer these questions, I conducted an ethnographic case study of CCYE. My findings show that teachers’ professional and personal pasts influenced the way teachers made sense of working within a multi-organizational partnership as well as the way that they took up their roles. Teachers made sense of their roles dialogically and drew on social and cultural resources from their past careers and experiences to identify organizational boundaries in the partnership and delineate their organizational position and tasks. My findings also suggest that increasing concerns with the civic empowerment and career and technical education of young people in state (Linked Learning), and federal-level (Career and Technical Education) reforms engendered slippages in the way that teachers made sense of their roles and CCYE’s goals of civic inclusion, referring to themselves as “employers” and “bosses” and their students as “employees” and “workers”. I show that working within these slippages impacted teachers' sense of agency and role in ways that differed across racial lines. White teachers' role negotiation in CCYE involved shifting practices and language to take on employer-like qualities, while the discomforts of role negotiation for Black teachers revealed a fraught relationship to the civil sphere. I trace teachers' differential experiences of discomfort to the underlying logic in current education reform that civic inclusion through school can be achieved through participation in the labor market. Finally, through conversation and discourse analysis, I illuminate the prevailing communicative practices and racializing discourses that CCYE actors drew on to construe and position themselves as social justice actors. By the same token, I also illuminate the ways in which actors disciplined and censored one another through talk and emotional interaction in the interest of maintaining an essential idea of CCYE as a social justice organization. This project makes an important contribution to literature interested in the impact and function of school-community-university partnerships and teachers’ roles and experiences in “alternative” reforms. By drawing on critical theories of race and organizations, in particular racial formation theory and racial organizations, my project responds to urgent calls to critically examine the technologies and relationships that shape RPPs’ impacts. My findings demonstrate that RPPs are embedded in contextual reform histories as well as the histories of the actors that populate them. These histories shape how RPPs respond to structural inequities as well as their capacity to intervene in them. Research-Practice Partnerships, Urban Education Reform and Teacher Positionality: An Examination of Community Change and Youth Empowerment (CCYE), takes up these issues. I examine CCYE, a RPP between a research center housed in a university in California’s Bay Area, local civic agencies and business partners, and local urban high schools that is focused on cultivating civic inclusivity of racially and economically minoritized youth. This dissertation asks: (1) How and to what extent do RPPs intervene in and/or reproduce the systems and structures they seek to redress? a. What do RPP actors’ communicative and discursive practices, such as their use of figurative language and speech interactions, reveal about RPPs’ functions and impacts? (2) What are teachers’ roles in RPPs and how they make sense of their roles, experiences, and work in RPPs?/nTo answer these questions, I conducted an ethnographic case study of CCYE. My findings show that teachers professional and personal pasts influenced the way teachers made sense of working within a multi-organizational partnership as well as the way that they took up their roles. Teachers made sense of their roles dialogically and drew on social and cultural resources from their past careers and experiences to identify organizational boundaries in the partnership and delineate their organizational position and tasks. My findings also suggest that increasing concerns with the civic empowerment and career and technical education of young people in state (Linked Learning), and federal-level (Career and Technical Education) reforms engendered slippages in the way that teachers made sense of their roles and CCYE’s goals of civic inclusion, referring to themselves as “employers” and “bosses” and their students as “employees” and “workers”. I show that working within these slippages impacted teachers' sense of agency and role in ways that differed across racial lines. White teachers' role negotiation in CCYE involved shifting practices and language to take on employer-like qualities, while the discomforts of role negotiation for Black and non-Black teachers of color revealed a fraught relationship to the civil sphere. I trace teachers' differential experiences of discomfort to the underlying logic in current education reform that civic inclusion through school can be achieved through participation in the labor market. Finally, through conversation and discourse analysis, I illuminate the prevailing communicative practices and racializing discourses that CCYE actors drew on to construe and position themselves as social justice actors. By the same token, I also illuminate the ways in which actors disciplined and censored one another through talk and emotional interaction in the interest of maintaining an essential idea of CCYE as a social justice organization. This project makes an important contribution to literature interested in the impact and function of school-community-university partnerships and teachers’ roles and experiences in “alternative” reforms. By integrating critical theories of race and organizations into my analysis, my project responds to recent, urgent calls to critically examine the technologies and relationships that shape RPPs’ impacts. My findings demonstrate that RPPs are embedded in contextual reform histories as well as the histories of the actors that populate them. These histories shape how RPPs respond to structural inequities as well as their capacity to intervene in them.

Advisor: Leonardo, Zeus