Whose Work Are We Doing\? A Self-Assessment Tool for Researchers in a Partnership

In their article, “Design experimentation and mutual appropriation: Two strategies for university/collaborative after-school interventions”, Deborah Downing-Wilson, Robert Lecusay, and Michael Cole underscore the value for partnerships of a mix of different kinds of work. Some work we researchers do to help our partner out—it’s neither our joint work or work we would do on our own if the partnership didn’t exist. Other work is hybrid, building on some innovation that already existed in the education setting. The third category of work is comprised of new things we design and implement together.

Researchers can use this self-assessment tool to help diagnose the extent to which they are engaged in these different forms of work. We hypothesize that a healthy partnership has a mix of activities in each of these categories.