Colleen McLaughlin a Senior Lecturer at the University of Cambridge is leading a week 
long BERA e-discussion on Schools-University Partnerships For Educational Research from 
20-27 May on the BERA VRE (Virtual Research Environment) site.  To access the login 
page go to http://groups.tlrp.org/ and you are asked for your usename and password - if 
you haven't got an account you can get one from this login page. In her introductory 
statement Colleen raises questions that I think you may wish to respond to. I hope you'll 
join us and help to create a useful archive of responses. Here is Colleen's introductory 
statement: 


"For the last decade I have been involved with highly valued colleagues in developing and 
studying a schools-university partnerships for educational research. In the conclusion to a 
book where we last paused and reflected we concluded that the partnership had a long 
way to go but that, ‘We shared, and still share, the view that if educational research does 
not lead to educational practice that is in some sense better – more thoughtful, more just, 
more effective, more rewarding for pupils or teachers – then there is not much point to 
it. We also shared the view that there was ‘room for improvement’ in what educational 
research was achieving, and therefore in how it was done. And, although there was much 
less clarity or consensus amongst us about how it could be done better, we shared 
sufficient confidence in the idea of a schools-university research partnership to be willing 
to invest a good deal of effort in exploring the possibilities of such a partnership.’ 
(McLaughlin et al 2006)

We concluded that schools and universities had divergent but overlapping concerns and 
that the differences were based on:

   1. The populations to be servedThe context of knowledge use
   2. The process of dissemination
   3. The criteria for quality control
   4. An emphasis on process or product
   5. Accountability systems

We also argued that universities were in a service role. ‘Given that schools are not much 
interested in the production of abstract academic knowledge, but rather in research to 
foster the development of their own well-founded, contextualised practice, the function of 
university involvement in the partnership is to help schools generate the kind of 
knowledge and practical development that they value. Instead of a symmetric partnership 
in which each partner helps the other to pursue its own distinctive goals, this is an 
asymmetric partnership, with the school partners in the front-line role and the university 
faculty in a crucial support role.  The basis of such a partnership is one of mutual respect 
for contrasting kinds of expertise and of shared goals, including the common ultimate 
goal of providing high-quality education, and the intermediate goal of the development of 
researching schools.’

I would like in this week’s discussion to focus on the space for collaborative research 
between universities and schools and:

    * explore how colleagues view the purposes of the work, especially in the current 
educational policy context and accountability systems
    * The particular contributions to research that such partnerships can and should make.

I hope this might be a useful way to set a future course and look forward to engaging 
with you."


Love Jack.