Re-imaging Graduate Research Through A Community of Practice: A Pilot

From the CESI Blog Archive - August 2023

Written by Jemma Llewellyn, with contributions from Caroline Duvieusart-Déry

This blog post was written by Jemma Llewellyn, a PhD student in Critical Studies in Improvisation and CESI’s Knowledge Mobilization Assistant. Over the Winter 2023, Jemma organized and co-facilitated Researchers for Change, a pilot project which brought together graduate students for informal learning and connection around topics of community engagement, collaboration and creativity in research. This piece gathers some of her thoughts and take-aways from her participation in this initiative.

Before I came to the University of Guelph to study for a PhD, I was a community-based theatre practitioner in Wales for about fifteen years, working with young people from vulnerable communities by using theatre as a tool for social change. Moved by the experiences of these young people and the lack of agency they felt they had when engaging with adults through education, I began to investigate the influence academia has on the way in which educators are taught to teach, especially in the arts.

Since then, my PhD research has evolved in response to the specific context in which I have found myself in, as an uninvited guest on Turtle Island, colonially known as Canada. Working in collaboration with a local and provincial mental health and wellbeing organization for youth, my dissertation seeks to mobilize Indigenous knowledge, through social and creative improvisations, to reduce settler colonial harm to Indigenous children, youth, and their families during their engagement with mental health services. In addition, my work seeks to challenge dominant settler colonial practices in doctoral programs, including approaches that do not develop and maintain relationships with communities in the research process or output stages.

Researchers for Change

It is from this perspective that I took part in the Researchers for Change series over the Winter of 2023. With this pilot community of practice hosted by the Community Engaged Scholarship Institute, we wanted to create a supportive space where graduate students interested in and/or practicing community engagement and knowledge mobilization could discuss their goals, experiences and challenges, and learn from each other. We were able to bring an interdisciplinary group of graduate students with diverse social and creative experiences together in conversation across three sessions. In doing so, we invited them to reflect on what type of ongoing community support they needed to assist them.

I was joined by fellow graduate students and CESI partners annais linares, Hannah Fowlie and Naty Tremblay to plan and co-facilitate each of the three hybrid sessions offered over February and March. The first session, Creative Knowledge Mobilization at the Graduate Level sought to push the boundaries of the ways in which graduate students think about and produce outputs at various stages of their studies. We reflected on our role in creating and mobilizing knowledge that can be meaningful outside academia and shared examples of creative and innovative practices. The second session, Co-Creating Knowledge with Non-Academic Partners invited participants to reflect on the principles and practices of engagement. We discussed how to identify and approach partners, what as students we can offer "back" to ensure that relationships are mutually beneficial, and what happens to those relationships once the research is over. The final session, Graduate Students as Actors of Change, had participants discuss how to build skills and values to become engaged practitioners. We considered how to prepare ourselves for this work and what support we might need.

Key Learnings

My participation in Researchers for Change, both as a facilitator and as an attendee, led to many important take-aways. I learnt that there are so many approaches to and possibilities for community engaged research within the social sciences, arts and humanities. A unique example comes from my co-facilitator, Hannah Fowlie, who chose to create a documentary film in lieu of a typical written dissertation. This highly unconventional approach required her to obtain faculty support and submit a proposal to graduate studies. Her experience - and eventual success in getting her method endorsed by the University - has helped develop my own confidence approaching PhD research. Similarly to Hannah, I am directly pushing back against the colonial structures that are embedded into doctoral training and which reinforce very restrictive understandings of how we should conduct research, and who we should engage with in the process. In my case, at the core of my work is developing and understanding relationships and the power dynamics that come from colonial institutional structures of ways of knowing and being in the world.  One way I am addressing this in my PhD is by  creating an alternative format for my qualifying exam: instead of the more traditional literature review and research proposal, I will be offering my advisory committee a toolkit that will narrate my relationships to the literature and to the project, and emphasize the roles of my partners throughout this process.

Graduate students are often led to believe that our journeys and research projects are inherently a solitary endeavor. However, by interacting with students from other programs during this workshop, I have developed new understandings of what interdisciplinary work can look like, as sessions were also attended by students from what is often described as the “hard sciences”. An example of an interdisciplinary conversation that took place was between a student from geography using quantitative data from land-based research projects and an improvisation student using land-based performance practices. This means understanding one’s own history to the land and environment through reflective and embodied approaches with others, which for example could be archival in nature. These students were able to enter into an exchange of ideas and practices about how to generate accessible knowledge for the public using creative methods. It was noted that the opportunity to learn from outside of one's own discipline and connect with students from other programs would not have necessarily arisen outside of these workshops.

Furthermore, these sessions revealed that there is an important need to foster empathy and build connections between graduate students. For me, the community of practice was key to removing the competitiveness that is often built into doctoral training across disciplines and even within the same program, primarily because of limited funding opportunities. During these sessions, I witnessed that there was no singular expert in the room, only people coming together relying on their own experiences, resources, and suggestions. Being in this space led me to realize and appreciate how, despite our different disciplines, communities, and cultural backgrounds, we are going through similar processes and asking similar challenging questions. Connecting was key to advancing our own reflection and learning around our roles as gatekeepers of knowledge between the university and the communities we work with, our power, privilege, and positionality as researchers, and how to enter and exit community-engaged research projects.

Looking Forward

This workshop series has left me with endless possibilities and reimaginings of community development, social justice work, and educational projects. Those conversations and exchanges have emphasized the need for an ongoing community of practice connecting graduate students keen to grow as engaged researchers and knowledge mobilizers. With support from CESI, I believe that graduate students' engagement with communities would become more meaningful and that research outputs would move beyond standardized products and into dynamically created and accessible knowledge.