Dr. Camille Wilson Partners with ULLC and Focus: HOPE for Research-Practice Partnership

The Urban Learning and Leadership Collaborative (ULLC) is a five-year-old place-based research-practice partnership that unites Detroit community members with university researchers to create innovative, inquiry based solutions to challenges identified by community residents. Co-investigators for this project include faculty from University of Michigan School of Education, Wayne State University School of Social Work, and a practitioner-leader from Focus: HOPE, a Detroit civil and human rights organization founded in 1968. With their guidance, the ULLC will establish and support a cohort of Detroit-based inquiry teams, comprised of academic and community researchers, with a particular focus on the schools and neighborhoods surrounding Focus: HOPE’s campus in north-central Detroit. Youth researchers will be trained, included, and mentored throughout this process as well. 

Working with residents of north-central Detroit has revealed that they regard dismantling the school-to prison pipeline as a central education objective since the criminalization, expulsion, and incarceration of school age youth has devastating effects. Through a collaborative inquiry process, this project will facilitate the ULLC’s ability to solicit, vet, and support community-based research initiatives that seek to advance equitable educational access, fair discipline, and restorative justice in Detroit’s schools, and nurture the socioemotional well-being, learning, and retention of youth most susceptible to expulsion and incarceration. 

Action-oriented, collaborative inquiry encompasses many different options for particular research designs. These partly include participatory action research (PAR), youth-led participatory action research, community-based design research, and survey research. Collaborative inquiry approaches commonly bring together differently situated individuals to partner in research and social action. When community-based and action-oriented, such collaboration positions researchers to alter status-quo institutional relationships and hierarchies to cultivate “strategic transformation” in communities and throughout the research process.

Plans to leverage this research-practice partnership to help dismantle Detroit’s STPP will unite Focus: HOPE’s ULLC, University of Michigan, and Wayne State University partners in a more concerted way that specifically and holistically addresses one of the most pernicious educational inequities of our time. This Spencer Foundation RPP grant enables the ULLC to engage in more expansive coordination activities that strengthen the research capacity of community-based STPP research teams and undertake an inquiry process that studies and evaluates ULLC’s process and outcomes.

The principal investigators’ joint leadership reflects ULLC’s commitment to promoting educational and neighborhood thriving. ULLC created a conceptual framework anchored in a theory of change that honors the unique and equally important contributions and expertise that academics, practitioners, and community member partners bring, while growing the group’s social and intellectual resources for community good. It reflects the central aim of community-based, action-oriented research to counter traditional research hierarchy that privileges university researchers and academic expertise. Instead, ULLC functions by democratic norms that center community members’ experiential and culturally relevant knowledge, while affirming the value of all partners.