ABSTRACT
Although partnerships between discipline-based practitioners and educators are a powerful means of creating learning and teaching connections, these partnerships can easily suffer from professional culture differences that are often perceived as binary states. Based on the results of a previous study using the United States National Science Foundation (NSF) GK-12 program at Idaho State University (ISU GK12), this chapter describes how perceived stereotypical binaries between educators and practitioners were identified and negotiated in the ISU GK12 example. Professional culture differences in other educator–practitioner partnerships can be identified by focusing on instances where educators or practitioners use binary statements about personality quirks, experience levels, and stereotypes. By modeling these differences as continuous axes of professional values rather than binary stereotypes, the participants in or administrators of partnerships can move beyond the binaries and into effective conflict prevention and negotiation through a process of metacognition, cultural relativism, and communication.
