Navigating literacy policy and practice with rural elementary teachers in a professional development partnership

Purpose In this paper, our primary objectives are twofold. First, we aim to contribute to understandings of how school–university partnerships are built across geographic contexts in ways that support university-based researchers to engage collaborative designs for learning with teachers. In particular, we hope to provide insight into partnership building with rural districts that may navigate constrained access to context-specific professional development (PD). Second, we seek to understand the role played by state policy mandates in how our school–university partnership unfolded over time. Design/methodology/approach Our partnership with rural elementary teachers was informed by two main tools: first, a design called Learning Labs (LLs), which provided a way to collaborate with teachers across a cycle of instruction and second, a routine known as a Teacher Time Out (TTO), which allowed for pausing during instruction for teachers to deliberate and make decisions in the moment that honor students’ knowledge, ideas and responses. Using a qualitative, iterative coding process, we analyzed data sources including interview transcripts, field notes and PD artifacts to explore how elementary teachers and university researchers went about building partnership across geographic contexts. Findings The main finding of this paper is that important tensions emerged between what administrators, researchers and teachers expected of partnership and of PD. Administrators, pressured by state policy mandates, tended to view PD as a way to address supposed gaps in teacher knowledge about the Science of Reading (SOR). Researchers asserted a vision of PD as a close, collaborative, constructivist activity where expertise is distributed across all partners. Teachers were left in the middle of these shifting visions for PD, expressing the hope that partnership with researchers would simply help them improve their teaching practice. Research limitations/implications The body of research known as the SOR has inspired legislation across the U.S., shaping the curriculum schools select, the way teachers are trained and more. In this case, the SOR also shaped how university-based researchers and practitioners conceived of and went about working with one another. Therefore, we suggest that future studies of SOR policy implementation might benefit from considering the themes of this inquiry, especially the finding that a school-university partnership was impacted by and implicated in the intensive policy context that currently surrounds U.S. elementary reading education. Practical implications Practically, we urge researchers partnering with in-service teachers to adopt a mediating role between state-required reading education mandates and the teachers and administrators who feel pressure to comply with them. In this inquiry, taking on a mediating role allowed us to make transparent ways in which programs like our partner school’s curriculum can defy the neat categories of “effective” versus “ineffective” that often accompany SOR dialogue. Such transparency is a crucial step in collaborating with teachers, advocating for teachers and joining them in better understanding the implications of policy for everyday practice. Originality/value Analyzing our processes for building partnership brought to the surface tensions between what we, administrators and teachers hoped literacy PD could achieve. By enumerating some of those tensions, we also elaborate on the tension between the need to position teachers as knowledge-holders in their own right, and an era of SOR reform that that implicitly positions teachers as in need of intervention or remediation. Understanding these issues and how they manifested in our work at a rural school can contribute to the field’s knowledge of creating, sustaining and studying school-university partnerships against the backdrop of intensive state policy.