What Is It Like to Do Community-Engaged Research? Lessons Learned From University Researchers’ Perspectives

Community-engaged research calls on us to rethink ourselves as researchers and to address lopsided researcher-researched relationships. As a group of university researchers, we participated in a research-practice partnership that included a research-intensive university, an internationally recognized professional learning network, a ministry of education funder, and a school district in Alberta, Canada. Despite the long-standing, collaborative relationships between these organizations, a spin-off research partnership slid into traditional research practices that limited the project’s potential. To critically reflect on these events, we engaged in eight cogenerative dialogues and three semistructured interviews to examine key moments in the partnership more closely. Our findings highlight how limitations in our fields of view as well as significant changes at crucial points in the partnership affected our ability to engage in sustained community-engaged research. We discuss critical learnings about this partnership in particular and offer recommendations that will help future research-practice partnerships assess and sustain their collaborations in meaningful ways.