Date of Award
Spring 2025
Project Type
Dissertation
Program or Major
Education
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy
First Advisor
Andrew Coppens
Second Advisor
Semra Aytur
Third Advisor
Bethany Silva
Abstract
With concerns about supporting students’ overall wellness on the rise, school-community partnerships offer a promising solution. These collaborations can improve outcomes for students, schools, and communities by bringing together diverse expertise and funding sources. However, how these partnerships are formed and maintained, as well as how stakeholders are included in them, needs further exploration. To address this gap, the current study follows a collaboration between a school district and local health agency from the project’s initiation through its execution. The research approach and study design draw on the traditions of community-based research and ethnography, guiding my data collection and representation for more than two years while I actively participated in the initiative. Drawing on extensive observational fieldnotes, participant interviews, and archived documents, this study describes how participants conceptualized this initiative as a partnership, and how their enactment of this conceptualization guided participants’ relationships with stakeholders. This school-community partnership was structured in a way that reinforced a boundary between those who project leaders perceived to be “internal” partners and “external” partners. This study demonstrates that when school-community partnerships solely prioritize internal ideals and expectations (e.g., group communication, relationship building with each other), then external characteristics (e.g., stakeholder inclusion, community outreach) are treated as discrete, rather than collective, activities. This close examination of a school-community partnership offers a deeper understanding of the implications of how partnerships approach stakeholder inclusion and how to support authentic stakeholder inclusion in similar contexts.
Recommended Citation
Coppinger, Emilie, "“How Do You Replicate a Relationship?” An Exploration of How a School-Community Partnership Was Conceptualized and Enacted" (2025). Doctoral Dissertations. 2871.
https://scholars.unh.edu/dissertation/2871