Abstract
The goal to enhance the impacts of academic research in the ‘real world’ resonates with progressive visions of the role of universities in society, and finds support among policy makers who have sought to enhance the ‘transfer’, ‘translation’, ‘uptake’, or ‘valorization’ of research knowledge in several areas of public services. This paper reports on an exploratory study of the strategies used by selected Canadian and international faculties of education to mobilize research knowledge. Drawing on data from semi-structured interviews with senior administrators of 13 faculties of education, the analysis reveals several themes. Academic leaders recognize knowledge mobilization as a desirable institutional mission, but they identify a number of barriers to greater efforts in this area. Although a number of strategies are employed, changes across multiple organizational dimensions to encourage and support knowledge mobilization were reported at only two institutions. These results are relevant to faculty administrators, scholars, and policy-makers interested in understanding the role of academic institutions in the mobilization of research knowledge to the broader education community.
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Notes
These were drawn from the most prestigious schools and research-intensive schools. A crude indicator of these attributes is that they are in the top 25 of the US News and World Report ranking of colleges of education. Northeast: Harvard University (3), Columbia University (2), Penn State University (22), and University of Pittsburgh (23); Midwest: University of Wisconsin (9), University of Michigan (14), and University of Minnesota (23); West: University of Southern California (27), Stanford (3), UCLA (6), and University of Washington (10); South: University of Maryland (25).
Names of the institutions are omitted in several segments in this section for reasons of confidentiality.
One of the Canadian interviewees, for example, highlights a community-university research alliance grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. Interviewees in two international jurisdictions similarly mentioned grant programs that induce and support collaborations with external organizations. It is worth noting that these activities are those known and/or supported by the interviewees within their faculties—we did not aim to catalogue each and every initiative occurring at every organizational level of the faculties studied.
Building research directories for external audiences is not a new idea with the rise of Internet. Institutions produced hardcopy directories of faculty members profiling their research in the past (e.g. OISE-UT alluded to the discontinuation of such a directory in the past because it was time consuming to produce and had questionable public impact). With the popularization of the Internet, faculties of education are creating online directories of faculty members, databases of research projects, among other tools.
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Sá, C.M., Li, S.X. & Faubert, B. Faculties of education and institutional strategies for knowledge mobilization: an exploratory study. High Educ 61, 501–512 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-010-9344-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-010-9344-4