Co-Education/Co-Research Partnership: A Critical Approach to Co-Learning between Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative and Tufts University

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

This paper presents an assessment of a community-university partnership drawing on years of ongoing partnership activities. The study contributes to the rich literature and traditions that aim to dismantle structures of white supremacy and inequality by presenting a framework for both advancing the study and practice of community-university partnerships (i.e., the explicit inclusion of relational and reflective practices, and impacts on communities). A few suggestions are below:

(1) Clarify the intended purpose/outcome of the CUP or assessment being presented, particularly in the abstract and intro. It's not clear why the assessment was done in ther first place. Was the assessment an explicit component of the CUP/MOU? IF so, was the prupose of the assessment to identify lessons learned (as discussed in section #7) to improve CUPs more broadly? Or did the thought of an assessment arise after establishing the CUP, but the sole purpose of the CUP was solely a vehicle for co-producing knowledge and action around CLTs or community control of land?

(2) Who We/Methods (Section #3): the first paragraph gives background/history on the authors but could benefit from 1-2 sentences explicitly discussing how their positionality influenced (if in any way) the outcomes/lessons learned, etc being presented.

The 3rd paragraph of this section (that starts at line 142) should clarify the purpose of the CORE assemment and state that more details will be provided later on (in section 6). 

(3) Section 5, would benefit from a citation or brief discussion on the content of the Practical Vision Workshop, since it played a critical role in establishing themese that became central to the subsequent 2016 CORE MOU and partnership. 

Author Response

We thank the reviewer for the feedback and comments.

Specifically, we have responded to the 3 comments:

1) We have amended the abstract slightly to make clear that this paper is not primarily an assessment but rather synthesizing lessons learned from our CUP experience, which aimed to develop a co-learning model.

2) We added detail in section 3 (paragraph 2) to explain how our various positions affected our learning. And we added more detail in this section (paragraph 3) to make clear the purpose of the program assessment that we draw on in this paper.

3) We added 2 sentences in Section 5 to further explain the content of the Practical Visionaries Workshop.

Reviewer 2 Report

This article addresses an important topic relevant to the special issue. There are some simple ways that its contribution to the field of community-university partnerships and power relations could be improved. My suggestions are to drastically shorten the literature review that historically situates UCPs - not even sure it's necessary to keep that section; to tighten the literature on power and relationships; and to spend more time discussing what you did and learned that could improve the partnership and relationships therein. The conclusion and discussion section gets to these points - and that's good - but the empirical part of the manuscript should tell readers more - that leads to your conclusions. The abstract suggests that the main contribution of the paper is in the importance of building  interpersonal relationships. It was difficult to understand how that could be, especially with such a long term organizational relationship and so many people moving back and forth in roles across the two organizations over time. This is one example of how this paper could make an important contribution to CU partnership research and practice - if the authors were to grapple with questions like that. As noted, the conclusions and implications for future practice section was good and succinct. But again - the field and people involved in it would benefit from concrete suggestions. One that occurred to me was why the course on democracy or train the trainer sessions wouldn't be likely places to incorporate lessons learned - about relationships and power or any other lessons that could improve practice. Some smaller points - The authors identify interviewees by name but mask the identities of the CP and U throughout. It's really hard to read the manuscript because of all of the (CP) or (U) throughout. Will the final draft identify these groups - if not, is there another way to convey the information? 

Author Response

Thanks to the reviewer for the feedback and suggestions.

Here are our responses to the main points:

• We have retained in our literature review the section on historical influences on our CUP. We believe this detail is necessary to place our CUP in context, since there are various traditions that inform CUP practice. We added a sentence to explain this purpose at the beginning of this part of the literature review.
• We have further clarified our section on power in the literature review. We wanted to avoid confusion over the relational view of power that we are using here, versus power in relationships (which could also be a relational view, but not necessarily).
• The reviewer states that "the abstract suggests that the main contribution of the paper is in the importance of building interpersonal relationships." While that is a central theme, it is not the main point of this paper. As stated in our abstract and introduction, our main contribution is in using a relational view of power to understand how CUPs can subtly reproduce inequalities and/or dismantle them. We have made some slight changes to try to reduce the chance that a reader would misconstrue our purpose.
• In response to the suggestion that we grapple with the question of how the specific relationships affect the organizational partnership, we note that we do clearly describe how we as authors (particularly the lead author) have been engaged over the long term and in various roles, thus holding critical relationships between the institutions, even as there was turnover.
• Finally, we note that we do have concrete suggestions for our own practice in section 8. There, we also share thoughts for the field, though less specific, as our learnings would have to be adapted to other contexts.