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Over the last two decades, the Center for Universal Education (CUE) has partnered with actors in 80 countries to build a rigorous evidence base and advance education policy and practice. In 2023, CUE launched the Strengthening Pedagogical Approaches for Relevant Knowledge and Skills (SPARKS) project to explore how the interaction of culture, ecosystems, learning theories, and other intangible factors—collectively defined as Invisible Pedagogical Mindsets—influences pedagogy in local contexts. To bridge the gap between research, policy, and practice, SPARKS established Research Policy Collaboratives (RPCs) in Egypt, Mexico, and India to serve as locally led collaborative research hubs for evidence generation.
At the CUE Annual Symposium in Washington, D.C., the SPARKS team and partners from Egypt and Mexico reflected on two years of collaborative research as well as the process of establishing and engaging with RPCs. The session brought together participants from diverse contexts and organizations to examine the design of collaborative research, the utility of collaborative approaches, and common challenges and pitfalls working across institutions and geographies. Many collaborative research models, such as Research-Practice Partnerships, focus on collectively working toward a specific research output. While SPARKS culminated with the publication of three country research reports (see links below), the RPC experiences over the past two years added immense value to the research outputs. These experiences, as well as discussions from the workshop in D.C., highlighted three principles centered around trust and relationships that—in addition to research outputs—are essential to consider in collaborative research and action:
1. Build relational infrastructure
One of the key insights from both the SPARKS research process and symposium discussion is that the relational infrastructure built over time is equally important as the tangible research outputs. During the session, SPARKS partners reiterated that sustained engagement was fostered by the relationships built within and between country teams, between Brookings and the RPCs, and with education actors in the local ecosystems. These relationships fostered the trust and rapport needed to navigate difficult conversations around methodology, research priorities, and authorship. The relationships formed between the three SPARKS countries also fostered cross-country learnings beyond SPARKS research, with partners drawing inspiration from one another’s programs and approaches. In line with the SPARKS experience, many symposium participants identified essential tenets of relational infrastructure as essential to successful collaboration, such as “listening,” “trust,” “empathy,” and “time.”
Figure 1. What factors make collaborative work successful?
Source: SPARKS Workshop, CUE Annual Symposium, visualized via Mentimeter
2. Design for flexibility while protecting core principles
Although the RPCs were originally envisioned as fixed groups that met regularly to advance the research, this structure proved impractical across all three contexts. Instead, the RPCs evolved to reflect more dynamic and context-responsive engagement structures. In Egypt, this included creating a document on tiers of engagement. In Mexico, partners developed a tool to guide collaborators’ participation based on sense of belonging. In this way, the teams addressed the need to be flexible while maintaining core values and principles for the collaboration. All three RPCs shifted to more one-on-one meetings with education actors involved in the collaborative to accommodate schedules, develop relationships, and gather input. While the structure of RPCs evolved, the project remained centered on its core conceptual framework—the Invisible Pedagogical Mindsets—and a shared commitment to intentionally center teachers’ voices and promote locally led data interpretation and evidence.
3. Directly address Global North-Global South power dynamics
Power dynamics emerged as a central tension in collaborative work, with one-third of workshop participants identifying either power dynamics or hierarchies as a key challenge. From the outset of the SPARKS project, partners acknowledged the structural realities of a Global North institution receiving and managing funding. Rather than minimizing these dynamics, proper acknowledgment and engagement with them throughout the project allowed for transparent conversations. This transparency helped build trust and enabled more honest dialogue.
When probed about power dynamics in collaborative work, participants from the workshop pointed to funding as the primary constraint. From the SPARKS experience, acknowledging that the anchor institution’s structural advantages (convening power, funding, visibility) coexist with local partners’ epistemic strengths (contextual knowledge, political access, community trust) and being open about the asymmetry rather than claiming equal partnership strengthened the collaboration.
Figure 2. When you think about power dynamics in research, what comes to mind?
Source: SPARKS Workshop, CUE Annual Symposium, word cloud visualized via Mentimeter
Researchers are often focused on the tangible outcomes—reports, toolkits, and evidence. The SPARKS experience highlights that investments in relational infrastructure, flexibility in implementation, and transparency around power dynamics are essential complements to strengthening collaborative research outcomes.
SPARKS will publish reports that synthesize learnings across all three country contexts and the collaborative research process. Read the SPARKS country reports from Egypt, India, and Mexico.
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