Knowledge Broker Diary: Day 167

The following is a guest blog posting from David Yetman, Manager of Knowledge Mobilization at the Leslie Harris Centre with Memorial University in St. Johns, NL. Visit their web site at www.mun.ca/harriscentre

I am a part-time PhD student and a full-time knowledge broker. And today I feel like Sisyphus. You never heard of him, hey? He was the poor Greek son of a… king who took pleasure in killing and was sentenced to a life’s struggle of pushing a boulder up a hill, only to reach the top with the curse of it falling down the hill again. Never (never!) to reach the top. Sounds a bit like positioning academic research to contribute to society. You think the change is happening… and then… before you know it, you are back to the base of the hill.

The graduate student gives me hope. I have no background in pedagogy or theories of learning. I have no need to fulfill tenure requirements. But I do have an inkling that graduate students could be the most important human resource in our modern society.

What makes graduate students so very different? Their post-modern view of the world? Their affinity for drinking copious amounts of European beer? (OK, different, but not unique) Not at all. Graduate students are unique human beings because they have a passion for knowledge and they want to share that knowledge for the betterment of the world around them. Is that unique you ask? Everyone carries knowledge and wants to change the world (existentialists exit here). But graduate students do it with a special thrilling insight into how knowledge can change society. And they have special knowledge.

I make no apologies for saying that, in my humble opinion, academic knowledge is the peak of the highest learning mountain. It is the supreme athlete of the learning arena.  The peer-to-peer battle over ideas gives knowledge its strength. Peers beat the pulp out of knowledge for a reason; so it can stand on its own merits. And graduate students take that torch with vigour. They are interested, focused and committed. At Memorial University of Newfoundland, Canada this year, there is a record number of graduate students. 2758 full and part-timers. 2758. That’s ten times the amount of people than the small community I grew up in. That’s 250 times the size of the average municipal council in Newfoundland and Labrador. That’s a lot of changing power.

I was reading on old University Affairs article the other day and it said only 51% of graduate students will go on to be academics. The other 49% will work in the public sector, not-for-profits, or start their own businesses. I’m not great at math, but that’s half. Half of all graduate students will choose not to be academics. I was shocked at that statistic, and enthused.

Imagine. Half of graduate students will be future academic researchers, half of them policy-makers. For the knowledge broker (able to leap silos in a single bound) it’s a future match made in Heaven. It is an infiltration of like-minded people who believe in the power of research. Who want to change the evidence-free decision-making culture in our system. 2758 (to infinity) pushing the boulder simultaneously, with a passion to push it over the top.

Knowledge Brokers and the Metaphors They Love

The following is a guest blog from Jason Guriel. A Research Assistant in the Knowledge Mobilization Unit at York University, Jason works to summarize and communicate the results of York research. He is also a PhD Candidate in English at York and has published two collections of poems.

As a graduate student at York University, the Knowledge Mobilization (KM) Unit has provided not just summer work but an opportunity to learn about some of the more policy-relevant research being carried out on campus. But as a PhD candidate in York’s Department of English, my relationship to KM is a bit murkier. Scholars, critics, professors, and graduate students who study literature are not typically engaged in research that is obviously policy relevant or that has much of a direct, material impact on, say, a local community. The same is probably true of academics in other areas, such as the fine arts. KM encompasses a pretty broad suite of services, but what can it offer disciplines like English – disciplines where research, though valuable in and of itself, does not necessarily always aim to have an explicit social use?

Well, one thing KM offers – or, at least, one thing it has offered me – is a better understanding of the nature of collaboration. There’s a lot of chatter, in the world of research, about the need to break through the silos in which academics are often isolated, and to bring these supposed hermits blinking into the light, into contact with others. Of course, the image of the researcher in the silo has become a cliché, and clichés can grate a bit, especially when you study poetry, as I’m fortunate enough to do. (Poetry, see, often tries to avoid clichés in pursuit of some more memorable way to say what amounts to the same old thing.) But when I really think about the cliché of the silo, I can’t help but picture an academic in an actual grain silo, up to his Adam’s apple in sorghum or something. As I picture it, this poor professor (or graduate student, or researcher) is talking and talking, saying important things even though the words remain trapped in the silo, caroming around, echoing uselessly. Outside of the silo, passing pedestrians hear only muffled noises, if they hear anything at all – if they even notice the silo! The silo, I should add, isn’t necessarily the academic’s fault; it may be the result of a discipline’s insularity, or the rigidity of institutional barriers, or any number of roadblocks for which there may be good reasons.

Knowledge brokers would seem to be those folks intent on knocking some holes into the silo – not just to let some beams of light in but also to let some beams of light out: out of the silo and into the community. They don’t want to dismantle the silo per se; they just want to help spread the sorghum. Or something.

So the silo metaphor, though a little cliché and unwieldy, is not so bad, if you really think about it (and, by doing so, rehabilitate it). And KM people, like poetry people, are always, it seems, thinking in metaphors and analogies and similes. One of the better metaphors sees knowledge brokers as agnostics: in other words, they believe in collaboration but have no firm, orthodox ideas about the form that collaboration should take. Another good one: knowledge brokers are especially imaginative matchmakers. They’re always looking to manufacture novel matches between researchers, policy-makers, and practitioners. They’re open to different, Twister^®-like relationships.

Whatever else KM represents – and this may include many things – it surely represents the potential of two-way relationships, the potential to learn from others even as they learn from you, the opportunity not just to mobilize knowledge (like the cliché of the rolling, moss-less stone) but to share knowledge. To engage in activities that are mutually beneficial. To make, I suppose, metaphors. A metaphor, after all, enables us to see one thing in terms of another. It enables a connection.

One Giant (Annual) Leap for York’s KM Unit

The following is a guest blog from Jason Guriel. A Research Assistant in the Knowledge Mobilization Unit at York University, Jason works to summarize and communicate the results of York research. He is also a PhD Candidate in English at York and has published two collections of poems.

Jason Guriel

Working with the Knowledge Mobilization (KM) Unit at York University has been my summer gig for the past few years. Most of the time, I’m a PhD candidate in the Department of English, which means I do some teaching, mark up student papers, and read piles of books (in February I took the last of the comprehensive exams for which I had to read the piles). But come May, when I rejoin the KM Unit, my thoughts turn, as a young man’s will, to the mobilization-of-knowledge-for-the-purpose-of-maximizing-the-impact-of-research-on-policy-among-other-things. And I return to something closer to what I think of as the real world: a 9-5 schedule and a packed lunch.

But here’s the interesting thing about this annual ritual: because I don’t usually visit the KM offices while I’m in school and, therefore, don’t witness much of its day to day goings-on throughout the year, the KM Unit, when I finally rejoin it every May, always seems dramatically different, as things will do when they’ve had a year to evolve incrementally, quietly, out of sight. I rejoin it only to discover: my beard-less manager of last summer has grown a beard; the research summaries I toiled over are now online; the blog that was a dream of yesteryear has an actual URL; and the KM Unit itself is no longer a tenuous experiment, with a grant, and housed in a tiny office but, rather, is a successful experiment, with a budget and, well, okay, still housed in that tiny office (but we’re moving; we’re getting there; we’re, you know, mobilizing). This has been one of the more gratifying aspects of my relationship with the KM Unit at York: experiencing its evolution as an annual leap forward (of course, it may not look this way to those who are here all year, in the trenches, but that’s how the evolution looks to me, from my perspective, checking in, as I do, every summer).

It’s a strange gig, then, because (unlike other kinds of seasonal jobs) I never know quite what I’m returning to, but I know enough to expect to be pleasantly surprised; to expect that the KM Unit will be more substantial than it was the summer before. In other words, the KM Unit keeps expanding outward, keeps building capacity, keeps working to connect some of Canada’s best researchers to a larger community of researchers, practitioners, and decision-makers. It keeps mobilizing stuff. I feel privileged, as ever, to have some small part in all of this. And I’ll look forward to being pleasantly surprised again, next summer, by the next leap forward.

New Grad Course at UVic “goes social” with Local NGO Content

The UVic KM Unit is excited to announce that UVic Graduate Studies will be offering a new Interdisciplinary Research Practicum course for graduate students that will give students an opportunity to work with NGO’s in Victoria, BC on research questions identified by front-line social service providers.

Modeled after the very successful GS 500 Interdisciplinary Graduate Courses that have been offered in collaboration with various BC Government Ministries and Health Authorities, this course will be themed around “Social Services”, and aims to provide graduate students with practical experience working on applied research in a non-profit setting. The Knowledge Mobilization Unit and Office of Community Based Research is in the process of consulting with several Victoria NGO’s in the development of the course content and research questions. This proves to be an exciting partnership between UVic and the non-profit community, and the Office of Community Based Research and Knowledge Mobilization Unit is thrilled to be working in a brokering role in the facilitation for this innovative initiative.

The course is set to begin in January 2010. The KM Unit anticipates interest from students in various disciplines who may be interested in applying their skills and expertise to research identified by an NGO.

For more information about this course, please contact kts@uvic.ca

KM into My Future

The following is a guest blog posting from YorkU 4th year undergraduate student Andrei Sedoff. Andrei has worked in the YorkU KM Unit for the past 2 summers and throughout the academic year and has worked on the development of our clear language research summaries, which can be found on our web site here.

Andrei Sedoff

Being part of the KM Unit at York has been a profound learning experience for me. I have many important lessons from KM to take with me into the working world. KM is much more than just an acronym that you find difficult to describe to friends and family (a common question from friends is: “you do what to knowledge?”). It is a powerful toolkit for engaging knowledge in today’s plugged-in workplace. KM creates the space where we can pause and reflect on the meaning of all the information we are constantly bombarded with. This adds value to all the volume. I look forward to applying the concepts I learned from my work with the KM Unit after graduating. It is still unclear to me exactly where I want to build my career, but I aspire to work in international affairs. I feel that the multifaceted nature of KM is a good fit with wanting to have the world as your workplace. I think that any job that deals with international matters embodies the values practiced in KM, especially the focus on collaboration.

No global task may be successfully tackled by any one individual. Seeing problems through the KM lens has always encouraged me to partner with as many people as possible when tackling a challenge. I also think that my experience with KM’s unyielding desire to find innovative solutions will carry over into my future career. I want to apply the KM mindset to look at a problem from multiple angles and be unafraid to try a new approach. Most importantly, I feel that the KM approach has really helped me be able to simply pause and reflect. With the modern supercharged pace of any workplace, reflection is a precious luxury. I hope that I can preserve this feature in my future jobs. I am also really excited to have the opportunity to promote KM outside of York. While working for the KM Unit at York, I have met many of our community, research, and government partners. Virtually everyone I have met has been an enthusiastic ambassador for the KM model. I am excited to promote this model to colleagues in any future workplace.

Everything is ready to go for another GS 500 Interdisciplinary Graduate course at the University of Victoria!

These courses match interdisciplinary graduate students up with real life research questions coming from a partnering agency in the community. For the fall 2009 course the Community partner is the BC Ministry of Housing and Social Development. Questions coming from the Ministry will focus on topics such as: homelessness in our community; rental market and market housing; housing needs in Aboriginal communities; sustainable and green housing, and much more.

The course will be co-taught by Dr. Bernie Pauly from the UVic faculty of nursing, and Dr. Cecile Lacombe, director of housing research for the BC Government. The Knowledge Mobilization Unit will facilitate the matching of graduate students to research questions appropriate for their area of study. The students will then work one on one with a research partner from the BC Ministry of Housing and Social Development, with a focus on action and recommendations to the Ministry. The end of the term will be marked by student presentations at a knowledge dissemination event that will open to all people who are interested in the topic.