Issue 5 - Special Issue Fall 2022

The idea for this issue of The Assembly began as part of the 2021 RESHAPE Conference as part of a focused mentoring experience for graduate students and early career scholars. In what follows, we will describe the origins of the RESHAPE network and the design of the conference. While not all of the article authors attended the RESHAPE conference, all of the articles seek to reimagine community research - from hardships to new understandings - to offer possibility, inspiration, and connection for potential paths forward.

Strong research-practice partnership (RPP) relationships are defined in part by having routines and norms that support equitable participation of each partner, but exactly how those routines and norms are achieved is unclear. Utilizing cultural historical activity theory (CHAT), we examine two RPPs who shifted their mediating artifacts – the tools, rules, and division of labor that structure joint work – to move toward more equitable partnership. These narrative accounts provide insight into how RPP participants – researchers, practitioners, and graduate students – can leverage moments of change to maintain or regain equitable power distribution.

Research-practice partnerships (RPPs) are a promising tool for producing educational research that supports sustainable and equitable school reform. However, the status quo in RPPs poses some challenges to the achievement of these admirable aims. We show the pervasiveness of these obstacles using institutional logics—historical patterns, practices, and systems used to make sense of our world

In this article, three immigrant scholars (two with Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) and one formerly undocumented) come together to reflect and theorize about and from their experiences engaging in research with and about undocumented immigrants. Through a Chicanx/Latinx feminist framework, the authors share their historias to dissect their lived experiences as researchers and research participants and how these experiences inform their understanding and engagement with research today.