Abstract
Designing effective structures around school-university partnerships is a highly interpretive area of research. Across Australia, a broad range of school-university partnerships exist and are based around a range of different factors. The focus of this chapter is on a specific school-university partnership model, based on activity theory, called an Alliance. This chapter draws upon reflections from Academic Mentors who are university-based actors and a principal, all in boundary crossing roles from the Ashwood Alliance. Reflections explore the experiences and perspectives of stakeholders during the COVID-19 pandemic who are involved in the partnership and boundary crossing within one Alliance. Reflections have been constructed as separate cases for analysis. The cases ultimately outlined the ways in which the individuals in these boundary crossing roles viewed their identity, notions of disruption and considerations of innovative and sustainable school-university partnership design.