Learners first: decolonizing school–university partnerships

Purpose This article aligns with two NAPDS Essentials: A Comprehensive Mission and Professional Learning and Leading. This paper aims to help education consultants, educators and other individuals who engage in professional development work in schools, particularly schools that educate Black and Brown students and other students of color, by presenting a decolonial school–university partnership (SUP) framework. Design/methodology/approach In this conceptual article, the authors discuss a SUP that prioritized reciprocity, mutuality and situated the university partner as a learner first before any professional development was created and engaged with educators. The authors offer two counternarratives of SUPs illustrating what relationships and service might look like within decolonizing SUPs. Findings Decolonizing SUPs are grounded in love, understanding, care, empathy, commitments to humanization. They are also responsive to and build upon the strengths, cultural knowledge and characteristics of school partners. Originality/value NAPDS’ (2021) commitment to equity, anti-racism and social justice in the Nine Essentials represents significant progress toward creating socially just schools where all students are able to thrive. An important component of realizing and enacting these commitments, however, is also recognizing the roots of inequity and racism and how those roots live within us as individuals and the policies, practices and taken-for-granted ways of being embedded within our institutions. This paper offers frameworks for how we might approach decolonized university–school partnerships. It also presents implications for how decolonizing SUPs requires shifts in mindset and positionality for external partners.