Contributors and Hindrances to Achieving Synergy in an Informal STEM Education Research Practice Partnership

ABSTRACT

There are increasing calls to broaden student participation in STEM education to ensure a diverse and capable future workforce. Both formal and informal STEM education stakeholders recognize that learning occurs across a variety of settings. Libraries have emerged as a place where informal STEM programming is prioritized and offered for K‐12 students. Due to the interdisciplinary nature of STEM, interdisciplinary partnerships have formed, including those between libraries and STEM educators. Little is known about the collaborative process that takes place within these partnerships, especially research‐practice partnerships. The current collaborative self‐study explored the collaborative functioning of an RPP between a district library and two mathematics education professors. Data from interviews, collective reflection interviews, and reflections revealed several factors contributing to the partnership's success as well as factors hindering it. Factors contributing to the collaborative functioning included relational and structural alignment. Factors hindering the success of the partnership included space limitations and funding. Furthermore, the reflective process surfaced subtle antagonism, indicating that partnerships in informal STEM contexts are vulnerable to expertise hierarchies that can underutilize the subject matter knowledge of partners such as librarians. Future research could examine collaborative functioning across different partner configurations.