Throughout this academic year, I will be using this Initiatives column to share parts of the college’s strategic plan. My goal is to help you understand the goals and how we aim to reach them, and to help you see yourself in the plan as someone who can not only help to implement it, but also can benefit from it.

This week’s initiatives column will focus on the remaining two action items of goal 3: Research addressing social issues, objective 3: Research, culture and partnerships in our strategic plan for 2021-25. You can read the full plan on our website.

This objective calls on us to coordinate fiscal and other supports to enhance a culture of research by providing professional learning opportunities, improving the recruitment of faculty and students, recognizing outstanding research, and developing and sustaining impactful collaborations, particularly research-practitioner partnerships.

The third action item calls on us to develop and support research-practitioner partnerships with museums, non-governmental organizations and school districts.

There are four implementation tasks associated with this action item:

• Work collaboratively with Pennsylvania and other school districts to identify and select projects for research-practice partnerships, particularly projects related to essential literacies, inclusive instruction, equity, mental health and well-being, social justice and anti-racism.
• Establish field-based and on-site research training opportunities to facilitate the professional development of faculty, students and partners as research-practitioner community members.
• Identify and develop innovative uses of technology (such as data collection methods, database management and communication networks) to support the short- and long-term goals of research-practitioner partnerships and its members.
• Conduct systemic, developmental and ethnographic case studies on research-practitioner partnerships to inform adoption of future research goals and practices in changing education to educate for change.

The fourth action item calls on us to support collaborative, multidisciplinary research projects with a wide array of organizations within the college, Penn State, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, the nation and across the world.

There are four implementation tasks associated with this action item:

• Develop mechanisms by which the College of Education captures the perceptions, concerns and needs of education stakeholders at all levels of the education system, especially from those who historically have had less voice in decision-making.
• Coordinate efforts across the college and University, especially with respect to the centers in the College of Education, to enhance collaboration and effort regarding research.
• Work with Penn State institutes (such as the Institute for Computational and Data Sciences, Huck Institutes of the Life Sciences, Social Science Research Institute and Sustainability Institute) to advance research initiatives pertaining to the synergy of essential literacies, social justice, and mental health and well-being.
• Cultivate research opportunities with other universities, organizations, research centers and institutes in the U.S. and across the world (such as the American Educational Research Association, National Center for Educational Statistics, national and international governmental and non-governmental organizations, and international higher education institutions).

Our faculty are increasingly engaging in interdisciplinary research and many already are involved in the Penn State institutes listed above. This interdisciplinary focus to our work broadens and diversifies the knowledge and experiences we create and share, and adds to the richness of the education our students receive. It is one of the ways we are changing education by educating for change.

Coming up

The next Initiatives column will include a look at goal 3, objective 4, action items 1 and 2.