SPF FORMS NEW PARTNERSHIP TO ENHANCE SHARING OF PRACTITIONER RESEARCH

By Eunsook Hong

The Social Publishers Foundation (SPF) announces the establishment of a partnership with a university in Lincolnshire, a county in the East Midlands area of England. Bishop Grosseteste University (BGU) was founded in 1862 and has roots as a teacher training college. It now offers a range of courses in education, business, psychology, sociology, sports, theology, and health and social care. The SPF-BGU partnership features a new practitioner-research project review structure to increase dissemination of research and products by teacher-practitioners through the SPF Knowledge Base. For this partnership a panel of BGU internal reviewers was formed in April 2017. The BGU internal reviewers will select quality action-research projects and MA dissertations produced by teachers and review them before practitioner-researchers submit them to SPF with the purpose of publishing their work in the SPF knowledge base. When publication applications are submitted to SPF, reviewers from the SPF review panel provide support to help enhance research products, if necessary, and communicate with the practitioner-researcher throughout the process toward publication. The partnership came about through the efforts of SPF’s Eunsook Hong and BGU’s Antony Luby, Senior Lecturer in the BGU School of Teacher Development. To date, three BGU practitioner-research projects have been published by SPF. Under the new partnership, many more will be added. SPF President Lonnie Rowell noted that such agreements provide a solid foundation for bridging gaps between research and practice and give much-deserved recognition to practitioner-researchers working to produce practice-based research evidence.