RESEARCH-EDUCATION-COOPERATION: EARLY EXPERIENCES WITH SCHOOLS AS PARTNERS IN TRANSDISCIPLINARY RESEARCH PROJECTS

Summary This paper relates first experiences of researchers cooperating with teachers to involve students from primary and secondary schools as partners in transdisciplinary research projects. A variety of ResearchEducationCooperation activities were implemented in seven research projects addressing risk and uncertainty in the framework of sustainable development. The paper focuses on the challenges and potential benefits of such a cooperation from the viewpoint of researchers and scientific projects. The experiences show that the cooperation between two worlds as different as school and academia requires substantial translation and communication efforts. Also, although the researchers found the cooperation highly rewarding, the activities did not necessarily yield a genuine scientific output. Given the prevailing ‘publish-or-perish’ culture in academic research, this might limit the researchers’ commitment to cooperate with schools, despite the potential benefits. To overcome this dilemma, two strategies seem promising: increase the recognition for the skills researchers acquire through engaging with transdisciplinary research partners and identify innovative approaches to integrate the output from the ResearchEducationCooperation activities into the project results.