Collaborative research approaches between universities and schools: the case of New Basic Education (NBE) in China

This article about collaborative research approaches between professors at Chinese universities and teachers in public schools examines theory–practice relationships and the cooperative interactions that need to be developed between those producing theory and those living practice. The work is based on a 24-year New Basic Education (NBE) collaborative research partnership that has produced knowledge about “two-way transformation” informing future actions. This paper focuses mainly on the theory-to-practice portion of the transformation. This research study’s significance has to do with five partnership conditions: (1) theorists must change their assumptions about practice; (2) partners must have deep understandings of each other and reach mutually beneficial consensus; (3) partners must have sustained and frequent communications after reaching consensus; (4) comprehensive applications of various research methods and continuous reflection and reconstruction of methodologies are necessary, and (5) “transformation intermediaries” are also exceedingly important. Narratives of experiences illustrate how these five underlying conditions were achieved.