Of boundaries and borders: A micro-interactional examination of consensus and knowledge-construction in a research-practice partnership

Abstract

This paper extends the boundary-crossing framework in research-practice partnership (RPP) scholarship to engage with Border and Critical Race scholarship to complicate how learning and knowledge are interactionally forged in RPPs. I highlight how boundary-crossing entails more than navigating cultural, professional and organizational differences and is shaped by the complex borderlands from which RPP actors make meaning. I suggest that a border-crossing framework allows researchers and practitioners to begin with the premise that “collective knowledge” is always-already fractured and that the possibility of consensus in RPPs is always-already a tenuous construction. I draw on data from a two-year ethnographic case study of an RPP to ask the following question: How does onto-epistemological difference impact RPP actors' boundary-crossing interactions and encounters? Using critical discourse and conversation analysis, I examine participants' talk-in-interaction in a focus group discussion to better understand how learning occurs and knowledge is constructed between RPP actors – three teachers and a university researcher, in this case. Ultimately, I show that the group's norms of interaction compelled participants to corral each other's talk towards agreement, constructing the impression of shared meaning-making and consensus even in its absence.