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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Educ.

Sec. Language, Culture and Diversity

Volume 10 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/feduc.2025.1435836

This article is part of the Research Topic Situating Equity at the Center of Continuous Improvement in Education View all 8 articles

Advancing Equity via Research-Practice Partnerships (RPPs): A Theory of Action for Equity-Centered RPPs

Provisionally accepted
  • Peabody College, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, United States

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    Research-practice partnerships (RPPs) are posited as a vehicle to improve the use of research evidence. Equity-centered RPPs are an evolving subset of RPPs loosely bound by equity principles and varying in partnership design and approaches. There is a need for a better 1 understanding of the partnership dynamics and activities of equity-centered RPPs, as well as whether and how equity-centered RPPs improve youth outcomes. In this study, we leverage the growing literature on the use of research evidence, RPPs, and improvement research to provide an interdisciplinary framework that connects the dynamics and activities of equity-centered RPPs to proximal and distal outcomes. We argue that equity-centered RPPs are RPPs that center race and racism in their composition, goals and approaches to research. Explicitly attending to race and power in partnership dynamics and activities, centering children marginalized by oppression, and embracing historical perspectives are hallmarks of equity-centered RPPs. By first attending to equitable processes (i.e., dynamics and activities), equity-centered RPPs create the conditions for equitable outcomesfor RPP participants and the students and schools they serve. We posit that the theory of racialized organizations centers the role of race in partnership dynamics, activities and outcomes of equity-centered RPPs and social design experiments capture the disposition of equity-centered RPPs of advancing equity through learning via the production and use of research evidence. We conclude with a discussion of how this theory of action can be useful for those participating in and studying equity-centered RPPs.

    Keywords: Equity, Research-practice partnerships, Continous improvement, equity-centered RPPs, Use of research evidence

    Received: 21 May 2024; Accepted: 22 Jan 2025.

    Copyright: © 2025 Welsh, Henrick and James McGraw. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Richard O Welsh, Peabody College, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, United States

    Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

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