The Network's poster titled Knowledge Mobilization: A Network Approach presented four examples of knowledge mobilization areas of expertise that demonstrated unique ways The Canadian Language and Literacy Research Network and partners are striving to mobilize research to practice.
The first example, Lay Paper on Classroom Acoustics, was presented by John Bradley of the University of Ottawa and National Research Council Canada and Michel Picard of the University of Montreal, School of Speech Therapy and Audiology. It demonstrated the link between engineering solutions and real-life social learning problems. Thanks to Bradley's relevant research and The Network's communication promotional activities surrounding this event, a story about his research was published in The National Post on March 10, 2005.
The second example was The Canadian Language and Literacy Calendar developed by Luigi Girolametto, University of Toronto, Associate Professor, Graduate Department of Speech-Language Pathology and Elaine Weitzman, Executive Director, The Hanen Centre and Janice Greenberg, Program Manager, The Hanen Centre. The calendar demonstrated how to facilitate evidence-based research information and best practices through knowledge mobilization to front-line child educators.
The third example supported by The Network involved The Centre of Excellence for Early Childhood Development (CEECD) and Network researchers: Susan Rvachew, McGill University; Luigi Girolametto, University of Toronto; and Helen Illios, Network graduate student at Brock University. It was related to the need to develop the Language component for the CEECD's Encyclopedia on Early Childhood Development. After developing the encyclopedia entry, the next step with the CEECD will be to translate the current research on language development into newsletter content for their Bulletin newsletter. This newsletter was published in May 2005 and will be sent to all Network members and Network contacts.
The fourth example on the poster was The Network sponsored Baby Talk! - Review of Evidence. J. Cyne Topshee Johnston and Andrée Durieux-Smith of the University of Ottawa and Kathleen Bloom of the University of Waterloo led this project. The review displayed their results regarding the lack of evidence surrounding the claim that teaching sign language to prelingual infants advances their language, cognitive and social development. The researchers' recommendations for parents is that if they invest time and money in baby signing programs and products it is only for the enjoyment of the activity, and not for any proven benefit for infant or child development. This knowledge translation project was featured in a National Post story on February 22, 2005.
In total, The Knowledge Project featured exhibits from 80 Canadian research teams working on key social and cultural issues, panel discussions hosted by journalist Ann Medina and the opportunity to talk, one-on-one, with social science and humanities researchers whose innovative ideas could one day make Canada a knowledge superpower.
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