What we do

Our work has had 3 main components: academic empirical studies, practical knowledge mobilization work, and efforts to strengthen the larger community of interest around knowledge mobilization in education.

What We Have Learned

Since our conception in 2007, our team has learned a great deal about both studying and practicing KM. For an in depth discussion of our learning, please visit our publications and conferences page.

Here are a few brief points on what we know about KM (from Levin, 2011):

There is wide interest in knowledge mobilization across roles, fields, countries and sectors, and growing connections among the various parties to share practices and ideas. There are increasing numbers of meetings, conferences, journals and websites, and increasing interest from governments and funders of research.
Debate continues, appropriately, on some key concepts in this area, including the range of different meanings for the central terms, ‘research’, ‘knowledge’ and ‘use’. There is no single way to understand any of those ideas and different views about them have different connotations for how the work should be done.
The empirical base for KM practices remains weak. Much work is carried out without good evidence as to its likely effectiveness. In a new field this is inevitable and required for learning, provided that the activities are actually assessed as to impact. Still, there remains a strong need for more research, using more sophisticated methods.
It is clear that KM is a social phenomenon much more than an individual one. This means that research and practice both need to do more to understand how organizational settings and social practices facilitate or constraint KM work, rather than focusing on the knowledge or activities of individuals within organizations.
It is equally clear that much KM practice is not yet taking seriously enough this lesson about the importance of the social, in that in many settings, including in education, the system structures and processes to support effective use of research knowledge simply do not exist and are not being created.