Interinstitutional examination of partnership structures and tools: A collaborative practitioner-scholar inquiry

Two universities (in the United Kingdom and the United States) collaboratively examined community-campus partnership practices adapting elements of the Transformational Relationship Evaluation Scale II (TRES; Kniffin et al., 2020) to analyze and reflect on the others’ partnership processes and to help create and refine approaches to partnership development. This article describes our interinstitutional practitioner-scholar inquiry and shares the approaches taken to understand and advance community-campus partnership practices by administrators within higher education structures. We present how the work on TRES influenced the process, share some of what we learned through it, and present some of the concrete products from it, including specific ways in which our work has been changed by this inquiry. The project described herein can be applied to other contexts, offering support to community engagement administrators as they seek to continually improve their partnership practices and to generate their own practitioner-scholarship to move the field forward.