Chapter 18: Moving Beyond Hierarchies: Building and Sustaining Equity-Focused Collaborative Partnership Over Time

In this book chapter we describe boundary-spanning activities to build and sustain a decade-long partnership between a university research and development team and a suburban public school district with the goal of promoting equity in STEM education at the middle and high school level. We use three descriptive cases to illustrate the processes and activities each partner participated in during the partnership: the first case is the co-design of a projectbased science curriculum for 7th grade classrooms; the second case is the development and implementation of a multi-pronged teacher professional development program to sustain 8th grade science teachers’ teaching of a capstone project that integrates science, computational science, and engineering; the last case is the co-design of a STEM afterschool program that features youth leadership and near-peer mentoring. Drawing upon phenomenological and ethnographic approaches, we report how the partners communicated to each other regarding their values and intentions to build mutual trust, how they negotiated and combined ingredients from their individual contexts to reach a consensus of solutions, and how the partnerships evolved over time. Together the cases serve as exemplars of building and sustaining long-term partnership between universities and K–12 school districts and offer valuable design guidelines for developing equitable STEM programs.