Peter: Well maybe that question of support is really an important one - part of the questions that we've been asking are about leadership. Leadership is always related to the task so if you were to think about what is the leadership that is needed – I mean you just talked that somebody that was cross-appointed that essentially lives in two different disciplinary worlds and there's an assumption that bringing somebody like that in, that you'll have an easier time including those perspectives. When you think about leadership and the way that you look at the world and the fact that you're a woman and the fact that you're in a particular type of discipline, what is an appropriate type of leadership around the concept of knowledge exchange and life-long learning within this context? Billie: Leadership to me is about trying to balance and negotiate and mediate so that it's about trying to listen right? Listen here is something that's being contributed over here. When I think about sharing knowledge, I think about the context of a sharing circle – a traditional sharing circle and this idea that we will come together – you know 7 of us and we're having this sharing circle so we each are contributing our knowledge and our experience and our understanding and we're sharing that together. And through sharing that all together, we create this eighth experience, and this understanding that comes of everything we've shared together. I guess I think about leadership of how you bring together people to share, in a respectful way, how we negotiate those relationships so that we're actually going about knowledge sharing, knowledge creation, knowledge dissemination in a way that's not appropriating knowledge, that's not taking away from people but that's giving to people. And I think leadership to some extent has to be modeling it – to not…to be walking your talk. I think that's the hardest part right? Really the hardest part is making your actions meet your ideals – meet your….all the great ideas that you can talk about, so… Peter: One of the interesting sets of conversations that I've been having is how to get full value out of knowledge and there are many different ways. Some people look at it as, you take the research, you produce a product, it goes to the market – money's made. That's one stream of creating value and it is a stream of creating value. Others will look at it of that you combine knowledge, you develop policies, they're implemented and the quality of life of people affected by those policies increases and so it's more valuable. When you think about the...improving the value from the use of your knowledge, what do you think about?
Billie: I think about value in terms of what is it going to mean. So if I'm thinking as a researcher, I'm thinking about what value is this going to have for the community that I'm doing research with. Peter: Okay Billie: You know, if I'm a social worker, I'm thinking what value is this going to have for my client because you have to overcome the… Peter: So talk a little bit about some of those things - when you're saying”here's value within my community” – what does that look like? Billie: Okay so if you're looking at…if I wanted to return to my home community and do research there – some kind of social research – looking at what are the challenges here? Well I can't walk back in after my length of not being there and dictate “here's the things that I think are going to be interesting”. I need to go and find out what are the issues that are really coming up for the community? Let them identify and then negotiate a relationship around can we look at these? Can I help you? Can we help each other look at these things together and how we're going to go about doing that so that the process is as important as the outcome. Peter: Okay, so it's not about getting to the outcome as quickly as possible? Billie: No, I mean because if you…I think the aboriginal community in one ways points to many of the things that have been wrong with research in the way that it would be sort of quick and dirty research with the aboriginal community - sort of mining knowledge as it referred to…so here's an example of how you have to establish trust and you have to establish relationships and in our community, it doesn't happen overnight. The process of how you come to things is as important as the outcome because if the process is awful, than the outcome isn't bound to be that great either? And it's that relationship. If I've had this negative experience with you, I'm bound to not pick up anything that comes out as a result of the product right? So I think that it's in the process is probably more valuable often than the outcome. Peter: Okay so we've talked a little bit about the challenges that you faced in terms of you doing this but you're obviously doing this because there's some rewards? Billie: Yes.
Peter: So what are the rewards for engaging in what you're engaging with? Billie: I think this is what I have to offer - these ideas or the skills or the things that I'm learning here that will be skills - this is what I have to offer to my community to help and clearly there are no shortage of social issues. My community and how I can help and I find that rewarding, cause it means that things aren't going to stay as they are. It means that we make change. And hopefully it means we can make change in ways that it's culturally appropriate without the negative impacts that have been there in the past. I think the rewards too are feeling like you can actually make some sort of social change that's actually going to improve things and that creating new knowledge and ideas about how things can be, helps to do that. Even just the process can help create the change, so that's the reward. Peter: Okay. You know, I often wish I had a crystal ball that worked, right? So I'm going to ask the imposable questions – so in ten years, if you were to look at the field of knowledge exchange, and especially with regards to life-long learning and to the capacity of making well informed decisions – what do you see in ten years? Where do you see the trends in your discipline, in your community and perhaps in and perhaps in your own personal work?
Billie: I think in social work…I mean there's this real push towards, we now have this institute here in this university…in this faculty for evidence based practice and so there's this real push. So I think it's about looking at how that's really going to unfold and for me, the idea, is what…in ten years I would like to know that evidence constitutes many things, many ways of knowing, many people's experiences in the world. That we're not just taking a stack of research that were conducted with certain groups, summarizing the results and then applying it blindly which I know isn't. I mean that's a really cut down version – it's a unfair characterization of evidence-based practice that happens often in social work… there's a real resistance by social workers that comes from practical issues meaning that if you're sitting in your agency and you're overworked and underpaid, you don't have time to sit and read journal articles and find out about the newest, best ways to do interventions and I think there's this resistance to you know what, that's great but I'm trying to help my clients right now or that's great but the research doesn't look at…for instance in mental health, the psychotherapies that tend to get tested are the ones that fit testing – they fit random control trials right, we're not looking at long term psychotherapies that are really more about interpersonal relationships because they don't fit well with traditional, empirical design. So I think there's also this reality for social workers on the ground who may not be using ways to fit traditional research so they resist this idea of evidence that has overwhelmingly has generally come from a traditional thing and this struggle about legitimizing social work as a discipline and the need to sort of adhere to standards of what constitutes good knowledge. So I think in ten years, what I'd like to see is knowledge as an idea is really expanded to capture the diversity of people's lived experiences and realities. And that in terms of life-long learning that social work as a discipline, that agencies of social help - whether that's around front line small agencies or institutions like hospitals that they've taken accountability for continuing education in a way that isn't just about saying we've read 500 articles but is about trying to ensure that people are staying connected to why they're doing what they're doing and how they can help their clients. I think the biggest piece for me will just be that knowledge and evidence are really huge, complex words at that point that aren't….the people aren't going to have this visceral reaction to thinking that it means one thing – you know, traditional and empirical knowledge based on scientific methods with rigor and validity and reliability. You know that it accounts for many other things and I see that happening. You know here there's a group of faculty doing arts-based social research, which certainly opens up ways about knowledge. Peter: Okay…great. So what about… one of the things I've done in all of these interviews at the end, is say how much I've enjoyed it and it's true. I always learn so much in going through this process but this is a set of questions that I gave to you – is there something out of our conversation that we haven't touched on? Is there something that you really want to bring forward here?
Billie: I think I probably haven't talked enough about or pick up the idea of life-long learning because I think…my grandmother is 80 and she's learning Ojibway - is learning Anishnaabemowin, so she's at this stage in her life and she's learning her language because she never had her language. Peter: So she's 80 and she's learning her own language… Billie: For the first time, yes. Peter: For the first time.
Billie: She's learning to pray in her own language and I mean she's so happy. She's just come through 2 years of pretty horrible treatment for breast cancer and this piece of…she's had spiritual support from the same person who's teaching here her language but this language piece has just been such a bright space for her cause it's a connection and it's something…you know, she always says you always have something to learn, you're always going around the circle, going around the wheel and you're always learning. And I think there's this idea of how valuable that is and I think, taking that and trying to translate that into the discipline that I'm in - that often times as practitioners, we get our training and we go out and we get entrenched in what we're doing and the way we do it and we get stuck and we're not so open to learning – and that's not everyone, that's not meant to be a gross generalization or undermine the great things that people do but I think it's trying to shift how I think about learning and knowledge right? That's it's not something we get and we have and I use it and for you, at you, on you. Re-visioning how we have relationships with people and what we know and that when you re-vision it, it does naturally make learning a life-long process.
Peter: That's great Billie: Okay Peter: That's great example. I'm glad I asked that last question because I think that makes it very real for people. I mean the concept of life-long learning…it's a concept but when you talk about that particular example of your grandmother, I think that's really going to resonate with people, so…thank you Billie. Billie: Thank you Peter: It's been fun – thank you.
