Recognizing and Weaving Expertise: A Partnership Between Early Childhood Educators and STEM Education Researchers

ABSTRACT Partnerships between universities and educational institutions are widely recognized as promising sites for mobilizing resources and collaboratively shaping educational futures. Existing scholarship on partnerships has largely emphasized their challenges, lessons learned, and resulting products, with comparatively limited attention to the processes through which partnerships are sustained over time. To address this gap, this study examines how a research partnership between early childhood educators and STEM education researchers is maintained. Data sources included documented communications, such as meeting notes, audio and video recordings of meetings, and email exchanges, which were analyzed to identify the practices enacted by partnership members. Findings, situated within the relevant literature, suggest that STEM research partnerships are sustained when weaving expertise with needs, working within external requirements, discussing to generate meaning, and layering practical knowledge. This study offers process‐oriented insights and actionable practices that STEM teacher educators can use to develop and sustain research partnerships in diverse educational contexts.