Michael Johnny, RIR, YorkU
York KMb is offering sessions for researchers, staff and graduate students to help make their research relevant to professional practice and policy development.
York MdC offre des séances de formation à l’attention des professeurs, du personnel et des étudiants gradués afin de les aider à accroître la pertinence de leurs recherches sur le plan de la pratique professionnelle et du développement de politiques.
For the past five years, York’s Knowledge Mobilization (KMb) Unit has focused our KMb activities on service and awareness raising for faculty, graduate students and external organizations and leaders who are seeking to engage in KMb. Since 2006, York KMb has led 186 information sessions for community organizations and has supported 142 graduate students to meaningfully engage in KMb activity. While we’re proud of our efforts to raise awareness of the opportunity and importance of knowledge mobilization, two recent developments that have supported an expansion of our capacity building initiatives: securing a community-based knowledge broker, and second, a mandate from federal research granting councils to include a knowledge mobilization strategy on funding applications.
The unique role of a community-based knowledge broker supporting York KMb has enabled our unit capacity to address some of the emerging issues in knowledge mobilization that are centred within York University. With an increasing demand for engaging York researchers in collaborative project opportunities, our service unit saw a need to support learning opportunities here at York to help expand the capacity of university researchers who have interests in collaborative research, or, in mobilizing their existing research to help inform public policy and/or professional practice.
Given this, we’re pleased to announce the release of a series of learning events that help university researchers and administrators learn tools and strategies to engage in KMb within research projects. This series will include sessions on clear language writing and design, social media (specifically twitter, blogging and collaborative technologies) and developing strategies in KMb. Sessions have been developed that provide one hour information sessions or half-day hands-on workshops on several aspects of KMb.
Feedback has been positive and we’re excited to continue to roll out learning sessions throughout the calendar year. Dr. Christopher Innes, Canada Research Chair and Distinguished Research Professor within the Faculty of Liberal Arts and Professional Studies (English) commented, “This is great. Sessions like this are important for York researchers to strengthen their research projects with plans for Knowledge Mobilization that are recognized by research funding councils. The KMb Strategy Building session provided important tools to assist me and my project team”.
Upcoming events include KMb 101 (February 13), Clear Language Writing and Design (February 27), O3 (March 6) and WordPress (April 3). The full calendar of events is available here.
In addition to building capacity on campus, York has been asked to provide a KMb webinar to the Canadian Association of University Research Administrators. This national webinar will help raise awareness of the emerging role of KMb for university researchers and their research partners. The webinar will be help on February 14 at 1:00 EST. Information about registration can be found here.
