Greetings Colleagues, 

 

The application window for the following grant opportunity from The Spencer Foundation opens today. Many (if not all) COEHD faculty engage in collaborative work with schools, colleagues at COEHD, other UTSA colleges, and other universities, professional associations, federal and state agencies, CBOs, NPOs, and advocacy groups. Following the literature on designing research-practice partnerships, this funding competition from Spencer would support faculty wanting to expand such work and connect it to their rigorous research. 

 

Spencer Foundation Research-Practice Partnership Grants Program LOI due November 10, 2021, 12 PM (noon) CT; Proposal due December 8, 2021, 12 PM (noon) CT 

https://www.spencer.org/grant_types/research-practice-partnerships 

 The Research-Practice Partnership (RPP) Grants Program supports education research projects that engage in collaborative and participatory partnerships with project budgets up to $400,000 and durations of up to three years. The Spencer Foundation views partnerships as an important approach to knowledge generation and the improvement of education, broadly construed. Rigorous partnership work is intentionally organized to engage diverse forms of expertise and perspectives, across practitioners as well as scholars and disciplines, in knowledge generation around pressing problems of practice. Further, RPPs can facilitate the long-term accumulation of knowledge in new ways as researchers and practitioners work together to ask practitioner-relevant questions on key topics in specific settings over time. Many key problems of practice are historically saturated and require multiple perspectives and long-term engagement if sustainable and systemic change is to occur. Over the long term, research conducted by RPPs will result in new insights into the processes, practices, and policies that improve education for learners, educators, families, communities, and institutions where learning and teaching happen (e.g., schools, universities, museums, other workplaces). This grant program is open to partnerships between researchers and a broad array of practitioners. Practitioners are defined as school districts, county offices of education, state educational organizations, policy-makers, universities, community-based organizations, out-of-school-time providers, informal educators, and other social sectors that significantly impact learners’ lives. As such, the Spencer Foundation is open to applications from design-based research teams, networked improvement communities, placed-based research alliances, and other partnership arrangements. 

 

Recent RPP funded awards: 

 

Untelling the Past to Reimagine the Future: Transforming K-12 Education and Supporting the Transition to Higher Education in the Rural U.S. South 

Christopher R. Lawton, Theodore J Kopcha, Melanie L. Hatch, Pamela Pitman Brown, Elizabeth Delancy, Matthew E. Stanley, Avis E. Williams, Andrew W. Cooper 

Putnam County Charter School System 

 

Comprehensive Sexuality Education Curriculum in rural KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa: A community-based participatory approach to contextually relevant programming 

Relebohile Moletsane, Xolile Msimanga 

University of KwaZulu-Natal 

 

Use Your Voice: Linguistic Justice to Literacy Practice in the State of Georgia 

Leah Panther, Eric Parker 

Mercer University 

 

Centering Trauma-Informed Practices (TIP) to Sustain TIP Knowledge and Reduce Secondary Traumatic Stress in Novice Teachers: An Interdisciplinary Research-Practice Partnership 

Ofelia Schepers, Megan Brennan, Kathryn Young 

Metropolitan State University of Denver 

 

Strengthening the Miami-Dade Early Learning Partnership: IDEAS for Children 

Rebecca Shearer, K. Lori Hanson, Marisol Diaz, Maria T. Riestra-Quintero, Imelda K. Moise, Anabel Espinosa, Christine Delgado 

University of Miami 

 

Please contact me for any assistance you might need to apply. 

Thank you. 

--Iwan