Strategic Forum for Research in Education

Key questions considered at Forum III (17th and 18th March 2010, Edinburgh)

What provision is there for appropriate co-production, transformation and dissemination of research findings to stakeholders, including the general public and democratic process – and how effective is this?

• Why is mediation of research important, to whom, for what purposes?
• How is the mediation of education research knowledge currently being promoted? What are the challenges being faced by knowledge mediation processes and initiatives in education research?
• How can co-ordination and communication among the different existent strategies be improved? How could we get more value from them in different country and sector contexts?
• How are the countries’ research and development work linked to appropriate international networks, centres and activities focussed on research knowledge mediation?

Synopsis of the discussions at SFRE III

Good research mediation was perceived by many participants as not only an attribute of a good research environment in higher education, but also as indicator of a well-functioning “evidence-informed democracy”. Mediators link the many overlapping communities with an interest in education research, including HE, practitioner, government, and other researchers, practitioners, think tanks, media, professional bodies, civil servants, politicians, third sector organisations, inspectors, local government officers, and so on. The agreement was that, although professional, specialised mediators had an increasingly important role to play, mediation of publicly-funded education research ought also to be a legitimate, and appropriately resourced, incentivised, and evaluated, component of academic work. Many at the meeting described it as a “moral responsibility” to research participants, beneficiaries, and the tax-paying public at large.

Mediation concerns both outputs and processes. In terms of outputs, discussions at the forum highlighted the importance of tailoring writing styles and presentation formats to the full range of audiences.  In terms of processes, it was pointed out that good mediation ought to tend to both the supply of, and the demand for, relevant, accessible and credible evidence, as well as to the interplay between the two. “Transferring a package” is not the most appropriate metaphor to capture the complex process of mobilising knowledge and knowledge co-producers in ways that are illuminating, empowering. and transformative. It is not only outputs and end-or-project dissemination that need to be tailored to the diversity of contexts and audiences, but also the strategies involved in establishing contextualised, multi-voiced interaction with all relevant communities throughout the research process. “Transformative partnerships” can bring together experiences and understandings from different sectors, in mutually beneficial ways. Constructive dialogue, from the early stages of a project, between researchers and commissioners of research can enable the development of appropriate communication strategies. Evaluating these strategies is an important element of knowledge management but despite growing recognition of its importance, current provision for such evaluation is patchy.

Fragmented, un-coordinated provision for research mediation was one of the current challenges for future development in this field discussed at the Forum. Other challenges identified included the issue of capacity for mediation, and of the different set of skills required by this activity; the patchy knowledge about what should count as effective mediation; the difficulties in mediating different types of research, with particular relevance for practitioner research; the barriers to cross-sectoral communication, including the limited transferability of findings; and finding the optimum balance between investing in the mediation of individual studies and in the mediation of research syntheses.

The persistence of these challenges had partly to do with inadequate incentives, training, and infrastructure for research mediation, and with different reward structures in different sectors and professional communities. However, many of these issues were accounted for in terms of a number of enduring tensions underpinning research mediation efforts. Such tensions included, for example, that between relevance and fitness for purpose, on the one side, and academic integrity and research independence, on the other. Despite being apparently incompatible, these sets of values can be brought together, but this is a different kind of mediation process than that involved in disseminating accessible outputs or in establishing networks.  Similarly, addressing tensions between accessibility and misrepresentation, or between conclusiveness/ clarity and trivialising findings, is also a task for thoughtful research mediators with good understanding of the epistemic, political, and practical constraints operating in each of the communities concerned.

Further discussion of mediation is available in the SFRE III Report and in the SFRE Final Report.