four - Community-university partnership research retreats: A productive force for developing communities of research practice

Summary

Introduction

Etienne Wenger (1998) applied the term ‘communities of practice’ (CoP) to groups of people who come together to understand and respond to a shared topic of concern, emphasising examples from work organisations. This is something that human society has always done, but in analysing the process and exploring how to cultivate it, social learning theorists consider how to overcome challenges and support effective CoP collaborations (Wenger et al, 2002). Most published literature on CoP has reported on mono-professional contexts (Hart et al, 2013). However, the concept and approach lends itself to mobilising knowledge and experiences from more diverse sources. In our case, the diversity particularly related to culture, nationality, age, class and knowledge claims that drew on academic or personal lived experience (and in some cases, a combination of these).

Members of our CoP considered that the CoP approach was particularly well-suited to the broader Imagine project's ‘community development approach’ to the co-production of research, because we wanted to bring together our diverse experiences and sources of knowledge to deepen our understanding of what community resilience meant for us and how we could mobilise it for mutual benefit. We hope that this chapter will be of practical use to those who want to consider using CoP in other research collaborations involving diverse groups.

The literature also contains broader guidance on how to support the effective functioning of larger research teams, including those that involve interdisciplinary approaches (Thompson, 2009), mixed methods (Bowers et al, 2013) and lived experience collaboration (Abma et al, 2009). Many of these bring together collaborators in meetings often held over a few days, termed ‘retreats’. However, most academic guidance and research has focused on retreats used by academics to produce written outputs (see, for example, Kornhaber et al, 2016) and not on the process of co-production by academics, practitioners and participants.

Participatory research: Intervention within a landscape of practice

Our programme consisted of a number of participatory research projects, all concerned with responding to some form of adversity. Over time our programme developed 15 such projects across seven countries (see the examples below). They addressed four main themes: child and family resilience; practitioner/teacher and school resilience; young adult/adult resilience; and resilience models for practice and research.