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At NNERPP, our current thinking around how to center equity in RPPs is captured in a three-pronged vision of equity, which was informed by the NNERPP community and emerged during the 2019 NNERPP Annual Forum. We invited our colleague Erin Henrick to develop a session for the 2019 meeting to help participants explore how equity was being taken up in their work, in addition to considering how these efforts related back to the 5 Dimensions of RPP Effectiveness framework. Together, session participants identified three ways equity may show up in RPPs:

  • Through the development of equitable relationships between those from the research and practice sides in order to support equitable participation in RPPs, thus explicitly addressing historical imbalances of power between these communities
  • Through the consideration of equity-related goals for the research and inquiry activities of the RPP
  • Through the efforts of the RPP to confront and dismantle systemic outcomes that contribute to persistent inequities in education

In a subsequent NNERPP Extra article, “Attending to Issues of Equity in Evaluating Research-Practice Partnership Outcomes,” Henrick and colleagues discussed in further detail how these three ways may also show up in the 5 Dimensions of Effectiveness.

This framing was also later taken up in “Research-Practice Partnerships in Education: The State of the Field” (2021), which highlights different conceptions of equity that emerged in interviews with RPP leaders and likewise organizes them into three general conceptions of equity: Conceptions centered on 1) the process of partnering, 2) the outcomes an RPP seeks to achieve, and 3) the goals of an RPP to address systems that contribute to or reproduce inequities (Farrell et al., 2021, pp. 14-15).

Although partnerships may differ in how they conceptualize and realize equity-centered aims across the pathways outlined here, we have observed that dimensions of equity are becoming ever-more critical to our members’ work.

Recent Efforts Supporting Further Ideation of Equity in RPPs

NNERPP supported a community-developed equity framework, led by NNERPP member Metropolitan Educational Research Consortium, which illustrates the factors that influence equity-based RPP work and resulted in the development of an open-access book. The goal of the book is to provide a collection of case studies describing how RPPs navigate equity in the design and implementation of their projects and to develop recommendations for both research-side and practice-side RPP leaders engaged in this work.

Director of NNERPP, Paula Arce-Trigatti, also worked recently with Caitlin Farrell and additional colleagues on the paper “Conceptions and Practices of Equity in Research-Practice Partnerships.” This effort offers an additional framework that outlines how equity can show up in the mission and processes of RPPs, developed from interviews conducted with a large sample of RPPs. This framework may be helpful in serving as a conversation starter for those in partnerships wishing to further explore how equity does or does not show up in their work.