Our Partners

Research Practice Partnerships (RPPs) establish collaborative, long-term relationships between researchers and practitioners to understand and address problems of practice in education. This model provides a context in which research is incorporated into decision-making, and the problems studied are meaningful to practitioners in schools and districts. RPPs can take many forms, from involving researchers from a single university and a single district, to much larger partnerships convening individuals from many research and practice contexts. Research-Practice Partnerships do not assume that researchers have solutions or that there is information lacking in practical contexts. Instead, the promise of RPPs is that by bringing practitioners into research, research questions will be more relevant to practitioners and the results from this research are more likely to be implemented in real-world contexts (Research + Practice Collaboratory). The CREST project involves tribal, school, and community partners coming together around the enactment of the Explore the Salish Sea curriculum, a place and project-based curriculum that engages students in using western science and traditional ecological knowledge to research and collaborate with community partners to make evidence based recommendations for improving a local habitat.