Research-practice partnerships (RPPs) are emerging as a promising approach for educational change by closing the gap between educational research and practice. However, these partnerships face several challenges, such as addressing cultural differences as well as relationship-building in a historically unbalanced relationship between researchers and practitioners. Scholars have argued that these cultural differences, also called boundaries, have learning potential if approached constructively, but that we need to know more about what characterizes them in an educational context. The aim of this study is to contribute to our understanding of frameworks for RPPs. By analysing 45 hours of video recordings from meetings in an RPP between four researchers and 300 practitioners, the study offers a characterization of seven different boundaries organized into three different boundary themes: a) prerequisites for collaboration, b) collaborative practices, and c) collaborative content. Moreover, the different boundaries affect the positioning of different actors in the RPP. For example, depending on the boundary expressed, teachers are positioned as either flawed implementers or co-inquirers. We argue that the boundaries and different participant positions within the RPPs they reinforce may affect their learning potentials.

This study examines how researchers and practitioners navigate between different discourses in a large-scale research-practice partnership (RPP). While argued to be challenging to conduct, RPPs are also argued to be promising for closing the research-practice gap in education. To contribute to our understanding of RPPs, 45 h of video recorded interactions between researchers and practitioners in a large scale RPP including 300 participants are analyzed. Through a discourse analysis, the presence of two discourses is identified: (1) an outcome-oriented discourse that aligns with traditional positions and division of labour, and (2) a process-oriented discourse that aligns with collaborative and less hierarchical positions. Explanations for the results are discussed in relation to didactic and curriculum traditions, as well as resource management and task distribution. Moreover, it is argued that, while the negotiation of discourses is necessary to avoid hegemony, the negotiation also produces ambiguous participant identities in the RPP.

There is an increasing movement in education towards closer collaboration between researchers and practitioners and research-practice partnerships (RPPs) are seen as one promising approach. However, some challenges still exist. To work in a new collaborative context such as RPPs, researchers and practitioners must adjust their roles in relation to each other. To better inform this movement, we conducted a systematic literature review of 80 articles investigating what roles researchers and practitioners are described to assume in RPPs. The results demonstrate eight different roles for researchers and practitioners, respectively, which reflect variations in both the main processes and tasks for school improvement in RPPs, as well as how these tasks are divided between the participants. Further, based on how tasks are distributed, the different roles provide varying opportunities to pursue a democratisation of evidence.

Research‐practice partnerships (RPPs) have drawn a great deal of attention as promising structures for bringing educational research and practice closer together. However, promising as RPPs may be, challenges still exist and there have been calls for studies investigating how research can be used within RPPs, and how to include practitioners more in the generation of research evidence. We address these calls by conducting a systematic review of the research literature on RPPs. Our review of 57 articles shows that research is used in various ways to inform both the methods and content for facilitating school improvement in RPPs. For instance, research on effective PD can be directly applied to a Professional Development (PD) programme to inform the methods of the intervention, or research findings can be used as the content of an intervention to facilitate teacher learning. Moreover, the results suggest that the type of research used to inform RPPs affects the kinds of opportunities for research use that are presented to practitioners; ranging from applying research directly to practice (instrumental use), to using research to extend understanding (conceptual use), or using research methods and methodologies in order to increase practitioners’ capacity for improving education (process use). Based on the results, we argue that the presented opportunities for research use in interventions strongly affect teachers’ opportunities to participate in the generation of research evidence and thereby achieve a more democratised evidence system.