Deepening Community-Campus Partnerships Through Critical Reflection on Partnership Dynamics

Participants in this interactive webinar will learn about and use parts of the hot-off-the-presses Transformational Relationship Evaluation Scale (TRES) III Reflection Framework, which supports community-campus partners in examining dynamics of their partnership (e.g., power sharing, decision-making), identifying and prioritizing desired enhancements that result, and generating actionable learning to improve partnership practice accordingly. Research (Kniffin et al., 2023) documents that partners who have used the framework have an enhanced commitment to and clarity around partnerships; collaborators have brought in new partners, improved communications, and set goals for refining their work. TRES is applicable across the range of community-campus partnership activities (e.g., community-engaged learning and research, extension projects, institutional assessment).

Bringing partners together for critical reflection on their partnerships is important in nurturing the co-creative relationships and processes that undergird transformative collaborative and meaningful change. Facilitators will provide an overview of the conceptual frameworks underlying TRES, walk participants through the framework, and summarize evidence of its impact on partnerships (reviewing data from research on an earlier version of the tool). Participants will then use excerpts from the framework and debrief that experience – co-generating possibilities and challenges for using it across multiple contexts.