The context of this specific pillar is a rather important aspect of understanding the overall outcomes and results. The research specifically focuses on the nuances of school-university partnership created through the European Doctorate in Teacher Education. (EDiTE), a Horizon 2020 project delivered under the Marie Skłodowska Curie research framework. The four-year project aimed at bringing 15 early-stage researchers (ESRs) from around the world to develop scientific projects on topic of teacher learning within scope of their doctoral education. The doctoral programme was provided by a consortium of 5 universities, and each had employed three early-stage researchers. It was expected that these researchers create a network across five
56 countries, as well as embed their research projects into the local universities and scientific communities.
EDiTE created a very specific context and this is primarily because it was established as an Innovative Training Network which under the framework of Marie Skłodowska Curie aims to develop research that is creative, entrepreneurial and innovative. This said, EDiTE was developed with close ties to identified partners in order to have relevant research projects facing current and future challenges in the area of teacher education. The main notion of EDiTE was collaboration at several important levels. The strong institutional support provided to the early-stage researchers through supervision with the senior researchers was designed to assure the robustness of the research design, but the ties and collaboration developed with the partner institutions held a promise of providing a relevant social inquiry and study impact.
EDiTE involved 23 official partners, most of them schools, as the summary in Table 1 shows.
Table 5: Type of external partners per country
Source: authors
The partnership framework within EDiTE was developed by Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE) as part of the co-called Package 5 of the project and guidelines outlined in an internal document entitled Guideline for Building Institutional Links. Based on the rationale of the Salzburg principles of doctoral education as well as the European Commission’s principles for innovative doctoral training, the guidelines offer a robust logic to establishment of an innovative training network in teacher education (Halasz, 2016). In case of teacher education this would mean bringing together academics and practitioners in a collaborative framework that aims at producing valuable multifaceted research outcomes. Furthermore, institutional partnerships aimed at creating a base for sustainability and long-term relationships among diverse organisations involved with the project. According to this, the external partners would provide research opportunities for the ESRs and actively be involved in co-creating research questions based on the practical needs and specific learning environments. As outlined in the guidelines, the specific objectives of institutional links are to (Halasz, 2016):
• Initiate long-term cooperation with different types of schools and different kinds of educational institutions
• Build institutional links for knowledge exchange and public engagement, aiming at exploitation of research results
• Enhance consortium and institutional capacities for building and sustaining collaboration with institutions involved in TE.
Hence, the institutional links within EDiTE were identified and developed with an aim to actively realise the research of individual ESRs through a tight collaborative manner. These
57 collaborations, particularly with external partners, were focused to support knowledge exchange, ESRs’ empirical research, but also provide a platform for “transformative potential of teachers, schools and other partner organisations” and “support cross-national horizontal sharing of knowledge and good practices between partner organisations” (Halasz, 2016).
While the institutional links were to be implemented through a set of coordination tools and mechanisms with the support of administrative staff at each of the partner university, an important element of the collaboration was represented through a number of underpinning principles. Described in the guidelines, they represent the following (Halasz, 2016):
• Linking research and practice – partners will actively seek opportunities of linking doctoral training and research with institutional practice supporting innovative solutions
• Mutual respect – academic and non-academic partners see each other as having equal standing and communicate with each other on the basis of mutual respect
• Mutual interest – partnership should serve the interest of both academic and non-academic partners cooperation should be based on the principle of mutual interest and usefulness
• Mutual learning – each partner has the intention to learn from each other. All forms of horizontal knowledge sharing are supported
• Diversity pf partnership models – the development of various models of partnership between EDiTE-EJD universities and partner organizations is supported, according to their capacities and mutual interests
• The active involvement of partners – partner organizations should be encouraged to play an active role in the implementation of the EDiTE joint research programme
• Supporting horizontal cooperation between partners – horizontal cooperation between partner organizations should be encouraged at both national and international level
• Transparency and visibility – the partnership should be as transparent and visible as possible
• Openness – although the number of primary partners is fixed and the primary partners are listed in the project description of the Grant Agreement, new partners can join the existing circle of partner organizations.
Based on these principles, it is possible to understand the qualities of both individual experiences and the overall success of the project. Furthermore, according to the guidelines, the implementation and the forms of collaboration in partnerships can undertake different interactions and as such be classified within three categories, as shown in Table 2.
Table 6: Types of partnerships
Source: Authors. Modified from the Guidelines
58 While the planned and the real implementation might have had some discrepancies, the idea that was setup through this guided framework, as well as the setting it potentially provided are the main aspects for delivering teacher education research through a partnership with non-academic institutions and organisations.