Psychologie in Erziehung und Unterricht, 2026, 73, 266 -278 DOI 10.2378/ peu2026.art19d © Ernst Reinhardt Verlag Dieser Beitrag steht open access online unter https: / / dx.doi.org/ 10.2378/ peu2026.art19d n Empirische Arbeit From Knowledge Transfer to Learning by Expanding Together: Creating New Hybrid Forms of Activity through Research-Practice Partnerships William R. Penuel, Anna-Ruth Allen, Helen Baynum, Anna Foster University of Colorado Boulder Summary: Across the globe, the influence of education research on policy and practice is limited by the fragility of connections among researchers, policy makers, and educators. Research-practice partnerships are a relational and systemic approach to promoting knowledge transfer that can support mutual learning across boundaries, though the approach differs from traditional, linear approaches to dissemination. This paper explores how one partnership’s activities supported a large school district’s process for adopting instructional materials in a way that integrated ideas and findings from research related to science teaching and learning. The paper explores how boundary crossing through boundary spanners, boundary practices, and artifacts supported the hybridization process. The analysis illustrates and helps theorize how successful knowledge transfer in research-practice partnerships entails transformation of activities through hybridization, rather than direct transfer of intact research-based practices into new settings. Keywords: Research-practice partnership, boundaries, hybridization, knowledge transfer “What I would appreciate is for research to be more in schools. Well, really research projects like the one we had last year, when someone comes into school and actually conducts a project in our regular classes. Not that I’m handing over my class and he does something spectacular with that class, but that regular classes are not just really observed and analyzed, but in an exchange with the teachers. Because I really believe that research could yield so much that educational practice could benefit from. We are simply not getting this now.” (Teacher interview transcript, as reported in Hartmann & Decristan, 2018, p. 120). Many teachers, administrators, and policy makers have expressed a desire like this one for a closer relationship with a researcher, so that research might benefit pedagogical practice or policy in some way. As one administrator in a large school district in the United States once put it, they wished they could have a researcher “on speed dial”, that is, someone they could call to answer emergent questions from their supervisors, their colleagues, parents, and teachers (Penuel & Gallagher, 2017). For many researchers, being so responsive to the needs of practitioners and policy makers is a new, demanding, and possibly problematic role. Some may think as Thorndike did nearly a century ago that investing in collaborative relationships with schools could easily prove to be a waste of time, a distraction from doing real scientific research (Jonçich, 1968, pp. 230 - 231). Further, it could threaten the researcher’s independence and objectivity, the very basis for their credibility. And yet a growing body of scholarship worldwide testifies to the fact that if research is to influence policy and practice, sustained interaction with research and with researchers is of tremendous benefit. An interactive view of Funding Note: This work was funded by the William T. Grant Foundation. Any opinions, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Foundation. Learning by Expanding with Partnerships 267 research utilization or knowledge mobilization as it is called today in many countries has replaced a more linear view that focuses on dissemination of knowledge to policy makers and educators as the very last phase of research production, not only within education but also in other fields (Boaz et al., 2022; Contandriopoulos, Lemire, Denis & Tremblay, 2010; Dobbins, Rosenbaum, Plews, Law & Fish, 2007; Edwards & Stamou, 2017; Nutley, Walter & Davies, 2007). In addition, there is also an appreciation that it is not enough to incentivize researchers to collaborate with educators, policy makers, families, and communities; rather, there need to be systemic supports for mutual engagement, so that relationships become part of the ongoing infrastructure of policy and practice (Best & Holmes, 2010). Across the globe, many countries have begun experimenting with expanding the range of relational and systemic approaches used to support knowledge mobilization (Torres, 2022). In the United States and increasingly in other countries, one systemic approach to fostering knowledge mobilization that has emerged are research-practice partnerships (RPPs) (Arce- Trigatti, Chukhray & López-Turley, 2018). RPPs are long-term collaborations aimed at transforming systems through engagement with research, intentionally organized to connect diverse forms of expertise and shift power relations in research activities to ensure that all partners have a say in the joint work (Farrell, Penuel, Coburn, Daniel & Steup, 2021). Developing the relationships with individual partners is time intensive, and it requires the cultivation of care and responsiveness (Arce-Trigatti, Klein & Lee, 2023). Such relationships also benefit from intentional structures, as we elaborate below, that facilitate both interpersonal interactions and organizational change (Farrell et al., 2022). In this paper, we will show how mutual responsiveness among partners helped support the transformation of an existing school system practice-curriculum materials adoption-leading to a new form of activity that was better informed by research. Importantly, the transformation did not involve the faithful implementation of existing research-based practices, but a hybridization of multiple practices in service of a district-held goal. Hybridization refers to a process in which a new form of activity is created, drawing on ingredients from two or more contexts (Akkerman & Bakker, 2011). Hybridization as an outcome stands in contrast with a common goal in transfer research: promoting educators’ faithful implementation of interventions developed and tested first by researchers. Here, we show hybridization is an alternate path for research to influence practice, supported by mutual adaptation of partners to one another, responsiveness to emergent needs of the practice partnership, and flexible repurposing of material resources and people’s time. Framing the Joint Work of RPPs: Learning by Expanding We begin with the premise that in an RPP, all partners have relevant knowledge and expertise to bring. In addition, we assume no partner’s knowledge is sufficient to accomplish goals that the partners wish to pursue together in transforming systems. Thus, to accomplish goals of transformation in an RPP requires learning: partners learning from one another and organizations learning how to do new things together, and RPP learning how and when their joint efforts succeed in transforming systems (Farrell et al., 2022). We need a vocabulary suitable for characterizing this set of assumptions and developing knowledge about if, when, and how they hold true. For this reason, we do not use the metaphor of transfer or of translation to describe the work of an RPP to create transformations in systems. While such a metaphor offers us beneficial conceptual handles for understanding the characteristics of interventions that make them more or less likely to be adopted, as well as frameworks for investigating factors that hinder or help adoption of research-generated knowledge and practices, ultimately the transfer metaphor 268 William R. Penuel, Anna-Ruth Allen, Helen Baynum, Anna Foster leaves unchallenged the idea that it is the practice partners who need to learn from researchers in an RPP, and not vice versa (Penuel, Allen, Farrell & Coburn, 2015). Further, this metaphor provides a way to think about the joint work of RPPs together to create new forms of activity that specifically address how to use interventions to promote systems change. Finally, the translation metaphor it presents systems themselves as if they are unchanging, while interventions and people move through a pipeline and are changed as interventions influence teaching and learning. In fact, systems themselves are constantly changing, including changing in relation to their external political environments (Glazer & Peurach, 2013). We instead characterize the joint work RPPs do to try to transform systems through design research as a form of expansive learning (Engeström, 1987; Engeström & Sannino, 2010). In expansive learning, “learners learn something that is not yet there. In other words, the learners construct a new object and concept for their collective activity, and implement this new object and concept in practice” (Engeström & Sannino, 2010, p. 2). In expansive learning within an RPP, a key assumption is that while each partner brings distinctive expertise, no partner alone has the knowledge - theoretical, practical, or otherwise - to transform an educational system toward a particular object. Transformation of systems requires both the elicitation and use of interdisciplinary forms of expertise (Edwards & Stamou, 2017); it also requires an appreciation of different forms of knowing that encompass social science knowledge and knowledge based in a wide variety of human experiences (Bang, Medin, Washinawatok & Chapman, 2010; Nowotny, 2003). The result or “what” of expanded learning encompasses three outcomes: the creation of something that does not yet exist (e. g., a new intervention or network of practices for supporting an intervention’s continuous improvement), some new theoretical concept, and a new type of agency for participants (Engeström & Sannino, 2010). Expansive Learning in RPPs Seeking to theorize the joint work of RPPs, Farrell and colleagues (2022) sought to articulate how concepts from expansive learning can help explain when and how RPPs can support systems transformation. They emphasized the central importance of encounters at boundaries - both within systems of practice and between research and practice - where participants encountered differences that required them to consider different purposes, contexts, practices, norms, and expectations for engaging with one another. Further, they posited that whether an RPP was “successful” depended on their learning at those boundaries, that is, whether when participants encounter boundaries, they develop new understandings, new ways of thinking of themselves, new forms of activity or organization (cf., Akkerman & Bakker, 2011). Learning in an RPP, posited Farrell and colleagues (2022), is facilitated through boundary work. Boundary work refers to work that partners do when they confront some kind of difference that impedes action. Initially, such work may involve negotiating a joint understanding of the problem space the RPP will address (e. g., how to better coordinate teacher education coursework with field experiences; Akkerman & Bruining, 2016). Over time, however, it may involve renegotiating that focus and reconfiguring teams as leaders and priorities in a partner organization shift (Davidson & Penuel, 2019). In such cases, the partners themselves can engage in different boundary spanning “moves” to facilitate moving past impasses, according to Farrell and colleagues (2022). In addition, the partners can make effective use of artifacts to navigate differences and that can be used across multiple settings of activity to achieve different purposes. Last, the RPP may create intentional structures for organizing activity, such as creating co-design teams to develop interventions, or repurpose existing routines (e. g., for assessing students and looking at assessment data together). Learning by Expanding with Partnerships 269 Supporting and Understanding Hybridization as a Learning Mechanism in an RPP In their synthesis of research on boundary crossing, Akkerman and Bakker (2011) note that for the creation of new practices, a type of learning that is needed involves the mechanism of transformation. Transformation, they note, typically starts with a process of confrontation of a problem, a contradiction, or dilemma that requires a reconsideration of current practice. Here, boundary objects or artifacts come into play in facilitating joint work that supports navigation of difference. Within the shared problem space, a new practice can be developed - a mechanism they call hybridization, which is defined as a process in which “ingredients from different cultural contexts are combined into something new and familiar” (Akkerman & Bakker, 2011, p. 148). Then, a practice may become crystallized - or in the terms sociologists might use, institutionalized - into a practice that is repeated and continues to evolve on its own, sometimes incorporating processes for continuous improvement and reflection. In this paper, we focus on describing and accounting for hybridization as a mechanism for learning within an RPP of the practice of an RPP, highlighting how the moves of boundary spanners within partnership meetings (a boundary practice created for a single research project) supported this hybridization. We focus on hybridization for several reasons. For one, the theory of expansive learning itself emphasizes hybridization as a key principle. Second, we seek to show how as a theoretical concept hybridization helps us see more clearly the work of “successful” transfer research as a process of transformation, rather than as a linear movement of research concepts into practice. Third, hybridization presents a concept that allows us to theorize implementation in a different way, as scholars of transfer research have called for in recent years, to develop more general theories of implementation (Schrader, Hasselhorn, Hetfleisch & Goeze, 2020). Methods The current study is a descriptive study of a single project’s effort to transform the practice of curriculum materials adoption, drawing on an existing researchbased cycle for instructional improvement. We focus on curriculum materials adoption because it is a highly consequential and regulated process in most school districts, involving formal decision-making processes and bodies that often include teachers, as well as small-scale pilots of materials (Allen & Seaman, 2017). It is consequential, because what curriculum materials are used matter for student outcomes (e.g., Krajcik et al., 2022). Because it is regulated, it is an example of a practice that is potentially challenging to transform, even if - as is common in the United States - the process results in curriculum materials of lower quality being chosen over those that are research-based (Polikoff et al., 2020). In this analysis of our RPP’s joint work, we ask: 1. How were activities from researchers and activities from the district hybridized to create a new form for the district curriculum materials adoption process? 2. How did boundary spanning moves, boundary practices, and boundary objects support hybridization? We focus on the second year of a two-year study, after a period in which the partnership had already confronted a problem together - that teachers were unlikely to choose to adopt instructional materials judged to be of high-quality by external standardssetting bodies without some deeper engagement with them. It also took place after the group had identified a shared problem space, namely helping teachers see how key concepts from research were reflected in the different routines and structures that were built into materials. More on the specific routines and structures used in defining the materials can be found in Reiser, Novak, McGill & Penuel (2021). As noted above, the problem of teachers choosing low-quality materials is common in many districts. Without high-quality professional learning to help them see key features that matter for student learning, HQIM may be rejected by educators (Lowell, Fogelman & McNeill, 2024). Many secondary teachers reject existing materials altogether (Doan et al., 2022; Wang et al., 2022), or choose materials that align with their own and colleagues’ existing beliefs 270 William R. Penuel, Anna-Ruth Allen, Helen Baynum, Anna Foster about teaching (Torphy, Liu, Hu & Chen, 2020), whether or not they align with ambitious visions for instruction. In addition, the kinds of curriculum materials that were considered in these materials, moreover, are being widely considered for adoption across the United States today. They have been judged by external bodies that review curriculum materials across the United States (e.g., EdReports), to be of “high quality; ” many districts use these ratings to consider what materials to adopt. The specific materials in question have a market share of close to 10 percent nationwide, according to a recent RAND analysis. For these reasons, we see this case as a potentially paradigmatic case (Flyvbjerg, 2006) for studying and theorizing the mechanism of hybridization in an RPP. That is to say, it is a good case to establish a base from which further conceptualization of the notion of hybridization as a mechanism for joint learning in an RPP can build. District and Partnership Context This study took place in a mid-sized (40,000 students) urban school district in the Intermountain West of the United States. Roughly half of the students are of Latine background, and one in five are Black. Nearly half of the students are multilingual learners, and 80 % live near or below the poverty line as measured by the percent of students eligible for free or reduced-price lunch. It is one of the most diverse districts in the state with students from more than 130 countries speaking over 160 languages. The district had 58 schools at the time of the study (of which eight were high schools) and more than 2,000 teachers. Prior to this study our inquiryHub team had strong ties to the district and had completed some small projects with the science team there. This project involved a close collaboration with the science curriculum leader, Tania. Tania was responsible for secondary science instruction in the district, and part of her role included facilitating professional learning activities for teachers and leading adoption processes for new instructional materials. The project had two distinct phases, where the first involved us introducing a researcher-developed routine for improvement in the context of existing Tania’s coaching activities with teachers. The second is the focus of this study, and it involved us working to adapt parts of the researcherdeveloped routine to support the district’s own adoption processes for instructional materials. The district was a good choice for a design study exploring how best to support adoption of highquality instruction materials for two key reasons. First, its leaders had adopted a theory of instructional improvement that centered on coupling the adoption of HQIM with professional development in how to use HQIM. Second, the district was in the midst of considering adoption of a new high school science curriculum and was focusing their consideration on OpenSciEd, a freely available K-12 program that is aligned to the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS; NGSS Lead States, 2013), and that has been judged to be of high-quality by two external ratings bodies (NextGen Science and EdReports). Sources of Data Our study relied on two primary data sources intended to help us develop the descriptions of the hybridization process and interpretations of it: (1) artifacts describing each activity and (2) transcripts of partnership meetings. Artifacts For the activity that we as researchers brought to the partnership as a resource for joint work, we relied on a series of publications to generate a description of the activity that our own research team had produced. These include a practitioner-facing article that described the activity (Penuel et al., 2024), descriptions of a data collection and visualization system designed specifically to support the activity (Raza, Sumner & Penuel, 2024), as well as research publications that described outcomes that demonstrate the activity’s potential to generate changes to students’ experiences with respect to their experience of learning activities within high-quality instructional materials (Raza et al., 2025 a, 2025 b). Notably, each of these articles was peer reviewed, which we take as baseline evidence for the activity’s basis in research. We gathered several artifacts from the district related to curriculum materials adoption activities, including an introductory professional development with teachers, as well as from teacher professional learning community meetings where biology, chemistry, and physics teachers planned and discussed lessons. From the curriculum review committee established to support adoption, artifacts comprised slides and agendas from curriculum review committee meetings. From the district level professional development, we obtained slides from the facilitator. Learning by Expanding with Partnerships 271 Partnership Meetings All partnership meetings took place on Zoom and were audio-recorded, and as part of these, we undertook regular periods of time where we elicited the district leader’s perspectives on processes to enhance our understanding of district activities, including the adoption activities that were unfolding during the time of our study. We sought to understand the people involved in different aspects of activities, the key tools and artifacts, and the rationales for them. During these episodes within meetings, we also engaged in what in partnership work is sometimes referred to as a joint search for solutions to emerging problems being faced by the district. They were key moments that are the basis for analysis here of what aspects of researcher practice were taken into the district’s adoption processes. They also were one basis for helping us identify key boundary spanning moves and artifacts that enabled the RPP to support a new, hybridized curriculum materials adoption practice. Approach to Analysis In this study, we employ a cultural-historical activity theory approach to analysis of the different forms of activity: researcher-introduced, district, and hybridized. In this approach, a key aim is to construct evidence from the data sources above to identify key components and relationships among activity systems. In such an analysis, a focus is on how tools mediate ongoing activities, where several key components and their interrelations are identified: the subjects and objects of activity, key instruments or tools that mediate activity, the implicit and explicit rules or norms that constrain actions within the system, division of labor, and community (i. e., the individuals and subgroups who share the same broad object of activity). For more on these components, see Engeström and Sannino (2010). Characterizing each activity in this way allowed us to characterize the new activity’s hybridity - that is, what is similar or different that could not have been anticipated by understanding each activity on its own. To develop interpretations of how hybridization was accomplished, we relied on a coding scheme developed for the larger study that we applied to analyze our partnership meetings. That coding scheme included broad characterization of different activities, as well as codes related to mentions of key curricular features and design principles that were used to develop those curricular features. We focused specifically on identifying themes (Braun & Clarke, 2006) from codes related to a single code focused on “strategic communication and boundary work”, focusing especially on work that Tania communicated to us that she was undertaking on her own to facilitate boundary crossing in the district to ensure a successful pilot process. Here, we sought to identify themes related to for aspects of boundary work: expansion of the object of the pilot, boundary spanning moves made by different partners, boundary objects that emerged to support the hybridization and coordination of the activity, and boundary practices established to support hybridization. Themes took the form of specific claims, supported with specific excerpts or elements of artifacts as evidence for claims, which helped us organize findings for the paper. Findings This section is organized in two parts: (1) an activity-theoretical description of the different activity systems, including the hybridized adoption process that emerged from the partnership; and (2) an interpretation of the boundary work we did together that contributed to the hybridized activity. Activity-Theoretic Description of Three Activity Systems There are three different activity systems that are relevant to understanding our joint work as a partnership: (1) the researcher-introduced Student Experience Improvement Cycle (SEIC); (2) the formal curriculum materials adoption process codified in district policy; and (3) the hybridized curriculum materials adoption process that emerged from blending elements of both Systems 1 and 2. We describe each below, in terms of their key objects and subjects, key instruments or tools, the implicit and explicit rules or norms that constrain actions, divisions of labor, and community (i.e., the individuals and subgroups who share the same broad object of activity). A comparison of the three is presented in Table 1 below and used as a basis for characterizing how the partnership helped establish a new, hybrid activity. 272 William R. Penuel, Anna-Ruth Allen, Helen Baynum, Anna Foster SEIC Formal District Adoption Process Hybridized District Adoption Process Object ◾ Promote more equitable participation in science learning with high-quality instructional materials ◾ Adopt high-quality instructional materials for high school science ◾ Build understanding of features of highquality instructional materials and support for adopting high-quality instructional materials Subjects ◾ Professional development leaders ◾ Secondary science teachers ◾ District leaders ◾ Teachers ◾ Board of Education ◾ District leaders ◾ Teachers ◾ Board of Education ◾ External partners: Professional development leaders and pilot researchers Community ◾ Students ◾ Science education researchers ◾ District secondary science teachers ◾ Students ◾ District secondary science teachers ◾ Board of Education ◾ Students ◾ Science education researchers Rules (Implicit/ Explicit) ◾ Asset view of students ◾ Valuing interests and participation of all groups (e. g., different genders, races) ◾ Ensuring participation and buy-in of educators ◾ Data required ◾ Approval of elected board of education ◾ Asset view of students ◾ Data required ◾ Ensuring participation and buy-in of educators ◾ Approval of elected board of education Tools and Instruments ◾ PDSA Cycle ◾ SEET System ◾ Rubrics for evaluating materials ◾ EQuIP Rubric for Science ◾ Sample Materials ◾ SEET System ◾ Research briefs Division of Labor ◾ Researchers in leading/ guiding role ◾ Teachers are learners ◾ District leaders in leading/ guiding role ◾ Teachers influence decisions ◾ Board has power to make decisions ◾ District leaders in leading/ guiding role ◾ Teachers are learners ◾ Teachers influence decisions ◾ Board has power to make decisions ◾ Researchers provide support for professional learning and pilot data analysis Table 1: Descriptions of Activity Systems Notes: SEIC = Student Experience Improvement Cycle, PDSA = Plan-Do-Study-Act, SEET = Student Electronic Exit Ticket, EQuIP = Educators Evaluating Quality Instructional Products. Learning by Expanding with Partnerships 273 Researcher-Introduced Activity System: The Student Experience Improvement Cycle During the initial phase of work with the district, we introduced an existing activity system, an intervention called the Student Experience Improvement Cycle (SEIC) into existing data-driven instruction routines. The object of the SEIC is to support teachers in using research-based strategies for promoting more equitable small group and whole class knowledge-building activities in classrooms where teachers are using high-quality instructional materials. In the past, we have led these activities in groups with teachers as participants, playing dual roles as professional development leaders and investigators of the cycle itself. Students are indirect beneficiaries of this work, to the extent that teachers’ participation leads to better experiences for them. The broader science education research community is also an important audience for us, and others have taken up tools and aspects of the process, partly through our sharing about the SEIC in articles and at conferences. A key orientation we bring - and ask teachers to adopt in the SEIC - is an asset-based view of students, and a disposition to look for gaps in participation to be explained not by characteristics of students but by a combination of things they do in the classroom and systemic factors. We can make these demands, because in the past, we have had the authority as professional development leaders and those with external grant resources to ask that teachers adopt these orientations. In the SEIC, teachers are positioned both as learners and co-investigators with one another of their students’ classroom experiences. The SEIC is based on a Plan-Do-Study-Act (PDSA) cycle used within improvement research in education (Bryk, Gomez, Grunow & LeMahieu, 2015) that engages coaches and teachers in strategies that we have identified from research can be effective in promoting more equitable participation in science learning. Teachers working in small groups select strategies they would like to try in their classrooms, and they use a web-based system that supports educators in collecting, analyzing, and visualizing student experience data collected via brief surveys administered at the end of class. The Formal District Curriculum Materials Adoption Process The district’s formal curriculum materials adoption process’ primary object is to select highquality instructional materials that teachers are expected to use in their classrooms. The process is conducted separately for different subject areas and grade levels every seven years. There are several key actors who are required to be involved, including the curriculum leader at the district for the focal subject area, their supervisors, teachers who are involved in both selecting and piloting materials, and the elected board of education that ultimately votes on the recommendation from the district about what materials to adopt. Though not all teachers in the district are involved in the process, nor do all students get to try out the materials, ultimately, they are key interest holders who will be impacted by the process. The process is governed by rules specifying the flow of activity, as well as who can participate and who has decision making authority in different parts of the process. The process is codified in a Curriculum Adoption Guide that was developed the year before our study began. That process specifies that a subject matter leader in the district office is responsible for constituting a curriculum review committee (CRC), organizing a pilot test of the materials, soliciting feedback and obtaining recommendations from the committee and piloting teachers, and then submitting the recommendation to the district’s elected school board, who formally vote on the materials being recommended for adoption. The CRC meets at least three times and always includes mostly teachers, leaders in specialist roles (e. g., disability student services, multilingual services), one or two union representatives, a community member, and the 274 William R. Penuel, Anna-Ruth Allen, Helen Baynum, Anna Foster coordinator. The teachers who are in the pilot may be on the CRC but do not have to be. Piloting is typically open to any teacher who applies to be part of the process. Including teachers as key participants is included to ensure that they have a say in the process and helps legitimize the decision to other teachers. Pilot testing is a key part of the curriculum materials adoption process and involves trying out the materials and gathering data from pilot classrooms. The criteria that the CRC decides to prioritize are used in deciding what data to gather. It is up to the CRC to choose the data and, under typical circumstances, to gather the data. At the conclusion of the pilot, the CRC together look at the data to make a final recommendation that the CRC coordinator will present to the school board, which then makes a final vote on what materials to adopt. In addition to the Curriculum Adoption Guide, there are some key tools or instruments that are expected to be part of the standards. These include resources that include information about district needs, relevant state and local policies guiding selection of materials, the focal academic standards, and available curriculum materials and the research base behind it. As in many adoption processes in science in the United States, a key resource used by the CRC is an externally developed tool for evaluating materials’ alignment to the NGSS, the Educators Evaluating Quality Instructional Products (EQuIP) rubric (Achieve, 2016). The CRC uses this rubric to evaluate candidate materials, ideally recommending between 1 - 3 materials to pilot test. The Hybridized Curriculum Materials Adoption Process The hybridized process that emerged followed all the required procedures of the district, but several elements - including a more explicit object related to building teachers’ understanding of key features of high-quality instructional materials - were added from the SEIC and from other activities of the system. In addition, the hybrid process relied on an existing infrastructure for supporting teacher learning, teacher work teams that met by subject area at three high schools, to embed opportunities to plan and reflect on piloting activities. In addition, we as external research partners played integral roles in the process, unlike in a typical adoption process, because time for our participation was compensated through the external grant we held was part of the partnership. Specifically, our involvement included leading both formal professional development in the units in an upfront workshop for pilot teachers, developing materials for facilitators to use in the teacher work teams, and supporting data collection and analysis aspects of the piloting process. A new, indirect interest holder in the work are science education researchers and curriculum developers, who share our own interest in processes that can support the adoption of high-quality instructional materials. Notably, Tania as leader of the district did not adopt the SEIC as is, but instead integrated elements of the SEIC into the required district adoption process. While a formal PDSA wasn’t followed, the teachers in work teams used planning and reflection routines that were adapted from the SEIC and that made use of the short student surveys used in that activity system. In addition, because the district needed data on student outcomes - and not just experience - we adapted the Student Electronic Exit Ticket (SEET) system to include questions about student learning that were already embedded in the instructional materials, as part of short “exit tickets” used in the materials. At the conclusion of the pilot, we on the research team conducted analyses of the data from exit tickets and from teacher interviews and provided a set of slides for Tania to use in presenting information to her supervisors and to the board. Two of the three teacher work groups also used a set of research briefs we had developed related to the key ideas from research for use as part of work group learning activities, so that teachers engaged directly with findings from research that had been embodied in the materials’ design. Learning by Expanding with Partnerships 275 For its part, the district incorporated an upfront professional learning workshop to introduce pilot teachers to the unit they were planning to teach. For our part, we believed that without such a workshop, teachers would be less likely to understand the key features of material or have the confidence to try them out. The district leader agreed on the value of such a workshop but noted that there were few days in the district schedule that would permit such a workshop to be held. This aspect required negotiation of when and how much time would be allocated for the workshop. Boundary Work that Supported Hybridization Several moves by Tania and by members of our own team supported the hybridization of the curriculum materials adoption process. Tania engaged in regular actions to help us understand internal priorities and processes of her school district that could impact our work, so that we could function as thought partners in how to navigate those processes successfully. In these interactions, she clarified the limits of her own authority - to direct resources, to engage others, and to make decisions - and where her need for internal advocacy was critical, given those limits. For our own part, as we realized time and resources would be needed to support the pilot that had not been part of our original research plans and that Tania could not provide, we adjusted our own grant budget. We agreed to pay for some adaptation of research instruments, data analysis, and for professional development and coaching to teachers as part of our grant. Third, notable in our boundary work was that of synchronization - that is, ensuring that we aligned our partnership activities with the school calendar (e. g., available days for professional learning) and with the timeline for the piloting process. Plans were adjusted along the way, too, as we learned of new constraints on teachers’ times imposed from outside the partnership and newly calendared meetings between Tania and her supervisors. Each of these moves illustrates the ways that partners’ adaptability and resourcefulness were both key to hybridization. Our analysis of partnership activities showed some objects emerged as key to enabling the work of hybridization. Repeatedly, the team discussed together communications with school leaders, who functioned as gatekeepers with the power to allow or deny teachers’ participation in both pilot activities and research. These communications were brief, written overviews of project goals and activities, sent through official channels, and the team took time in multiple meetings crafting them. Also significant was the system for collecting and visualizing data from brief surveys; we did work to change this system as part of the pilot, integrating items that could be used to assess student learning from focal lessons into them. “Data for the pilot” more broadly emerged as key - including negotiations over what data to include as part of the pilot (interviews, surveys of students and teachers), as well as to help school leaders understand desired shifts in instruction (observation protocols). Notably, the research briefs related to key ideas from research embedded in materials were also objects used within the school-based teams to facilitate their learning. One of the key boundary practices that we established that was critical for the success of hybridization was a series of four meetings of teacher teams in three schools that agreed to be part of the pilot process. Tania had identified ahead of time some schools she thought would be ideal, while leaving the opportunity to pilot materials open, and the team recognized that a key resource these and other schools in the district had was protected time for teacher teams to meet. And though Tania articulated her hope for a “PDSA cycle” like the SEIC, along with data from the surveys, to be central, we together created and co-enacted a series that relied on short routines for planning and reflecting on instruction in key lessons of the unit that each team was pilot testing. We focused on lessons where surveys were already built into the materials, and teams were facilitated by Tania and another person connected to our team who had helped developed the materials. 276 William R. Penuel, Anna-Ruth Allen, Helen Baynum, Anna Foster Discussion Analyzing the process of hybridization of activity in partnership provides us a way to characterize - as well as theorize - the transformation that is involved when research transfer takes place. The observation that transformation is inherently part of implementation of innovations is not a new idea (see, e. g., McLaughlin, 1976), but such transformations are not always well theorized (Schrader et al., 2020). Hybridization provides a language for characterizing the broader object of joint work in partnerships that aim at systems transformation. It is not only more accurate than attempting to characterize such work as the adoption of evidence-based practice, or as faithful implementation of an intervention, it is also more useful for supporting collaborative relationship-building in which each partners’ perspectives and activity systems are considered necessary ingredients for making something new together. Looking at boundary work, too, provides a more detailed look at the work of collaboration. Our own analysis not only reveals the importance of teams’ adaptability, but also the importance of being able to use resources flexibly and to synchronize research and practice activities. We are not the first to point out the significant role played by the importance of external funding and flexibility with respect to funding (Farrell et al., 2021); nor are we the first to point out the key role of synchronization (Akkerman, Bakker & Penuel, 2021; Penuel et al., 2020). In precisely this respect, though, our analysis begins to reveal possibilities for developing more general knowledge related to key partnership processes. It shows that such phenomena are not unique or specific to contexts, but general phenomena with which RPPs must grapple. This is not to contest the idea that the unique features of different systems make it difficult to establish general solutions to the problem of how to use research to support systems transformation (Boaz, Oliver & Hopkins, 2022; Torres, 2022), and we know that generalization is an important goal in transfer research and other kinds of research. Differences in the institutional contexts of schooling across countries - including the cognitive, cultural, and political dimensions of schooling - should not be underestimated in terms of how they matter for the design of approaches to support knowledge mobilization (Schrader et al., 2020). Another limitation of this study is that we’ve not examined a key characteristic of expansive learning, namely the creation of new forms of agency. We have not done so in part for space reasons in this paper, but it is important to note that a key condition for the success of the hybrid activity described here was promoting teachers’ agency in identifying and adapting high-quality instructional materials (see also Severance, Penuel, Sumner & Leary, 2016). Teachers were key decision makers in the adoption process, both as prescribed by the district and enacted in the process. Separate analyses are planned of their own experiences and ways in which they did and did not support teacher agency. To date, there has been limited investment in developing capacity for relational and systemic strategies such as RPPs world-wide (Boaz et al., 2022; Torres, 2022). Particularly rare have there been investments in RPPs at the national level outside the U.S. (Boaz et al., 2022). Expanding investments may benefit from parallel investments in evaluation of RPPs, given limitations in what is known about whether, how, and when they can be effective (Penuel & Coburn, 2016). Our own team has sought to help build capacity for evaluation by developing validity evidence for measures of RPP effectiveness (Soland, Penuel, Farrell & Wellberg, 2024) and a toolkit for teams to use formatively to assess the effectiveness and health of RPPs (https: / / nnerpp.rice.edu/ rpp-effectiveness-andhealth-tool-kit/ ). Investments in capacity building might require additional evidence regarding the establishment of new social ties - across research and practice, and among practitioners - and evidence that hybridization efforts result in networks that also support integrity to the key research concepts behind interventions (Farrell et al., 2026). Learning by Expanding with Partnerships 277 Conclusion Collaboration is key to effective knowledge transfer, but it is difficult when it relies on individuals acting outside of wider systems of support. RPPs can provide a context for engaging in powerful work of transforming systems in ways that are informed by research, as this study illustrates. But such transformation always involves creating new forms of activity, not simply scaling and replicating effective interventions in new settings. And such transformation typically involves the hybridization of research-based practices that requires flexibility and responsibility on the part of researchers. While this paper shows the potential for such hybridization, we recognize that the promise of transformation through RPPs is still just that - a promise. As such, the wishes expressed by the teacher interviewed by Hartman and Decristan (2018) remain wishes, but, we would add, worthy ones worth pursuing. References Achieve (2016). 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