10: Epistemic Authority and School-University Partnerships: Findings From a Collaborative Inquiry

The divide between theory and practice in education is well-established and longstanding (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2009; Ferguson, 2021; Zeichner & Liston, 2013). School-university partnerships (SUPs) offer one model for potentially addressing this divide. Nonetheless, common challenges experienced by school and university-based stakeholders identified in the SUP literature include power differentials and relational dynamics (Bernay et al., 2020; Herbert et al., 2018; Sarmiento-Márquez et al., 2023). This chapter reports findings from a qualitative interview-based collaborative inquiry investigating the Praxis Project; a SUP that involved collaboration between a secondary school and a teacher education program in Toronto, Canada. Working in triads, this SUP involved in-service teachers, pre-service teachers, and doctoral students co-designing small-scale collaborative action research studies on a topic pertinent to the in-service teacher’s classroom context and teaching practice. This SUP project is unique in its grouping of triads and in its inclusion of doctoral candidates as primary research mentors in place of university-based professor(s). We report our findings and identify two key recurring tensions that signal learning opportunities for our specific SUP, drawing on theory and practice in this field more broadly. These tensions implicate considerations of epistemic authority and considerations of structural parameters in school-university-community partnerships and collaborative inquiry initiatives.