Hello! We are Mark Yu and Christina Lemon from McREL International. In our daily work as evaluator and practitioner, respectively, we aim to bridge boundaries between research and practice and expand ways communities can more effectively collaborate and promote equitable educational student outcomes. One strategy we employ in our work is knowledge brokering.
Broadly, knowledge brokering is a process to connect evaluators and practitioners to share knowledge and promote the use of evidence-based practices in schools and districts. Spanning boundaries between research and practice is crucial for understanding and addressing complex social problems and improving outcomes for individuals and communities.
Hot Tips for Promoting Equity through Knowledge Brokering
As evaluators and practitioners, we need to ensure that knowledge brokering is done equitably to avoid perpetuating existing inequities. Equity-focused knowledge brokering ensures that all relevant stakeholders have opportunities for meaningful engagement and can derive practical benefits from the evaluation process, regardless of their background or position.
Here are some tips for evaluators to promote equity in knowledge brokering:
- Engage diverse stakeholders: It is important to engage stakeholders from diverse backgrounds and perspectives to ensure that all relevant voices can be heard. This includes collaborating with community members, practitioners, and evaluators from diverse racial, ethnic, and socio-economic backgrounds.
- Recognize and address power imbalances: Power imbalances can exist between evaluators and school practitioners, and between different stakeholder groups. Evaluators can address these imbalances by facilitating open dialogue and creating a safe and respectful environment for all stakeholders.
- Practice cultural humility: Evaluators can approach knowledge brokering with cultural humility, recognizing that they may not have all the answers or fully understand the experiences and perspectives of all stakeholders.
- Prioritize community-driven research: Community-driven research involves connecting with community members as partners in the evaluation process. This approach helps to ensure that the evaluation is relevant to the community and addresses the priorities and needs they identify.
- Disseminate findings in accessible formats: Disseminating research findings in accessible formats, such as plain language summaries, infographics, and presentations can help make information accessible to a wider audience, including those with limited literacy or language proficiency. Partnering with practitioners is helpful because they can ensure that dissemination efforts incorporate user-friendly and action-oriented guidance that addresses relevant problems of practice.
Expectations for evidenced-based practice demand new ways of thinking about connections between evaluators and practitioners. In offering these tips, we are advocating for a bidirectional approach to evaluation that integrates the benefits of research with the realities of schools, practitioners, and stakeholders. While strategic communication is an essential part of knowledge brokering, the core of the process is building relationships to facilitate networks and partnerships that promote meaningful, actionable, and equity-supporting strategies to improve students’ educational outcomes. Evaluators can play an important role in this process by grounding knowledge brokering efforts with the needs and priorities of the diverse communities they serve, which can lead to more equitable student outcomes.
Rad Resources
Want to learn more about knowledge brokering across evaluation-practice boundaries?
- The Center for Research Use in Education (CRUE) offers resources on addressing critical barriers to research use and offers innovative solutions for promoting evidence-informed improvement.
- The National Network of Education Research-Practice Partnerships (NNERPP) aims to develop, support, and connect research-practice partnerships in education to improve their productivity.
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