In the face of limited impact of academic research on community conditions, community stakeholders often develop innovative practices to address their issues of concern. Focusing research and evaluation on such innovations--an approach called practice-based research--can facilitate equitable power distributions among scholars and communities, and document ecologically-valid solutions to community issues. This is particularly the case when practice-based research is pursued with attention to the effective representation of community perspectives, Building from extant approaches to PBR, over the course of a decade and several practice-based research partnerships, we’ve refined an approach that can be applied in a breadth of such partnerships: REDI, the Rapid Evaluation and Dissemination of Innovations.
The first presenter will introduce this approach and the manner in which it can be deployed into established community service systems that seek to support children and families facing poverty and societal bias. He will discuss issues of governance and representation within these established systems, particularly when decision making rests in the hands of professionals who may not share common experiences with those whom they seek to serve.
The second presenter will discuss the application of this approach to specialty systems within established infrastructures that seek to support individuals who belong to marginalized communities in culturally-responsive ways. She will discuss the manner in which the shared identities of those administering the specialty systems and those served by them help informally foster some degree of representation in decision making.
The third presenter will reflect on the implementation of practice-based research in two separate Indigenous serving settings that both seek to increase Indigenous participation and in climate science. These settings are juxtaposed primarily through differences in organizational affiliation and ownership; with one organization being owned and operated by a tribal government and the other by a federal research institution. These differences will be examined to explicate how governmental affiliation moderates the capacity for practice-based research to challenge the status quo.
Together, these presentations illustrate the possibilities for deploying practice-based research across a variety of settings, from those that may be considered more status quo affirming to those that inherently seek a departure from the status quo. They also illustrate that, although practice based research provides a structure for community representation, the degree to which communities are authentically represented depends on intentionally introducing practices that foster said representation.