Since 2001, two teacher educators from distinctive midwestern universities have been engaged in partnerships with two local urban school districts that resulted from their personal relationships with educators and school leaders. By applying Macedo and Freire's (2001) framework of analysis, this article shares their dialogic reflection and assessment of the impact of their roles, intentions, and modes ofoperandi as qualitative researchers and the effectiveness of pursuing contextually relevant transformative agendas within these partnerships. This reflective analysis provides the forum for examining emergent issues and practices relevant to the intersection of these school and university communities, provides insight into the personal and professional commitments of those involved, and the potential for pursuing similar efforts to advance this agenda.We accepted the natural ambiguity built in to the college role and tried to use it as a strength rather than a weakness. (Trubowitz & Longo, 1997, p. 10) Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has. -Margaret Mead (Institute for Intercultural Studies, n.d.) Discussions about school-university partnerships often are divided into two ideological camps: those that provide the prescriptive how-to manual for engaging in such projects, and those that provide the descriptive, after-tne-events reflections about the unresolved challenges and conundrums of creating and attempting to maintain successful partnerships. These two positions reflect the epistemological (i.e., positivist versus constructivist) and philosophical (i.e., essentialist versus progressivist) discourse continuum and tensions in research 264 Downloaded by [Oregon State University] at 14:07 21 December 2014and discussions about research on teaching. In our two small-scale school-university collaborations, this continuum describes the differences in role expectations among those educators with whom we work. Teachers and school leaders often work from a positivist and essentialist perspective, assuming that teacher educators will follow a traditional role of entering their schools with a predetermined agenda for instructional, curricular, or organizational reform. Instead, as teacher educators committed to constructivist and progressivist perspectives, we envision our roles as learning partners supporting teachers and school leaders in co-constructing efforts for personal change, knowledge and skill building, and centering students' lives and learning experiences in the classroom.We are a husband and wife who graduated from the same university, who are currently teacher educators at different midwestern universities. Our active presence during die past 5 years within two urban, high poverty school districts has brought us to a point of convergence when we share the highlights of our day over morning coffee or an evening meal. By conducting a critical analysis, we articulate how and why we are involved with teachers and t...
