partnerships. The network now boasts more than 100 members from 20 universities internationally. Today, Wegemer is a postdoctoral scholar at UCLA, where he is working on a collaborative research project with Ahn, two UCLA researchers, and the Los Angeles Unified School District, funded by the William T. Grant Foundation. He plans to pursue research-practice partnerships in the future. “UCI has been at the forefront of this movement and is unique to the extent that it provides resources and funding to allow graduate students to take on these partnerships,” says Wegemer. “So many grad students previously taught or worked in schools and now want to connect with people to foster positive change in society. OCEAN is an opportunity for us to do just that – in an inclusive process that collaborates with communities to inform progress.”
On the horizon
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Postdoc: Chris Wegemer ............................................................................
Chris Wegemer, Ph.D. ’21, was among the first UCI students to participate in OCEAN. During his three years with the program, he collaborated with the Samueli Academy, a public charter school in Santa Ana, serving as a resource for school administrators who wanted to make data-driven decisions. A former classroom teacher and union organizer, Wegemer found OCEAN to be an ideal vehicle for his growth as a scholar. “I gravitate toward community-based initiatives like OCEAN, which position scholars as mutual partners with educational practitioners,” Wegemer says. “We acknowledge that school leaders and teachers are experts, the holders of knowledge, and we’re co-creating together.” As interest in this type of partnership grew among students across the country, Wegemer and a group of UCI grad students collaborated with students from other top universities to launch the Rising Educational Scholars Helping Advance Partnerships & Equity (RESHAPE) Network, a resource for earlycareer scholars engaging in research-practice
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If these first four years of OCEAN have been a startup phase, Ahn’s focus for the next phase is sustainability – solidifying the curricular model and ensuring the program’s continuity even as individual people come and go. “Our biggest need is maintaining the relationships we’ve built with the community, which takes time and effort,” says Ahn. While Ahn celebrates OCEAN’s significant growth and extramural funding, he points out that not all the program’s impacts are tangible. “There are impacts and benefits that don’t get encapsulated in the millions of dollars of fundraising, such as human development,” Ahn says. “We’re helping each other, and folks are learning, developing and jumping off from their experiences – not just our graduate students but our community partners as well. Working together develops everyone’s capacity. “You can’t quantify the trust and relationships OCEAN has built,” Ahn continues. “But as universities need to become more and more relevant, trustful relationships are going to be a core resource. We have experience building that, and I’m really proud of that impact.”