Lived Experience Interview:
Dr. Kemi Oyewole — Researcher, Researcher, Relationship Advocate

In this interview, conducted at the 2025 URBAN National Conference, Kemi Oyewole reflects on her work as a researcher; on the importance of relationships in ensuring that research is inclusive, responsive, and impactful; and on the importance of institutional collaborations — particularly between more and less resourced institutions.

JCEC:
Can you tell me a bit about yourself, the work that you do, and how you ended up being connected to the URBAN Research?

Kemi:
My name is Kemi Oyewole. I am a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania, and I got connected to the URBAN network through my work with research-practice partnerships and the National Network of Education Research-Practice Partnerships. I heard about the conference when it was at UC Santa Cruz in 2022 and I attended with some of my school-based partners. When I heard there was one in 2025, I decided to come back.

JCEC:
How do you tend to think about collaboration and what kinds of collaborative relationships or practices are you or your organization engaged in?

Kemi:
I think about collaboration as coming together to achieve a goal greater than the sum of its parts. I think it’s about working together. I’m a researcher — that’s my primary identity — so from project envisioning to project communication, thinking about co-designing projects, articulating goals that multiple partners agree are important and impactful. I think it’s about collecting data together, ensuring that survey instruments, interview protocols are planful and appropriate, especially when you’re engaging with communities that have often experienced a lot of harm. It is about collaboratively analyzing data and member checking to ensure that the findings that are emerging are accurate, and also not perpetuating stereotypes or harm that might come from someone interpreting data that they don’t understand or language that they might not understand. And then communicating the findings and sharing so that whatever is learned first speaks back to the people who contributed to that study so that they know what happened with the data, but then also to their broader community. Who else do they think needs to hear this? Since I focus a lot on K-12 teachers, does the school board need to get a summary of our findings? Does the teacher’s union need to get them? So, also including those folks and research products that are connected to my work as an academic, so through journal articles, things like that.

JCEC:
Based on your experience, what would you say are some collaboration-best-practices that you would suggest others use in their collaborative relationships — particularly in this current context of great social upheaval and uncertainty?

Kemi:
In terms of action … being really in relationship with folks seems important, and then using that to target specific sites of action, right? Are we trying to work on funding at the City Council? Do we need to strategize about making relationships there? Are we really just trying to talk to someone at the central office who runs this program? Do we need to sit down with them? And then also thinking about the resources necessary, right? It would be great to decrease class sizes across the home school district, right? Do we have the resource for that? Probably not. So, how do we think about our locus of control? I like to articulate what are the most likely outcomes for what we can do with this, and then some ambitious ones as well, but ensure that we’re on the same page and calibrating.

You know, change doesn’t have to be something that makes the newspaper. Maybe it’s conducting meetings in a way that people said were impactful, but just being intentional about it and then also celebrating it. Sometimes it’s like you learn something and you just change your practice, because that’s what facilitators do — what responsive educators do – and celebrating like, “No, the reason we’re doing this is because we learned something in our interviews.” And so honoring the inquiry and the research that’s already embedded in people’s practice seems important, to acknowledge the action that happens all the time, the things that are published in life.

JCEC:
Is there anything you would like to add?

Kemi:
Yeah, I think there are a lot of opportunities for institution types to collaborate, and it’s great to see historically Black colleges doing this work. But we need to also think about ways that more resourced institutions can be partnering to amplify the knowledge and the histories of community engagement that are rooted at HBCUs and minority serving institutions as well as tribal colleges. So, thinking about ways that all institutions need to look around and ensure that the voices that are being amplified through their conferences and journals and faculty members are not only coming from a specific set of institutions. So, I think that’s something that needs to be more intentionally conveyed.