Abstract:

The creation of the 2023 close to practice partnership at Nottingham Trent University, builds upon work completed at university of Warwick in 2022. The aim is to establish a connected approach to education research from partners at the university and those within our education setting partners. This initiative focuses on the professional development and knowledge exchange including colleagues within partner schools and those employed by the university. The project funds an opportunity for close to practice researchers and evidence informed practitioners to work closely with HE staff and to participate in professional development session across the academic year. Dedicated meetings between colleagues who have been matched for research interest, support the work of practitioner researchers in schools through co-creation of research questions and interrogation of methodological approaches and ethical consideration; whilst also allowing settings to focus their close to practice research activity in areas that will have impact for them as institutions, solving real problems and addressing issues faced by their communities including children’s and young people’s outcomes, organisational culture, teacher job satisfaction and teacher effectiveness.

The research projects understand the tension between the 6A’s (Elliot Major and Higgins 2019; Higgins 2018) namely, the need to make research accurate, accessible, actionable, appropriate, acceptable and achievable. The benefits from this combined partnership approach to research in education settings, and the use of research by schools, includes professional development for all parties, equity, supporting continued career progression for established staff with many years of classroom experience as well as ECTs who enter the profession with significant research skills and knowledge. The funding and the partnership knowledge exchange activity provides the time and space needed to support close to practice research (Parsons 2021). Following the year long partnership colleagues will be invited to present at conference to discuss and disseminate their newly created projects as well as discuss the issue of power and hierarchy that may have been at play.

The close to practice partnership is about collaboration between research and practice such that knowledge (evidence) is co-constructed, ‘new knowledge creation (the what) through the shared endeavours of research and practice working together equally (the how)’ (Parsons et al., 2020b, p. 3; emphasis in original). Knowledge co-construction is an explicitly and deliberately contrastive stance with knowledge transfer or exchange, since it recognises that there is a shared and more ‘synergistic’ (Leibowitz et al., 2014, p. 1258) space between research and practice which can offer new insights and theories for both research and practice (Guldberg et al., 2017). Such a ‘third space’ (Ostinelli, 2016, p. 542) enables the combination of practical (exemplary) knowledge of practitioners and families (Thomas, 2012) and the embodied knowledge of children (Parsons et al., 2020b) with more formalised, research-based knowledge, without positioning one type of knowledge as more or less valuable or important than the other. Rather, they are different but equally valuable forms of knowledge, some of which may be more tacit and all of which may be differently represented by the people working in collaboration (Guldberg et al., 2017).

Keywords:

Close to practice, knowledge exchange, practitioner research, professional development, third space, educational research.