Hello, this is Peter Levesque. Welcome to episode eleven of the Knowledge Exchange Podcast. This podcast series is a product supported by the Canadian Council on Learning – Canada's leading organization committed to improving learning across Canada and in all walks of life. I want to thank the great staff at CCL for their efforts with this project to advance our understanding of effective knowledge exchange to improve the learning of Canadians. You can download this episode, as well as one of the nine future episodes in the series from my website at www.knowledgemobilization.net, from iTunes directly, just search for KM podcast. Alternatively go to knowledgeexchange.podomatic.com.
Dr. Budd Hall is a pioneer – working on pushing our understanding and our ability to work together productively and with maximum shared benefit. He is credited with coining the term “participatory action research” and has been a leader in adult learning – in life-long learning for more years than he cares to admit. This conversation took place in his home in Victoria. Victoria is engaged in some very exciting experiments that are changing the way our institutions work with each other and benefit from active knowledge exchange. I really like the concept of expanding the interaction of “knowledges” and of building evidence for action from many sources. I also like his hopefulness and enthusiasm. Hopefully it rubs off on you all – enjoy.
Peter – I'm sitting here in beautiful Victoria with Dr. Budd Hall. Why don't we start with introduce yourself, talk about what you do. Budd – Ok, thanks Peter. I'm currently the Director of a new structure at the University of Victoria called the Office of Community Based Research. This is something that the University has created, that has taken around two years of consultation and has created this structure in order to do three or four things. One - to better support students and faculty at the University of Victoria who are interested in getting involved in community based research, or in fact may already be doing community based research, and would like some visibility or some recognition for their work.
Peter – This is a series of podcasts about knowledge exchange, about leadership, about life-long learning about policy and decision-making.
Budd – Ok Peter – One of the ways that knowledge exchange is described is bringing people and evidence together to influence behavior. What does this mean to you? How do you think about knowledge exchange?
Budd – Well, I think about knowledge, of course in an extremely abroad way because I've spent a lot of my years outside of the University in community settings, where knowledge was story telling, or anecdotes, or was something that was generated at meetings where neighbors came together to talk about the lack of parks in their neighborhood or very practical issues. The second thing is that I've also been very interested in artistic forms of knowledge formation and creation, so I've done quite a lot of work with theatre as a form of knowledge creation and dissemination, and of course poetry, which I still engage in, in terms of poetry and social movements. The arts, particularly the arts as a collective form of knowledge creation - production so when I get to the notion of knowledge exchange - knowledge mobilization…I'm thinking of a very broad… Peter –That's a really important piece. When you're talking about creating these spaces where people are going to talk about these issues. One of the challenges, I think, that we run into when we think of the universities – the universities where hard evidence comes about…and these communities concerns – they're important but they're not evidence based. When you hear the word evidence, what comes to your mind?
Budd – Well evidence-based decision-making and evidence-based practice, is a discourse that means more effective use of quantitative data in decision-making. It comes out of medical and Capital S science and is increasingly being taken up in the social sciences and humanities and is increasingly the coin of the realm, even in community agencies, even in Victoria when I talk to the Victoria Foundation or the United Way in Greater Victoria. They are now beginning to use evidence-based decision-making – they're using the jargon. They are using the language but they are using it mostly because the Ministries that support them are using it and some people at the university are increasingly using it.
The universities like it because they, as you said; they think that they are the places that have evidence of the right type. My concern with the concept – there's nothing wrong with the evidence – there's nothing wrong with logic and reason, but I'm concerned that it seems to be a return to…or it seems to be - the hand is played much more by people who have a very narrow idea of what evidence is. It's not….if we're talking about evidence; we need to think about evidence in a much broader way. If evidence can be…if we can understand evidence in a broader way, then simply in quantitative studies, which are…their capacity for predictability is vastly over-rated, then I have no problem with the concept. But if it's simply…if it's simply a means for traditional approaches - the research to be used, then I'm less interested in it as a concept. I think there are other ways to go about decision-making and policy influencing and so forth.
Peter - The Canadian Council on learning is all about life-long learning.
Budd -Yes.
Peter – And so what is that interface between evidence and perhaps the wider meanings of evidence and life-long learning?
Budd – What's so important about the Canadian Council of Learning's attention to life-long learning is that there is no other place in Canada where they are attempting to understand learning as something that goes from literally the cradle to the grave. So there's no other institutional space. The early childhood people have got their series of structures and researchers and lobbyists and government supporters and research. The K to 12 community has got its vast areas of implementation and structure, then adult literacy has got a tiny little portion. Adult education again, has got a relatively small portion and the learning in the later adult years – almost no body is paying any attention to at all.
I think that life-long learning…life-long learning…if Canada were to be able to develop a coherent structure of life-long learning, coherent policy - a structure for life-long learning, it would be an incredible advance to the country because we are losing …we lose so much human capacity in our country because people aren't able to – not everybody is able to move forward - not able to learn in ways which then can make them more productive and more engaged citizens. In terms of the relationship between evidence and life-long learning…I really haven't…I'm really not so sure. You and I were both at a conference on knowledge translation in Victoria earlier in the year, and there was a fellow from one of the ministries…I think the Ministry of Health.
Budd - He was a Deputy Assistant … and you'll remember the charts that he put up in terms of the relative…the percentage of input that went into government policies. And I believe, if I'm not wrong, I believe…and their certain amount was kind of advocacy, and lobbying, and special interest, ideology and political parties and whatnot, whatnot. And the amount of influence that research had - evidence in this sense was something like 10 percent.
Peter – Right…which caused gasps in the audience.
Budd – Yes and so for those people in universities…this is why I think that…I think that we need to be approaching the implementation - policy making in a much broader way. Evidence needs to be something which - it need s to be played with and jiggled around in the same way that knowledge is beginning to be. We are now talking about knowledge in much more creative ways, than we were even ten years ago. So now we've got all…the whole…as you call it “the knowledge so-whats”. You've got this whole family of cousins of knowledges and so I think that we need to start complexifying our notion of evidence as well. We need to think about that – we need to take that apart and talk about what kind of evidence. Evidence by whom? Evidence for whom? Evidence when? Evidence how? We need to talk about all of that because until we can have that kind of conversation around this notion of evidence-.based decision-making, it's not going to go anywhere. Because if we're going to change….if we're going to have changes in health care system or the educational systems, or systems of the big energy kind of…the big systems that we've got - the economic systems. Research is only one part, research in the narrow sense, but if you start thinking about knowledge…political knowledge, advocacy knowledge, story telling knowledge – if we can think of knowledge…of that broader, more powerful family of knowledges and evidence, then I think that we've got a chance to make a difference. Peter – Well that…that's an interesting point because what you're calling for is a movement towards an exchange…. Budd – yes.
Peter – from many different sources and that's really the basis of knowledge exchange. But there needs to be leaders. And where does this leadership come from? Where do you see the leadership developing from? And how do we develop that leadership? How can CCL help support leadership and knowledge exchange to tackle those issues – to tackle those questions that you've just brought up? Budd – I think the CCL fundamentally believe that investing in the kind of infrastructure and the kind of space that will help to develop community based research, is a very, very important space for the CCL or for anybody else, to invest in right now. Because I think that its in those spaces – for example, let me be very concrete, the United Way of Greater Victoria has in the last year or so undergone a transition from being, basically a charitable organization - giving money to 35, 50 or a hundred local groups that are all doing good – to moving into what it calls, what it understands as a more transformational kind of agency. So what they've done now is they've created a…they've created three impact councils. These impact councils are bringing together the ….all of the major players – there are government players, there are community players, and university players and they are now coming to the University of Victoria and they're now asking us “we want to move….we want”…housing, is one of the impact areas – shelter, housing. “We want to make an impact – we're tired. Our community is willing to come together and we now, would like to interact with the University of Victoria…and see what…marshal…you know the kinds of …either the research community that you've got there – the student research community and see if together we can do something about housing in this wealthy city that has eleven/twelve hundred homeless people”. So in this space, something new is going to happen. Something new is going to happen, and these are the kinds of spaces – and I think that the…what's the…institute for urban health initiatives in Toronto? Peter – Right Budd – I think that's another space where this kind of stuff is happening. And these are the kinds of places, where at a smaller scale, the work at Trent – the Trent Community Education Centre that they've got there…Trent…these are the places where the different kinds of knowledges and different kinds of evidence are going to come to play. One thing I….when you are doing work - political work - and you're on a council, a powerful personal story is sometimes as important as a Stats Can report. At the right time, somebody stands up and says “well, that all may be well and good Mr. Counselor, but my Aunt tried to get into that hospital four days running, she wasn't able to get into it – when she finally was accepted, she only lasted thirty minutes and she passed away.” Budd - So it's this…it's this… Peter – But it's both. I mean, it's not just the anecdote that… Budd – no, no… Peter – Because if we made decisions just on anecdote….right. Budd – ya Peter - So it's -what you're saying is that…what I'm hearing is you say what is happening here in Victoria is that the University is finding new value in this exchange by opening up to a larger community. Budd - We're trying to – we're opening up but we're in the early days. Peter – Right Budd – And it's hard for us Peter – So what are the challenges you're facing? What are the…what are the roadblocks? What are the opportunities?
Budd - Well the roadblocks are that we're, for the most part, the professoriate – we're off to the races, we've got to get our research grants – we've got to publish our papers. And it's a lot faster to just pick some obscure topic, get a bit of money and get going and not sit down with a whole bunch of community groups and find out what they want to do, and their stuff isn't researchable and nobody… the structure of the University is one of the main…the structure - the funding grants and the structure of the University itself. The promotion and tenure guidelines in Universities are old fashioned and need to be broadened out and made to be much more - much closer to other forms of evidence as well. And it's...different cultures you know, we think we're the ones that know most of this stuff frankly. And so to sit around with a bunch of people from the community that …they're not PhDs for the most part – they don't go to academic conferences…they don't have the theoretical sophistication that we're used to prefacing our remarks with …so it's very difficult for us to hear this kind of discourse as really researchable questions or really openness and there's an experience at the University of Victoria …you just have to keep moving it forward. Peter – Every time I talk to you though, you're really excited about what's happening here and so what are those opportunities that you see? Budd – Well, I'm very excited about a number of those areas…we are beginning to, I think at the university of Victoria, learn how to work with the aboriginal communities in a better way…in a more respectful way. We're learning how to approach communities using appropriate protocols, which are fairly sophisticated in British Columbia. We're learning to go slow, and do plenty of consultation and to make sure that everybody's had a chance to be heard, before rapidly moving ahead. And we're also learning that what our….the aboriginal communities around…you know in this part of the world - probably and everywhere really - are not looking for a research relationship, they're looking for a permanent recognition of who they are and who's land we're really on….and an ongoing relationship. So if, as we engage, we not engaging so much in eight or ten or twelve research projects, as we are engaging with these communities on an ongoing basis.
We're saying to these communities, “we will be friends, we will be partners, we will treat you with respect, really basically for now and forever”. So I think we are beginning - there's a lot of work to be done. And I think that also, we've done a lot of good work with young people, with adolescents and with teenagers. We had a number of years ago, a very unfortunate murder of a young woman called Reena Verk and as a result of that the University and a number of our university people began to talk about, and think about, and work with members of the community, and the police force, schools and parents around issues of racism and violence - teenage violence and so on and so forth. And so we've learned a lot by listening to young people themselves. By allowing young people to tell their own stories in ways…using video and other much more, very creative ways - film and video and story telling and drawing and so forth….art…so we're learning a lot from that. Peter – Well the use of alternate technologies is one of the things that people talk about in terms of the future especially around knowledge exchange – that...we've had a conversation that doing these podcasts is a form of knowledge exchange. That it's…instead of just putting this into a paper article with text, that people will be able to listen to this. If you were to think ten years into the future, the long experience that you've had, as knowledge exchanger or as a broker, as a facilitator, of this discussion - if you were to look forward ten years, where do you see knowledge exchange going? What does the future look like to you?
Budd – Well, I would love to see…I would love to see all of our academic…all of the papers and all of the work that we do, whether where is a community engaged piece or it's just a curiosity driven piece. I would love to see…to find expressions of that available through the Internet - to everyone. So I would love to see academics throwing their stuff up on to the ‘YouTubes' of the day or the ‘My Spaces' or the various public spaces. I think what will evolve will be some kind of new form of using…of the pedagogical aspects of blogging and some of the aspects of more formal research so that we will end up…that you could have them around in policy areas. So you could have kind of a research blogs around housing issues….
Peter – Right Budd – …or around environmentally - green construction or naturopathic medicine where you've got…where you've got spaces that are co-constructed by academics, by people working on these issues in the community. It's open, in other words the ideas are flowing. I think that that will produce knowledge, which is…which has more impact. But it will be co-constructed because the academic will be putting some stuff in there but it will be digested and commented on and other peoples ideas and much in the way that the Wikipedia ends up producing….pretty good account of quite a lot of what's going on in the world…not entirely perfect but a pretty good account simply by everybody participating. I think academics - I really do believe that it's going to be possible for academics to get credit for doing podcasting. Now we only get credit for academic peer reviewed, but there's no reason we can't develop a peer reviewed approach to podcasts, or videos, or anything else that we stick. So I think that open source idea that all knowledge that is produced becomes…is available free of charge….and is a powerful one that's going to have a big impact on many of us. There will be…the tensions are, of course, at the same…is that we have…it's always this way, there are contradictory tendencies because at the same time as we have open source…and we've got the universities opening up to community…and all of that, we've got the private sector also with it's influence on the University…also with it's influence around increased patenting and increased commoditization of knowledge and marketization of knowledge…so those two…those things are going to happen simultaneously, but they always have. I mean those… Peter – right… Budd -…we are a public space - the University is a public space and all of the tendencies in society, struggle and interact with our space just like they do every place else. So we're not going to be any better and we not going to be any worse…we going to. I think the next ten years or fifteen years are going to be really exciting years for people interested in knowledge and its life.
Peter – Thank you very much Budd.
