International Experts

In TransferForce, we work with a strong, established international network of institutions that promote Research-Practice Partnerships and develop them further in their respective contexts:

NNERPP (Rice University, USA) – Dr Paula Arce-Trigatti

The National Network of Education Research-Practice Partnerships (NNERPP) operates across the United States and is based at the Kinder Institute for Urban Research at Rice University. The network aims to develop, support and connect Research-Practice Partnerships in education in order to strengthen the links between research, policy and practice. Founded in 2016, it brings together established and emerging partnerships to share good practice and lessons learned. The network has since grown considerably: the 2023 NNERPP Yearbook documents impact stories from more than 60 member partnerships. Its activities include sharing partnership practices, research syntheses, comparative research and fostering collaboration across partnerships. NNERPP also published the brokering guide (Wentworth et al., 2023) on which TransferForce draws. Paula Arce-Trigatti is the network's founding director.

ULF (Sweden) – Dr Sebastian Björnhammer

ULF (Utbildning, Lärande, Forskning – Education, Learning, Research) is a nationwide structure for practice-based research conducted jointly by schools and higher education institutions. It moved from a pilot project to permanent operation in January 2025. A defining feature is that research starts from schools' own knowledge needs, with teachers playing an active and initiating role. A total of 27 higher education institutions take part, and collaboration with school authorities is governed by local ULF agreements. ULF is organised into five regional nodes (North, South, East, West and Capital), with national and regional steering groups. The new national ULF agreement runs from 2025 to 2034. ULF is an example of Research-Practice Partnerships institutionalised across an entire education system.

University of Glasgow (Scotland) – Professor Christopher Chapman

Christopher Chapman is Professor of Education Policy at the University of Glasgow and has led the work of the Robert Owen Centre for Educational Change on networks and collaboration in the school system. A key project was the School Improvement Partnership Programme, which ran from 2013 to 2015 across eight partnerships involving 14 local authorities and more than 50 schools, based on collaborative action research. The Glasgow researchers acted explicitly as brokers, facilitating partnerships between schools together with Education Scotland and local authorities. The work also had a system-level impact: Chapman's research provided evidence that informed the establishment of Scotland's Regional Improvement Collaboratives in 2018.

University of Calgary, Werklund School of Education (Canada) – Professor Sharon Friesen & Dr Barbara Brown

The Werklund School of Education established the Partner Research Schools initiative, in which researchers, school authority representatives and teachers carry out joint projects and strengthen teachers' research capacity. Sharon Friesen was co-founder and President of the Galileo Educational Network from 1999 to 2021; her research interests include design-based professional learning, school and district leadership, educational reform and Research-Practice Partnerships. In 2022, Sharon Friesen and Barbara Brown co-authored a book on engaging in educational Research-Practice Partnerships, published by Routledge.

Norwegian Directorate for Education and Training / DeKomp (Norway) – Siv Hilde Lindstrøm

DeKomp, Norway's decentralised scheme for competence development, is a state funding scheme for quality development in schools. Its measures are designed to address local needs, reach as many teachers as possible and have a direct impact on teaching. School owners carry out these measures in partnership with universities and university colleges; needs are identified through local analysis and professional dialogue, and the measures aim at collective competence development across the whole school. The policy intention was to create mutually committed partnerships between teacher education and schools. DeKomp is thus an example of a Research-Practice Partnership logic that is steered by the state but implemented locally, combining bottom-up development with the system level.

Tallinn University (Estonia) – Dr Kätlin Vanari & Professor Eve Eisenschmidt

The Future School programme takes a whole-school improvement approach built on three cornerstones: distributed leadership of collaborative learning among teachers, evidence-based decision-making, and co-creation to improve student learning. University researchers and experts support selected schools for ten months a year in developing new teaching and learning methods and in managing change. Eve Eisenschmidt and Kätlin Vanari designed the programme together and have been running it since 2017. The approach is now also being transferred internationally: a project with the Estonian Centre for International Development (ESTDEV) uses the principles of Future School to support vocational education reform in the Ukrainian city of Zhytomyr.